Individual and Situational Risk in the Emergence of Violent Events among Youths on the Street

In this chapter, Baron focuses on the emergence of violent behavior among street youth. He argues that to accurately predict and understand aggressive behavior within this population (and, indeed, for any population), scholars must consider more than the background characteristics of individuals and situational factors. In this way, his explanation embraces the interactive aspect of emergence, which was discussed in our opening chapter. Relying on Agnew’s (2006) concept of “storylines”—a variant of what other scholars term “scripts”—Baron proposes that we can reduce uncertainty in explaining crime by considering the manner in which background characteristics promote the adoption of scripts that generally support aggression, as well as how situational factors interact with these storylines at several stages to produce (or inhibit) violence.