The Roots of Youth Violence Review

The Roots of Youth Violence Review was released today by the Ontario provincial government. The Review was established in 2007 by Premier Dalton McGuinty, and was co-chaired by former Chief Justice and Attorney General Roy McMurtry and former Speaker of the Legislature Alvin Curling. The purpose of the review was to identify and analyse some of the contributing factors to youth violence in the province in order to develop policy and planning recommendations.

The report highlights the critical importance of developing strong public policy that addresses racism, neighbourhood marginalization, affordable housing, and income disparities:

The very serious problems being encountered in neighbourhoods characterized by
severe, concentrated and growing disadvantage are not being addressed because
Ontario has not placed an adequate focus on these concentrations of disadvantage
despite the very serious threat they pose to the province’s social fabric. Racism is becoming a more serious and entrenched problem than it was in the past because Ontario is not dealing with it. The significant new investments in education are not reaching many of the children who need
the most help because long-identified barriers to learning are not being addressed. Ontario’s youth justice system is harming some youth because it has no overall coordination, remains punitive in ways that are not strategic and permits increasingly problematic police-community relations (page 3).

It is further added that:

The worst impacts are being felt in neighbourhoods that are often already isolated from the rest of the community because of the circumstances of poverty. What is particularly disturbing is that many of these communities are largely composed of members of racialized groups. We trace in Chapter 4 how racism and other barriers have concentrated poverty in these groups, and
how the housing market has then driven them into concentrations of those who
suffer from high levels of poverty. When poverty is racialized, and then ghettoized and
associated with violence, the potential for the stigmatization of specific groups is high. That stigmatization can, in turn, further reduce opportunities for those groups. If we allow these trends and impacts to grow in intensity and impact and fail to mobilize as a society to
address the conditions that give rise to them, the prognosis for the neighbourhoods and for the future of this province could be grim (page 4).

The full report can be viewed here:

http://www.rootsofyouthviolence.on.ca/english/reports.asp

A CTV article about the report can be found here:
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20081114/youth_violence_081114/20081114/?hub=TorontoNewHome