Desmond Upton Patton

Internet banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop

Abstract Gang members carry guns and twitter accounts. Media outlets nationally have reported on a new phenomenon of gang affiliates using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to trade insults or make violence threats that lead homicide or victimization. We term this interaction internet banging. Police departments in metropolitan areas have increased resources in their gang violence units to combat this issue. Interestingly, there is little to no literature on this issue. We argue internet banging is a cultural phenomenon that has evolved from increased participation with social media and represents an adaptive structuration, or new and unintended use of existing online social media. We examine internet banging within the context of gang violence, paying close attention to the mechanisms and processes that may explain how and why internet banging has evolved. We examine the role of hip-hop in the development of internet banging and highlight the changing roles of both hip hop and computer mediated communication as social representations of life in violent communities. We explore the presentation of urban masculinity and its influence on social media behavior. Lastly, we conduct a textual analysis of music and video content that demonstrates violent responses to virtual interactions.

Social Media as a Vector for Youth Violence: A Review of the Literature

Homicide is the second leading cause of death for young people, and exposure to violence has a negative impact on youth mental health, academic performance, and relationships. We demonstrate that youth violence, including bullying, gang violence, and self-directed violence, increasingly occurs in the online space. We review the literature on violence and online social media, and show that while some forms of online violence are limited to Internet-based interactions, others are directly related to face-to-face acts of violence. Central to our purpose is uncovering the real-world consequences of these online events, and using this information to design effective prevention and intervention strategies. We discuss several limitations of the existing literature, including inconsistent definitions for some forms of online violence, and an overreliance on descriptive data. Finally, we acknowledge the constantly evolving landscape of online social media, and discuss implications for the future of social media and youth violence research.[The original abstract for this article contains images that cannot be displayed here. Please click on the link below to read the full abstract and article.]

A Systematic Review of Research Strategies Used in Qualitative Studies on School Bullying and Victimization.

School bullying and victimization are serious social problems in schools. Most empirical studies on bullying and peer victimization are quantitative and examine the prevalence of bullying, associated risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes. Conversely, there is limited qualitative research on the experiences of children and adolescents related to school bullying and victimization. We review qualitative research on school bullying and victimization published between 2004 and 2014. Twenty-four empirical research studies using qualitative methods were reviewed. We organize the findings from these studies into (1) emic, (2) context specific, (3) iterative, (4) power relations, and (5) naturalistic inquiry. We find that qualitative researchers have focused on elaborating on and explicating the experiences of bully perpetrators, victims, and bystanders in their own words. Directions for research and practice are also discussed.

Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication

Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social media platforms like Twitter. We examine the Twitter communications of one known female gang member, Gakirah Barnes, during a two week window in which her friend was killed and then weeks later, she was also killed. We explore how street culture is translated online through the conventions of Twitter. We find that a salient script of reciprocal violence within a local network is written online in real time. Those writing this script anticipate, direct, historicize, and mourn neighborhood violence.

Sticks, stones and Facebook accounts

Recent research has identified a relatively new trend among youth (1224) living in violent urban neighborhoods. These youth use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to brag about violence, make threats, recruit gang members and to plan criminal activity known as Internet banging. Studies have typically examined youth communication by mining data on social media and surveying or interviewing youth about their social media behaviors. However, there is little to no empirical research that examines how adults who work directly with youth in violent, urban neighborhoods shape, conceptualize and intervene in urban-based youth violence facilitated by social media. Utilizing qualitative interviews with violence outreach workers, we asked outreach workers to describe how youth use social media and the extent to which they use social media to intervene in crisis that emerge in violent Chicago neighborhoods. Participants describe youth behavior that included taunting rival gangs, posturing and boasting about violent events. We also found evidence that social media enhanced crisis intervention work in violent neighborhoods when coupled with close, trusting relationships with youth. Internet banging involves posting images to provoke and boasting about violence.Social media enhanced crisis intervention work in violent Chicago neighborhoods.Human-centered approach needed to interpret social media data from Chicago youth.

