Curbing Juvenile Violence

Canada -- October 23, dailygleaner.canadaeast.com had a very interesting article about youths at risk for violence and how learning martial arts can prove to be helpful in curbing inappropriate behavior, resistance to rules and aggression.

The article was seemingly an answer to -- or rather an alternative to -- an announcement by the leader of the Conservative Party, who reportedly said how he was going to get tough on juvenile crime.

The article pointed to how several psychiatrists had written about a study in the journal 'Adolescence'. The psychiatrists had attempt to reproduce other (smaller) studies - pointing to how school-linked courses in traditional martial arts could benefit juveniles at high risk for violence and delinquency.

Previous research often shows mixed results. This is because participation in the studies is voluntary, or the participant is already in a martial arts program. The researcher say that both factors self-select for more aggressive youth, with the result that some studies even show an increase in violence for students who take martial arts.

However, in the study done by the psychiatrists, school teachers identified students at high risk for violence and delinquency. As the school was located in a poor area of a large urban city, with a very high juvenile arrest rate, there was no lack of such students.

Students who were identified as high risk could only take the course if their parents agreed, and an outside martial arts teacher was brought in to teach them.

60 students with similar problematic behavior profiles were paired and then assigned randomly to either a treatment group or to a wait-list control group, to make the study scientific.

The students took three classes per week, for ten weeks, of a traditional martial art . The art emphasized self-protection and calmness, using meditation and kata (patterned movements).

In this really great article, the author points to the significant positive findings of the study. He also has some great insight as to why this is so. A must read!