About the Presentation:
This presentation will provide an overview of the factors that may be contributing to the recent rise in juvenile crime and violence including the easy availability and use of more lethal firearms, the role of exposure to violence impacting youth mental health, the rising influence of social media particularly as it is manifested via cyberbullying in and outside of schools, and the lingering impacts of the COVID pandemic. Examples of promising community-based efforts to address youth violence will be provided as well as what has been shown not to work.
About Our Speaker:
Daniel Flannery is the Dr. Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Professor and Director of the Begun Center for Violence Prevention, Research and Education in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences (MSASS) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). From 1998 to 2011 he served as founding Director of the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence at Kent State University. He is a licensed clinical –child psychologist and a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Case University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.
He has authored several edited volumes including Youth Violence: Prevention, Intervention and Social Policy (1999) for American Psychiatric Press and the Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression (2007 and 2018) for Cambridge University Press. He is author of Violence and mental health in everyday life: Prevention and intervention for children and adolescents (2006) and Wanted on Warrants: The Fugitive Safe Surrender Program (2013). He was a committee member and co-author of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s 2016 report Preventing Bullying Through Science, Policy and Practice. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters and was named in 2019 one of the 100 most influential Social Work faculty.
Flannery’s primary areas of research are in youth violence prevention, the link between violence and mental health, and community-based program evaluation.
He received his PhD in 1991 in Clinical Psychology from The Ohio State University. His previous appointments were as Assistant Professor of Family Studies and Psychology at the University of Arizona, Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry at CWRU, and Professor of Criminal Justice Studies and Public Health at Kent State University. He was named a University Distinguished Scholar at Kent State in 2006 and Distinguished University Professor at CWRU in 2023. In 2008 he was appointed by the Secretary of Education to the U.S. Department of Education’s Safe and Drug Free Schools Community Advisory Committee. Dr. Flannery has
generated as Principal or Co-principal investigator over 70 million dollars in externally funded research. He has served as advisor to various local and national organizations including the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Crime Prevention Council, the National Resource Center for Safe Schools, and the Ohio School Safety Center.