Researcher Studies Violence against Young Black Men
As a researcher, Associate Professor Henrika McCoy has concentrated on the experiences of juvenile offenders with mental health needs including their exposure to trauma. Her last major research project studied juvenile offenders ages 11 to 18 at two Midwestern juvenile detention facilities. In one of those facilities, she found that 84% of girls, 81% of boys, 81% of Black youth, 79% of White youth reported having a history of trauma. In addition, regardless of gender or race, as the number of traumatic experiences increased, so did their level of anger and irritability. Using these results McCoy developed recommendations that trauma exposure be considered during the adjudicatory process and these youth be provided with the tools necessary for addressing their history of trauma to interrupt the cycle of often related negative and risky behaviors.
Her current study, SURVIVE (Suburban, Urban, Rural Violence: Investigating Victim Experiences) focuses on young Black males. Funded by the National Institute of Justice for a three-year period, the first phase of McCoy’s study focuses on Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 residing in different areas of Illinois. She is developing a survey instrument that captures data about the encounters with violence that young Black men experience in addition to identifying their varied needs and supports utilized. Conducting focus groups with these victims and survivors of violence, she will also meet with women who have a relationship with a Black male in the age range of the study. This latter group will be limited to the Chicago area and includes grandmothers, mothers, sisters, spouses, friends and significant others. Existing related instruments will be reviewed and content experts in the fields of adolescent development, Black males and minority crime victimization experiences will be consulted during the instrument development. Finally, a group of young men will have an opportunity to review a draft of the instrument and make recommendations for changes. Overall the focus of each component is designed to gather is to gather data that can be used to create the final instrument.
The second phase of her study is to implement the survey on a national basis in urban areas as well as suburban and rural areas. The instrument will be pretested before the national rollout. The final version will be implemented in ten areas nationwide with 660 participants. It will be validated by re-testing a subset of those initially tested. These steps will help to create a valid method of gathering data that can be used to address the disproportionate violence experienced by young Black males. McCoy’s research will be more widely disseminated through publications in peer-reviewed journals. It is also expected that the National Institute of Justice and Office of Victim Crime Services will use the study findings to inform the policies created and practices used by the criminal justice system when responding to young Black males who have been victimized violently.
Given the acceleration of violence in Chicago, the results of McCoy’s work cannot come too soon.
Learn more at the SURVIVE project website.
For more information see the feature-length article in the Chicago Defender at https://issuu.com/chidefender/docs/cd_01-27-16