The Institute for the Reduction of Youth Violence will soon be established at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby campus, thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
The role of the institute will be to further "our understanding of the factors associated with youth violence and other serious behaviours," said Mario Pinto, vice-president of research at the university, in a press release.
Although youth crime has declined in Canada in the past decade in both rate and severity, statistics show adolescents were charged with more than 100,000 criminal offences in 2011, including more than 40,000 violent crimes, according to the release.
"Youth violence and other serious conduct problems pose significant social, public health, and economic problems in Canada and throughout the world," said SFU clinical psychologist Robert McMahon, who will direct the institute.
The youth "conduct problems" to be researched range from relatively minor oppositional behaviours like yelling or temper tantrums to more serious forms of anti-social behaviours like violence, aggression, and destructiveness.
Most of the research associated with these issues has been done in other countries. McMahon said it's therefore important to gather data from within the Canadian population.
"It will give us the enhanced ability to make informed decisions about the development of conduct problems in various Canadian populations," he said. "More importantly, it will assist us in developing, selecting, and evaluating evidence-based interventions to reduce conduct problems among Canadian youth."
