Crime & Law
Community Safety Leaders Emphasize the Power of Youth, Social Media in Gun Violence Prevention
Panelists gathered for a conversation moderated by WTTW’s Joanna Hernandez about the role of youth and social media in reducing gun violence at Maggiano's Banquets in the Near North Side on October 8, 2024. The conversation is the final installment of a three-part series about ending gun violence in the city hosted by the Joyce Foundation, WTTW and City Club of Chicago. (Eunice Alpasan / WTTW News)
Empowering young people is an important component in helping to shift narratives about guns and violence prevention, community safety leaders said during a Tuesday panel conversation.
The conversation was the final installment of a three-part series, “Ending Gun Violence in Chicago: Connecting Policy, Practice and Community,” hosted by philanthropic group The Joyce Foundation in collaboration with WTTW and the City Club of Chicago.
Previous conversations held in the series focused on collaboration in gun violence prevention and efforts to stop the flow of illegal guns in Illinois.
The latest discussion, moderated by “Chicago Tonight: Latino Voices” host Joanna Hernandez, focused on narratives around guns and safety and the youth-led efforts on social media to curb violence. The event was hosted in collaboration with Project Unloaded, an organization that aims to prevent gun violence by educating the public about how guns make people less safe.
One approach the organization takes is youth-led social media campaigns, according to Founder and Executive Director Nina Vinik.
“We see Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram as more than just entertainment,” Vinik said. “Content on these platforms is influencing how young people see the world, including how they think about guns.”
Olivia Brown, program manager for Project Unloaded, spoke about how social media often gets a bad reputation, but young people can also use those platforms to educate and inspire conversations among their peers.
“They want to be creative, they want to be influential in their community and for a lot of them, the first step for that is social media,” Brown said.
Jadine Chou, Chicago Public School’s chief of safety and security, said that when it comes to prioritizing solutions to gun violence, the best ideas always come from young people.
“We bring students to the table,” Chou said. “If it’s social media, a cell phone policy, whatever it is, we’re involving our young people in deciding how we’re going to move forward, and that’s what I found to be our most successful approach.”
Dr. Selwyn Rogers, founding director of University of Chicago Medicine’s Trauma Center, said that research shows that owning a gun does not make people safer. That finding applies not just to young people, but also in cases of domestic violence or elderly populations experiencing mild dementia, he said.
However, the counter-narrative, portrayed oftentimes in media, is so powerful that people believe it to be true, Rogers said.
“Every time you hear, ‘Someone shot someone who was breaking into their house,’ how many times has that actually happened?” Rogers said. “It’s a minority of time compared to how many times someone took a gun to take their own life, or try to take their own life, or someone used a gun to illegally do harm to another person.”
Laia McClain, a sophomore at Whitney Young High School and Project Unloaded youth council member, said the future gives her hope.
“Seeing that I was placed in a good position — I have not gotten shot, I’m fully functional, I like to think,” McClain said. “If I was given these cards … then I would want to use everything I have to try to make that difference.”
WTTW presented the event in partnership with The Joyce Foundation, Project Unloaded and the City Club of Chicago.
Contact Eunice Alpasan: @eunicealpasan | 773-509-5362 | [email protected]
