OFF BALANCE:
Youth, Race & Crime in the News

Recommendations For Child Advocates, Youth Groups And Civil Rights Organizations

Work with the media to give a more accurate picture of youth crime.

Because of the juvenile justice system's historic confidentiality protections, many child advocates refuse to talk to reporters about the context of individual cases. This places a serious and sometimes insurmountable burden on reporters when they try to tell a more complete story. It can also result in depictions of youths as monolithic criminals whose delinquency is presented without important contributing antecedents. Child advocates and lawyers must develop creative ways to tell a more contextual story about youth crime without jeopardizing their clients' confidentiality. Advocacy groups can conduct their own audits of crime coverage, as some youth groups have done, and directly engage media outlets in dialogue about youth crime coverage. Civil rights groups which have successfully demanded diversification in entertainment media should now turn their attention and creativity to the disparate coverage of youth crime.

Engage the media in a dialogue about their coverage.

Child advocates, youth groups and civil rights groups need to begin to engage news outlets as consumers to educate the media about their needs and to jointly seek solutions to the complex issues raised in this and other reports about coverage of youth crime. We Interrupt This Message, an advocacy group that conducted two of the studies discussed in this report, took its findings on disproportionate youth crime portrayals directly to the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. In 2000, Suffolk University's law school held a forum which brought together reporters from the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and several electronic media with lawyers and community groups that work with young people for a productive exchange of ideas about coverage of youth crime. In recent years, civil rights groups like the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza have highlighted the scarcity of minority representation on network programming. Although these efforts concerned entertainment media, there is no reason to believe that similar efforts to educate news media about depictions of minority offenders and victims would fall on deaf ears.

Make data available.

Journalists need local data to make national problems relevant for their audiences. Share information with the media so journalists can learn about local patterns, incorporate that information into daily stories, and give citizens the information they need to make better decisions about violence prevention policy.

Prepare young people to speak for themselves, then give them the opportunity to do so.

Youth are becoming involved in advocacy efforts about juvenile justice and violence prevention from coast to coast. Give young people the training and support they need to speak confidently about the work they are doing to improve their communities for themselves and others. Increasing the visibility of young people in the news will help balance the current picture. Create situations where you can introduce young people to journalists so they can begin establishing themselves as sources on their own.

Make yourself available to the media.

Youth advocates and researchers cannot have an impact on the coverage of youth crime if journalists don't know they exist, if they cannot find spokespeople when they need them, or if advocates do not respond to their requests for information in a timely manner. Sometimes, this will be difficult, because breaking stories about youth crime do not always arise at convenient times. But advocates' availability as experts or alternative voices prior to deadline can help shape coverage and put youth violence into its proper context.

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