Examination of Youth Gangs and Interventions in Three Contexts: American, European, and Turkish Experiences

The purpose of this article is to examine gang problem and intervention strategies in American, European, and Turkish contexts. Although there is a lack of common definition of gang and gang membership in the extant literature leading to overestimation and underestimation of the problem, research on gangs in both American and European contexts is promising. In all three contexts, there are different risk factors for gang membership and hence, interventions focused on different aspects and contexts such as suppression, community mobilization, school based interventions and so on. Gang problem and related intervention and prevention strategies are relatively new and not comprehensive partly in European and mostly in Turkish contexts. However, intervention and prevention strategies are mostly evidence-based and theory oriented in American context. This study can further our understanding for developing intervention and prevention strategies to deal with gang problem.