Episode Details

What are ‘teen takeovers’, and do we need to curb them?

Krista Mehari, associate professor of public health at Michigan State University, says teens themselves can be part of the solution.

Faculty Bio:

Krista Mehari is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health in Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. Her work focuses on improving the safety and well-being of youth from minoritized groups in overburdened, underresourced communities, with a specific focus on youth violence and firearm injury prevention. She takes a participatory action research approach to partner with communities to develop, implement, and evaluate violence prevention strategies. Her work has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

Transcript:

“Teen takeovers”—youth-led gatherings fueled by social media—have occurred in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh. The headlines often focus on curfews and crackdowns, but beneath the headlines lies a bigger question: How could we partner with teens to come up with solutions, instead of deciding that teens are the problem?Teen takeovers demonstrate young people’s creative energy, their desire for community, and their capacity to spread information quickly.In my work as a youth violence prevention researcher, I have found that youth participatory action research—working with young people to identify problems and create potential solutions—works for the good of communities and for the young people themselves.Research shows that involving young people in participatory action promotes leadership skills, boosts academic engagement, grows strong social bonds, and builds safer communities for everyone.But here’s the catch: Sometimes youth partnership is just for show—adults pretend that they are including young people but still exclude them from real power. Teens don’t just spot hypocrisy; they call it out. To quote one frustrated youth leader: “Honestly, people are irrelevant after they hit 25.” This sentiment isn’t about age; it’s about adults who violate their trust and resist making real change. The research on youth partnerships shows that teens need more than empty promises. To make adult-youth partnerships successful, teens need mutual respect and trust, collaborative goal setting, shared decision making, and transparency. Adults can build successful youth partnerships through warmth, consistency, curiosity, and flexibility. Youth partnerships are most successful when adults are transparent, share decision-making power, collaborate in brainstorming solutions, and support implementation of solutions.By partnering with young people, decisionmakers can monitor the pulse of their communities and implement relevant, attractive, sustainable solutions in real time.

Read More:

[Sage Journals] - Project GRIP: An Illustration of Participatory Action Research with Communities of People Who Own and Use Firearms

[Taylor & Francis] - Transdisciplinary participatory action research: how philosophers, psychologists, and practitioners can work (Well) together to promote adolescent character development within context

[Taylor & Francis] - Impact of a participatory action approach to virtue promotion among early adolescen