--- description: Chicago schools set out to pinpoint (and protect) likely victims of violence title: Fight School Violence, Pinpoint Its Victims image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [U.S.](/section/us/) # Fight School Violence, Pinpoint Its Victims by [Annie Murphy Paul](/author/annie-murphy-paul/) Oct 17, 2010 4:00 AM CUT by [Annie Murphy Paul](/author/annie-murphy-paul/) Oct 17, 2010 4:00 AM CUT Ron Huberman is a fast-talking former beat cop with an M.B.A. and a passion for number crunching. For just under two years, he has run the Chicago public-school system, a job whose duties include trying not only to raise test scores and graduation rates but also to keep students from getting killed. During the past school year, 245 Chicago public-school students were shot, and 27 of them died. Huberman thinks the toll would have been even higher had it not been for a controversial school-safety program he announced last fall and is continuing this year. Instead of focusing solely on the perpetrators of violence, the district is also identifying potential victims — figuring out which students are the most likely to be gunned down and taking steps to keep them safe. [(See “Bullying: Suicides Highlight a Schoolyard Problem.”)](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1899930,00.html "undefined") The initiative, one of the first of its kind in the U.S., is the natural extension of a burgeoning field of study called victimization research. Its premise: most crime victims are not chosen at random, and some people are much more likely than others to become targets, on the basis of factors such as where they live, how they spend their time and even which personality traits they possess. Huberman, 38, approached Chicago’s seemingly intractable youth-violence problem by gathering detailed information about the more than 500 public-school students who had been shot in the city over the previous two years. The typical student shooting victim was failing academically, absent 40% of the school year (compared with the average student’s 16%) and five times more likely to be off track to graduate than other students. These victims—90% of whom were male—also had a history of school disciplinary problems, racking up eight times as many incidents of serious misconduct, like drug use or gang activity, as classmates who were not shot. Huberman and his team used the data to create a predictive model that identified a tenth of Chicago’s roughly 100,000 public high school students as at increased risk of victimization and about 250 individuals at the very highest risk. “If you’re not in that group of about 10,000 kids, your likelihood of being shot is incredibly low,” Huberman says. If you’re in the ultra-high-risk group of 250, he says, “your chances of being shot in the next two years are 1 in 5.” After identifying the ultra-high-risk students, Huberman set about trying to change how they spend their time. “How many alcoholic drinks someone consumes each day, how many nights a week someone spends outside the home—these things are highly predictive of victimization,” says Robert Sampson, chair of the sociology department at Harvard University. Another major predictor is proximity to crime hot spots, places where assaults and other illegal activity tend to cluster. If you live in or near a hot spot, you’re more likely to be victimized. This was the case for Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old who was beaten to death with railroad ties on his way home from school last fall. His route home passed through a South Side neighborhood notorious for gang violence. [(See “The Bullying of Seth Walsh.”)](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023083,00.html "undefined") Though many of the ultra-high-risk students live in high-crime neighborhoods, Huberman has taken steps to mitigate their risk: he has assigned each of them a full-time mentor—an adult from the student’s community who gets paid to act as a counselor, cheerleader and role model and to be available to the student around the clock. Huberman’s $60 million safety program, which is financed by federal stimulus grants, also subsidizes part-time jobs for at-risk students. The jobs and mentors are intended to offer guidance and instill good habits and also to help run out the clock. “Every hour a kid is working at his job or talking to his mentor is an hour he’s not hanging out on the street corner, vulnerable to getting shot,” says Josh Gray, 33, deputy director of the Chicago schools’ antiviolence initiative. “We track their activities very carefully.” [From the archives: “How to Make Schools Safer.”](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1543803,00.html "undefined") The strategy seems to have worked for at least one participant. “Sunshine,” as he was nicknamed by a program staffer, is a slight young man who seems engulfed by his baggy jeans and black leather coat. Identified last fall as a senior with an ultra-high risk of being shot, he ended up bonding with his mentor, spending as much as 30 hours a week with him, sharing meals, playing basketball, going online to learn about colleges and applying for financial aid. In June he became the