ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors make a strong case for contextualizing youth violence to make sense of its occurrence. By adapting Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, Ahlin and Antunes place youth violence in three nested layers essential to understanding youth violence—the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual layer. This discussion establishes the broad ecological framework for describing the five domains of a youth’s life essential to understanding exposure to violence and perpetration of violence: community, family, peers, school, and individuals. The chapter concludes by offering routine activity theory as a theoretical perspective from which to consider youth violence. The various contextual systems of the ecological framework that amplify or mitigate youth experiences with violence can be understood using a routine activity theory (or lifestyles perspective) and its three tenets: motivated offenders, target suitability, and capable guardianship. These elements of routine activity theory can be placed in the ecological model to explain youth violence.
