The authors delve into the topics of prevention of youth violence by questioning whether the trajectories of past violence predict future violence better than other, more traditional measures of risk. As well as, what factors of violence can be altered during a juveniles early years of exposure to violence-causing factors that can prevent or protect individuals against violence?
In this article the authors first explain that trajectories of past violence foretell future violence in youth better than other, more traditional measures of risk. The authors then gauge whether elements that can be controlled during youth can promote less violence for all individuals. This article finds that several factors protect youth from violent behavior. Unfortunately, these factors do not protect youth from gun or weapon carrying.
The researchers used the Rochester Youth Development Study, 14 interviews of youth from their early teenage years through age 31. The authors used 20 potential factors that lead to violence. They used two methods of analysis for this data. The first one is the well-established method that was a prevention model where the violent and risky behavior had yet to appear and they ran the correlation between the factors and the data from the Rochester Youth Development Study. The second method projected the youth’s risk based on trajectories of prior violent behavior and ran correlations between the factors and the trajectories. The data suggests that the trajectories are more accurate in predicting the youths involvement with crime. It also suggests that factors that contribute to violence are accumulated over time and harder to prevent.

Crime & Delinquency 2014, Vol. 60(3) 379–401