Lecture on Children, Neighborhoods and Violence April 8

Felton Earls' longterm study of children and violence led to his theory that most important influence on crime rate is neighbors’ willingness to act for one another’s benefit.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

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Durham, NC -- Felton Earls, who led a 10-year study of children’s exposure to violence in Chicago, will give a talk at Duke University April 8 about his work.

Earls will speak from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Rhodes Conference Room of the Sanford Institute Building, 201 Science Drive on Duke’s West Campus. The lecture, called “Adolescents, Neighborhoods and Violence,” is part of the Center for Child and Family Policy’s Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture Series.

It is free and open to the public. Register for the event by contacting the Center for Child and Family Policy at 613-9350 or ehlayko@duke.edu.

Earls is a professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health. His lecture will take a historical look at the context and research agenda for his best-known study, the $51-million “Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods,” a large-scale epidemiological investigation of the causes and consequences of children’s exposure to community and family violence. Earls will reflect on the study’s design, major findings, policy relevance and new research directions.

The project, which included collecting data from more than 8,000 people in 343 Chicago neighborhoods, led to Earls’ “collective efficacy” theory. Earls and his colleagues argue that the most important influence on a neighborhood’s crime rate is neighbors’ willingness to act, when needed, for one another’s benefit and, particularly, for the benefit of one another’s children.

Earls’ new project, “The Ecology of HIV/AIDS and Child Mental Health,” uses the strategies and results of the Chicago study. Conducted in Tanzania, the project aims to mitigate the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the growth, development and education of young adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

A 1963 graduate of Howard University, Earls went on to earn his medical degree from the Howard University School of Medicine. He completed a residency in pediatrics at New York Medical College and studied at the University of Wisconsin; Massachusetts General Hospital; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and the Hospital for Sick Children in London.

Earls first joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1974. In 1981, he moved to Washington University in St. Louis and returned to Harvard in 1989.

Earls directs Harvard’s South Africa Fellowship Program, which was established to address the needs of South Africans who were denied access to advanced education under apartheid. He also serves on the board of directors of Physicians for Human Rights and is a member of the Committee for Human Rights at the National Academy of Sciences. 

The Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture Series began in 2006 and is endowed by the Arthur Sulzberger family.

The Center for Child and Family Policy, which is affiliated with the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the Social Science Research Institute, bridges the gap between research and public policy to improve the lives of children and families.