Understanding the correlates of face-to-face and cyberbullying victimization among U.S. adolescents : a social-ecological analysis

Using a national sample of 7,533 U.S. adolescents in grades 6–10, this study compares the social-ecological correlates of face-to-face and cyberbullying victimization. Results indicate that younger age, male sex, hours spent on social media, family socioeconomic status (SES; individual context), parental monitoring (family context), positive feelings about school, and perceived peer support in school (school context) were negatively associated with both forms of victimization. European American race, Hispanic/Latino race (individual), and family satisfaction (family context) were all significantly associated with less face-to-face victimization only, and school pressure (school context) was significantly associated with more face-to-face bullying. Peer groups accepted by parents (family context) were related to less cyberbullying victimization, and calling/texting friends were related to more cyberbullying victimization. Research and practice implications are discussed.

Are Community Violence-Exposed Youth at Risk of Engaging in Delinquent Behavior? A Review and Implications for Residential Treatment Research and Practice

Numerous studies have documented a direct association between children’s exposure to community violence and subsequent delinquent behavior. Regrettably, an understanding of the community violence exposure-delinquent behavior link is incomplete because violence-exposed children rarely engage in delinquency immediately. Rather, there are complex, developmental pathways in which these children experience behavioral problems before subsequently exhibiting delinquent behavior. Despite the importance of understanding the mechanisms that illuminate how children exposed to violence in the community might engage in delinquency, relatively few studies have investigated potential mechanisms. This review proposes four potential mechanisms: depression, anxiety/PTSD, conduct disorder, and aggression. More specifically, we examine how certain internalizing and externalizing behaviors can potentially mediate the relationship between community violence exposure and delinquent behavior. We also discuss implications for residential treatment research and practice.

“Police took my homie I dedicate my life 2 his revenge”: Twitter tensions between gang-involved youth and police in Chicago

ABSTRACT The hostile and adversarial relationship between youth and police in urban settings has remained pervasive and persistent for centuries. This is a tension historically rooted in the miasma of lack of trust; racial, ethnic, and cultural differences; and fear, anger, and hostility from racialized surveillance and policing. Indeed, most Black youth have little contact with police unless it involves harsh profiling and/or criminalization. In this article, we leverage the policing literature to examine how the perpetual detestation between urban youth and police is expressed in physical and digital contexts (e.g., Twitter). We find that urban youth, particularly gang-involved youth, publicly articulate their disdain for law enforcement agents on Twitter. The young people in our study expressed chronic grief and anger after the fatal police shooting of a Southside Chicago gang member. Further, they expressed a strong desire to violently retaliate against the Chicago Police Department after their friend was killed. In fact, users on Twitter frequently posted the hash tag #CPDK—an acronym for Chicago Police Department Killer—shortly after this incident. We discuss the implications of using Twitter data to inform policing practices, as well as early intervention and prevention strategies for youth living in inner cities.

Baldwin’s Mill Race, Punishment, and the Pedagogy of Repression, 1965–2015

Written in the 50th anniversary of the historic debate between author and social critic James Baldwin and the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley, we extract from the corpus of Baldwin’s social critique a method to grasp emergent forms of marginality in the contemporary age. Described as a mill, Baldwin shows how everyday interactions shaped the behaviors and meaning making of black Americans during the civil rights era, teaching them to repress their feelings, motivations, and desires at the threat of violence. Inspired by Baldwin, we apply this analytic to mass imprisonment and the rise of prisoner reentry as a national policy priority. Attending to the “work” of reentry in the lives of the black poor, we find that the institutional and policy arrangements that gave birth to prisoner reentry, coupled with the exclusion of the criminalized poor from full participation in the social, civic, and economic life of the city operates as a pedagogy, locating the presumed black and criminalized poor within a social hierarchy and situating them within a moral taxonomy.

Expressions of loss predict aggressive comments on Twitter among gang-involved youth in Chicago

Recent studies suggest social media shapes the transmission of firearm violence in high-poverty, urban neighborhoods. However, the exact pathways by which content on social media becomes threatening has not been studied. We consider a dataset of tweets by gang-involved Chicago youth that are coded for expressions of aggression and/or loss. Using a permutation test and mixed-effects log linear regression, we find that aggression and loss tweets do not occur randomly, and furthermore that in a 2-day window after loss expressions we find an increase in aggressive tweets. We discuss implications for intervention.