The Center for Research on Crime was asked to assist the Community, Family and Youth Resilience (CYFR) multi-year program to reduce violence as well as decrease the numbers of youth at risk of entering gangs and/or engaging in anti-social behavior in target communities in the eastern Caribbean countries of St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Guyana.
We conducted focus groups in the eastern Caribbean at the start of the project with youth as well as with parents to discover the particular issues to address in the prevention tool. The Center has helped the CFYR team to strengthen the capacity of their family counselors in using the tailored prevention screening tool to refer youth to family counseling and to measure behavior changes. In 2018, the Center analyzed the baseline data, developed cutpoints and identified high-risk youth. In early 2019, the Center received midline data from the six-month retests and wrote individualized feedback reports for use by the local counsellors. We anticipate receiving the final twelve-month retests before the end of 2019.
The program will use a community-based approach that engages youth and local stakeholders in defining problems, identifying risk and protective factors, and creating local solutions, using available data and evidence. CFYR will build the capacity of service providers to administer risk-screening tools and to deliver quality services that meet identified needs in collaboration with communities and families, and through partnerships with the government and private sector. This includes, but is not limited to, adapting and deploying a secondary prevention model (ie targeting higher risk youth) based on family systems theory.
CYFR is being implemented at an opportune time to garner the political will to test out new approaches for reducing violence. The program will also serve as “proof of concept”, informing the national and regional policy debates with much needed empirical evidence to show that identifying and targeting higher risk youth for specific interventions is one of the most effective ways of lowering overall rates of crime and violence. It also comes at a critical juncture in the US government debate on how best to allocate funds for citizen security in Central America and the Caribbean.