Effects of Gang Membership on Teens, their Families and their Communities

Thesis Statement

This paper focuses the concept of gang memberships and it impact on the youth in terms of public health anxiety

Introduction

The past 15 years have witnessed a spectacular resurgence in youth gang activity in the United States. One of some kinds of gangs (others encompass jail gangs, motorcycle gangs, despise groups, ideological gangs, and mature individual road gangs); youth gangs are not new to the American landscape.

Modern youth gangs, although, are more unsafe than their chronicled equivalent because of the growing pharmaceutical economy, the decreasing availability of legitimate paid work opportunities in urban localities, increased mobility due to the availability of automobiles, and larger get access to more lethal weapons. Moreover, gangs are no longer limited to densely populate urban localities but have an increasing occurrence in suburbs, little towns, and country towns (Chesney 33).

What Is A Gang?

There is a large deal of heterogeneity inside youth gangs and consequently substantial contradiction over how to characterize them. Some gangs are loosely intertwining groups of youth with no exact function, while other ones are highly structured lawless individual organizations with identifiable leadership. In some regions, gangs are organized round exact geographic locations or turf; in other ones, although, they are not. There have been some endeavors to evolve a definition that is very broad sufficient to encompass the varying manifestations of gangs while at the identical time exact sufficient to omit other youthful groups that may occasionally enlist in deviant undertakings (e.g., fraternities). (Chesney 33)

A commonly used definition recognizes youth gangs as groups that (1) comprise of more than two persons inside a limited age variety (typically 12 to 24); (2) share a sense of identity as evidenced by the use of a collective title, colors or emblems, exact clothing methods, or hand signs; (3) display some signal of permanence, lasting for a year or more; and (4) are involved in lawless individual activity. (Hagedorn 65)

History of Gangs in the United States

The soonest youth gangs may have originated in Europe or Mexico. Although no one is certain when these groups started to appear in the United States, there are anecdotes of youth gangs in this homeland as early as 1783. The first gangs appeared in large towns for example New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, followed by appearances in Chicago and, more recently, Los Angeles. (Howell 11)

The first up to date lawless individual gang was the Forty Thieves gang that formed in the Five Points locality of New York City in 1820; whereas primarily an mature individual gang, it subsequent provided increase to a juvenile group called the Forty Little Thieves. Social technical study of youth gangs started in the early 20th 100 years and suggested that the soonest youth gangs may have spontaneously evolved from district play groups as a outcome of changing communal conditions, particularly increasing urbanization, industrialization, and immigration(Hagedorn 65). During the past two centuries there have been four distinct time span of strong gang proliferation ...