Research Question: 

What is the structural system of violence underlying the killings of young people?

Globally, youth aged 15–29 make up 40% of all homicide victims. In Latin America, homicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents aged 10–19. Despite these numbers, youth are overwhelmingly portrayed as perpetrators, rather than victims, of homicidal violence in academic and policy spheres. Common frameworks like ‘youth violence prevention’ implicitly blame young people for killing each other, overlooking that youth are also killed by older actors such as police or adult criminals. This project seeks to counter this victim-blaming narrative by testing the theoretical soundness and practical relevance of conceptualizing youth killings as juvenicides – i.e. as distinct homicides rooted in the juvenile condition. Historically, the conceptualization of femicide as a distinct kind of homicide rooted in patriarchy has spurred legal and policy reforms to combat violence against women. By conducting the first-ever comparative, mixed-method study of youth killings in Latin America, we aim to assess whether a similar path is viable for juvenicide.

By combining theories and methods from anthropology, peace studies, economics, and computer science, the project will:

1. Build a theoretical framework on youth killings grounded in comparative ethnography and LLM-assisted dataset analysis across 5 Latin American countries;
2. Develop a measurement framework to estimate the prevalence of this phenomenon across the region;
3. Integrate these findings into policy frameworks through collaboration and joint advocacy with (I)NGOs.

The overall aim is to propose a paradigmatic shift in how youth killings are understood and addressed — moving beyond ‘youth violence’ frameworks to instead highlight the structural, symbolic, and systemic factors that disproportionately endanger young lives.

This project is carried out in close collaboration with the Colectivo Juvenicidio y Resistencias Sociales (JUVIR)