Brainpower Focused on Youth Gangs

University of Miami anthropology professor fights youth crime in Haiti and miami, by means of an internatational academic collaboratation.

Youth-gang violence is a problem around the world, but only Haiti has the University of Miami-affiliated Interuniversity Institute for Research to provide it with data and tactics that may help counter the brutality.

Inaugurated in May 2007, the institute implemented around a consortium of 23 universities and research entities that conduct social-science research in Haiti, the western hemisphere’s poorest country. Convening in October in Port-au-Prince, with 30 specialists from Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the United States in attendance, the institute addressed potential areas for research and intervention strategies. Participants examined not only the youth-gang problem in Haiti but also the country’s rapid urban transformation and its generally high level of violence.

University of Miami professor of anthropology Louis Marcelin, the institute’s coordinator, is the first Haitian-American to receive a prestigious National Institutes of Health R01 grant. He has won two such awards, in fact, the first of which was a $1.1-million grant to study gang activities among Haitian youth in Miami. Both awards helped generate data to develop the institute.

According to Marcelin, gang violence in Miami influences gang violence in Haiti. That is because immigrants or children of immigrants who break the law in the United States are often deported to their home countries. “During the last 11 years, the U.S. has sent close to 3,000 kids to Haiti,” said Marcelin, “and many of them bring sophisticated gang technologies and skills with them.”

Marginalization, he noted, is one of the primary reasons why young Haitian-Americans join gangs. Many Haitian families, being undocumented U.S. residents, are often forced to live in the most disadvantaged and violent neighborhoods. Moreover, given the relative independence of today’s young people, parents’ influence in discouraging their children’s involvement with gangs is often minimal.

Marcelin said he is interested in the topic not because he is Haitian-American but because he wants to explore, in general, humanity’s capacity to produce misery as well as enlightened and practical ways to correct it. “The questions I ask are deeply human,” he said. “I could apply them to American kids in New York or Japanese kids in Tokyo.”