Introduction

Similar to Dubey (2021), Jana's Campaign believes gender and relationship violence is a serious, preventable public health issue. This chapter focuses specifically on gender and relationship violence in adolescents, commonly called teen dating violence (TDV). In 2008, Mulford and Giordano wrote that TDV had only recently been recognised as a significant public health problem. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identify TDV as a public health problem that most commonly occurs in the form of physical, psychological or sexual abuse (CDC, 2021). Violence in relationships has been, and continues to be, a weapon utilised to enforce power and control. The tactics utilised to establish and maintain power and control over one's partner typically do not vary depending on age.

TDV is an adverse childhood experience (ACE) that affects millions of young people in the United States. ACEs are potentially traumatic events that occur during childhood (0– 17 years). Some studies indicate exposure to ACEs, such as witnessing violence at home between parents or witnessing neighbourhood violence, can be associated with an increased risk of teens personally engaging in dating violence (Vagi et al, 2013). This characterisation of ACE exposure across both family and community violence in middle-school-aged youth is particularly important given that adolescents spend large amounts of time both within and outside of the family context (Davis et al, 2019). These experiences can have an impact on future violence victimisation and perpetration, and lifelong negative health and limited opportunity. Moreover, ACEs and their associated harms are preventable (CDC, 2021).

While it is widely understood that the issue of gender and relationship violence on college campuses has become a national crisis, less is known about a similar crisis in secondary schools. It is imperative to help schools, communities and states understand the importance of providing prevention education to secondary school students. To understand this significance, one must first understand the negative impact that TDV has on young people, both in the short and long-term. From ACEs to a general lack of acceptance for how individuals identify, students are facing many challenges that will negatively impact their health and success in the future if violence prevention and intervention measures are not in place.

This chapter reviews the effectiveness of preventive interventions in reducing delinquency and later offending. This focus has three key features: interventions are implemented in the early years of the life-course; before children or young people engage in delinquency in the first place; and they are developmental or social in nature. Early childhood prevention programmes are aimed at the improvement of children’s learning, social and emotional competencies, and success over the life-course. The chapter draws upon the highest quality evaluations (i.e., randomised experiments and sound quasi-experiments) and the most rigorous review methods (i.e., systematic and meta-analytic) that include only high-quality studies. It finds that there are many types of effective preventive interventions, including preschool intellectual enrichment, social skills training, parent management training, parent education, anti-bullying programmes, and community-based mentoring. Explanations for effectiveness vary, and reviews have proven helpful for understanding what theoretical orientations and programmatic features are associated with effectiveness.

David P. Farrington was born in 1944 in England and is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. He is director of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), which wasinitiated in 1961 by Donald West with 411 males in London, England, who are still followed. The study advanced knowledge about offending and antisocial behavior; drug and alcohol use; risk factors for aggression, violence, bullying, and intimate partner violence from childhood to adulthood; and the relationship between offending and other life problems, such as in accommodation, relationships, and employment. It has advanced knowledge about risk factors for offending, especially those measured in childhood, such as impulsiveness, low school achievement, poor parental supervision, and disrupted families. It has also advanced knowledge about the effects of life events – such as getting married, becoming separated, and becoming unemployed – on the course of development of offending, as well as the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior. Farrington has consistently advocated for early intervention targeting risk factors in order to reduce offending.For example, poor parenting can be targeted using home visiting and parent management training, impulsiveness can be targeted with skills training, and low achievement can be targeted in preschool intellectual enrichment programs.

Adolescents use the language of peers as models for dialect acquisition in ways that sometimes diverge from their family or home variety, often leading to broad heterogeneity and unpredictability during adolescence and early adulthood. Participants in Grade 6, 8, and 10 were paired with a same-sex peer partner and interviewed in dyads. In this chapter, using an analytical model based on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), we establish participants’ convergence to or divergence from the peer partner. The study analyzes these accommodation patterns in adolescent African American dyads through the use of the scores from the Dialect Density Measure (DDM) composite index and an analysis for assessing relative similarity within dyads for large dyadic samples. The results reveal that samples exhibiting high and significant intra-class correlations (ICC) indicate more accommodation in terms of the DDM than those with low, non-significant ICCs. The study uncovers important gender differences in accommodative patterns intersecting with grade level as well as a role for ethnic identity. Ethnically salient features are employed as resources for accommodation for both girls and boys, but in different ways.

Most linguistic theories of language socialization from childhood to early adulthood are based on cross-sectional studies or case studies of individuals. The Frank Porter Graham (FPG) project radically breaks from this tradition by examining the longitudinal development of more than 70 African American children for the first 21 years of their lives. The result is an unprecedented, comprehensive study that offers insight into the trajectory of change from pre-school through post-secondary education for speakers of African American Language (AAL) and the primary factors that influence these changes during this vital stage in the lifespan.

In this chapter, we consider trajectories of change in vernacular African American Language (AAL) based on a set of seven temporal data points, from 48 months of age to post-secondary (19-21 years of age), using a Dialect Density Measure (DDM). Although different trajectories are uncovered, the predominant pattern is the “roller-coaster effect,” in which children’s vernacular index entering school recedes over the first four grades, accelerates during sixth to eighth grade, then recedes again as they proceed through secondary and post-secondary school. Comparison of token-based and type-based inventories show a high correlation in the results, and most individual variables also follow this pattern. However, some variables that are acquired during the later acquisition phase, such as ‘habitual be’ and copula/auxiliary absence, may show divergent patterns over the early lifespan.

In this chapter, we examine the relationship between the vernacularity of caretaker speech as represented by the participants’ mothers and the subjects in the FPG sample. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between the vernacularity of caretaker speech as represented by the participants’ mothers and the subjects in the FPG sample. The analysis indicates that a significant relationship between the relative vernacularity of AAL-speaking mothers and their children exists across most of the early lifespan. Further, the analysis of the impact of relevant social and family factors on the development of AAL vernacularity reveals gender as a significant determiner at only the earliest and the latest points in the early lifespan. Finally, the analysis uncovers the nuanced picture of the relationship between mothers’ and children’s vernacularity – that adolescent females from low-vernacular families are likely to become low-vernacular speakers (like their mothers) in older adolescence. Finally, we see the departure of the children from the parents in the early stages of schooling, following the roller coaster trajectory described in the overall trajectory of vernacularity described for morphosyntactic features.

The monumental research project reported here emerges at a crucial juncture in the field, bridging work on individual variation across distinct life stages with more traditional questions related to community variation, style, and change. The project expands previous approaches to African American Language (AAL) by considering the interaction between life stages, a host of social variables, and language use. The participants come from a wide variety of neighborhoods and communities, allowing us to move beyond the tradition of prioritizing highly vernacular speakers from ethnically homogenous communities to investigate the relationship between segregation and language variation. The depth and breadth of this study adds a new richness to our understanding of AAL as it relates to distinct life stages and social contexts. It also represents a more inclusive and comprehensive variationist perspective by adding to the analytical toolkit the composite dialect index that has traditionally been eschewed and dismissed by variationists in favor of myopically focused isolated, single linguistic structures. Though this methodological inclusion is controversial in variationist studies, we have offered empirical evidence and argued for its methodological utility and its theoretical validity as a complement to traditional variation studies.