Teaching conflict resolution to our kids could help curb gun violence

For as long as most of us can remember, Chicago has struggled with gun violence. In fact, we have not had under 400 homicides in a single year since 1965, and we remain the gun violence capital of America with more shootings than any other city.

In recent years, however, Chicago has begun to recognize gun violence as a public health problem as much as a crime problem and has begun “treating” it with preventive measures, including community violence intervention, or CVI, and proactive policing. There is still one big missing piece of the answer, however, and that is helping each other learn how to resolve conflicts safely and peacefully.

Well-to-do couples spend billions of dollars on therapy to learn how to resolve their differences. Corporations spend billions teaching college-educated adults from stable, middle-class backgrounds how to resolve conflicts and work in teams. We as a society spend little to nothing teaching individuals from difficult and challenging backgrounds to do the same.

In the last decade, a network of community violence intervention organizations in Chicago have begun to engage with “high-risk/high-promise” individuals — the ones who are most likely to shoot or be shot. Through a variety of services, including trauma treatment, life coaching and job training, we help them escape the street life and transition into the legal economy.

But, for every one person that we save, there are several more we have not reached — some as young as 10 years old. Generally, we don’t identify them early enough to intervene before they get in trouble.

By the time they arrive at our community and faith-based organization or, God forbid, our emergency room with a gunshot wound, they have suffered so much trauma that the investment required to help them heal is astronomical.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A ‘captive audience’ in classrooms, youth sports

The disinvestment and neglect that is a root cause of our gun violence problems are costing us billions of dollars each year in direct services and lost opportunity for the thousands of young people who don’t live long enough to enjoy the blessings of life that we all take for granted.

It’s not hard to predict which children will grow up into at-risk adults. They often come from struggling families. They move around a lot as kids, shuttling between schools, homes and neighborhoods. They have repeated disciplinary infractions. They often have adult family members with challenges like drug abuse.

What would it take to bring conflict resolution into our schools? We have a captive audience of children in our classrooms filled with curiosity and hunger for love and support and peer leaders to be present in their lives By starting early, we can have so much more impact on them and on their communities.

What would it take if our youth sports programs integrated conflict resolution into athletics? Could our job training programs be tailored to include conflict resolution as one of the core skills needed to thrive in the workplace? Could our faith-based and community-based programs also make conflict resolution a priority?

There is a lot of pressure on our city, county and state to balance budgets and meet our many challenges, and we are all grateful for what our public sector partners have done in recent years to support violence prevention. But if we really want to achieve a dramatic and enduring reduction in gun violence, we should consider bringing conflict resolution training into more dimensions of our work.

Needless to say, conflict resolution alone won’t end gun violence. Sadly, we are still a society with more guns in private hands than people. Economic and racial isolation, along with decades of disinvestment, have perpetuated economic inequity. Substandard education continues to hold back whole segments of our society.

But we need a comprehensive approach to public safety that reaches people of all ages. It should include community violence intervention, more effective policing, greater investment in crime-plagued communities, and a serious strategy to stop the flow of illegal guns into our cities. But it should also include efforts to help us all get better at resolving our differences safely and peacefully.

Father Michael Pfleger is pastor of St. Sabina Church. Bryan Samuels is executive director of Chapin Hall. Selwyn Rogers, MD is founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center. Arne Duncan is the founder of Chicago CRED.

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