first person in his family to graduate from high school. The program has made Sunshine feel safer. “Before, I was a fish out of water,” he says. “I couldn’t breathe. Now I have water around me, and I can breathe again.” **The Odds of Victimization** Some of the links social scientists are making between how people behave and how likely they are to be victimized are in line with our everyday assumptions about crime: we know we’re more likely to be mugged if we stay out late partying than if we have an early dinner and go to bed. [(See “The Bully Blight.”)](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1047497,00.html "undefined") But some of the researchers’ theories go further, tying the odds of victimization to certain personality traits. Christopher Schreck, an associate professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is at the vanguard of these studies. In a 2006 paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, he and his two co-authors analyzed data that tracked 3,500 young people starting when they were in the sixth and seventh grades. To measure the participants’ level of self-control, they were asked to rate how strongly they agreed with a series of statements, such as “I act on the spur of the moment,” “I do what brings me pleasure now” and “I am more concerned with the short run.” The youths were also asked how many times they had experienced physical assault, robbery or theft. Even after controlling for contact with delinquent peers, Schreck found that youths’ level of self-control effectively predicted how often they were victimized—at the time of the first survey as well as a follow-up a year later. Low self-control, he concluded, predicts vulnerability to crime “potentially many years into the future.” Scientists are also searching for characteristics associated with another form of youth aggression: bullying. A 2008 study of nearly 2,000 children, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that the “trajectory of victimization” begins as early as age 2\. The aggression of young children who are unable to peacefully negotiate solutions to social problems can lead to those kids’ being bullied. This helps explain why a number of antibullying initiatives are taking a victim-focused approach, teaching bullied kids how to handle social situations and manage their emotions more effectively. Such efforts have shown promise in reducing victimization, but a concern still lingers: Is it a good idea to label vulnerable young people, who are just developing their identities, as victims? The answer is that the stigma is worth it if the intervention saves lives. But some youth-violence experts are skeptical. “My models can tell me where and when people are most likely to be victimized, but they can’t tell me with certainty that it will be Joe and not John who will be the victim,” says Harvard’s Sampson. “Showering resources on a small number of individuals in the belief that they’re the ones who will be victimized is unlikely to pay off.” [(See which kids are more vulnerable to bullying.)](http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1850405,00.html "undefined") One problem with the Chicago program is that “time does not stand still,” Sampson says. “Older kids are aging out of the gangs. Younger kids are coming up. New alliances and enmities are being formed. By the time you draw up a list \[of potential victims\], it’s going to be outdated.” Huberman disagrees. His victim-prediction model pinpointed more than 40% of the Chicago high school students who ended up getting shot during the past academic year. And he thinks providing mentoring and jobs for high-risk kids kept at least some of them from meeting the same fate. As for the danger of labeling, it’s relative. “None of our kids were remotely surprised to learn that they’re potential victims,” says Jonathan Moy, 32, a program manager for the Chicago schools’ safety initiative. “They already know they’re vulnerable. They’re just glad someone else noticed.” _This article originally appeared in the October 11, 2010 issue of TIME._ [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek "undefined") [See the Cartoons of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek "undefined") Fight School Violence, Pinpoint Its Victims ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597725/fight-school-violence-pinpoint-its-victims/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597725/fight-school-violence-pinpoint-its-victims/"},"headline":"Fight School Violence, Pinpoint Its Victims","datePublished":"2010-10-17T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T03:08:51.485Z","description":"Chicago schools set out to pinpoint (and protect) likely victims of violence","url":"https://time.com/archive/6597725/fight-school-violence-pinpoint-its-victims/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Annie Murphy Paul","url":"https://time.com/author/annie-murphy-paul/"}],"articleSection":"U.S.","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/us/","name":"U.S."}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597725/fight-school-violence-pinpoint-its-victims/","name":"Fight School Violence, Pinpoint Its Victims"}}]}] ```