ISR Insights Speaker Series
Exposure to Violence and Subsequent Weapons Use in Two Urban High-Risk Communities
Thursday, Feb. 10, noon ET via Zoom

Speakers: Eric F. Dubow (Adjunct Research Scientist, Research Center for Group Dynamics; Professor of Psychology, Bowling Green State University) and L. R. Huesmann (Amos N Tversky Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies and Psychology, Professor Emeritus of Communication and Media, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, College of LSA and Research Professor Emeritus, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research)

Researchers Dubow and Huesmann report preliminary results of data that they have collected over the last 13 years from youth and young adults in two diverse, urban, high-crime communities (Flint, MI, and Jersey City, NJ). Their findings have shown that early exposure to weapons violence (whether in the family, neighborhood, or through engaging with violent media) significantly correlates at modest levels with weapon carrying, weapon use or threats-to-use, arrests for weapons use, and criminally violent acts 10 years later. Violence exposure was significantly linked to beliefs about the acceptability of behaving aggressively. They argue that youth who observe more violence with weapons, whether in the family, among peers, in the neighborhood, or through the media or video games become infected from the exposure with a social-cognitive-emotional disease (evidenced particularly by normative beliefs approving of gun violence) that increases their own risk of behaving violently with weapons later in life.