Deanna Soto History 1-2 The Interrupters 2/6/13

The Interrupters

1. The main strategy that CeaseFire uses is to directly mediate between gangs by having important members of the community and past gang members, who understand the street mentality, meet to talk face to face with gang members who are having the conflicts. In 2011, CeaseFire outreach workers mediated 550 conflicts. They also worked with 1,151 high risked youth during that time. CeaseFire believes talking with gang members and mediating between gangs is the only way to stop the cycle of vengeance and misunderstanding between gang members. They believe that important people in the community must get personally involved with the gangs to try and talk sense and stop the cycle of violence that has been going on for decades in Chicago.

2. CeaseFire embodies a lot of the teachings of the main religions in the world. Both Christianity and Buddhism, for example, teach that you should always treat others as you would want to be treated and to love your fellow human beings. Buddhism teaches that when you hurt another person that you are hurting yourself just as much. Both religions also teach how important it is to forgive people for things that they have done against you. Until gang members start

forgiving each other they will just keep up the cycle of anger and vengeance, but the cycle has to stop at some point, or it will go on forever.

3. It is not possible to successfully reduce the cycle of violence until the family, educational, social, and economic issues that are in these communities are helped. For one, teachers and schools need to educate and motivate students by teaching them that they have to break the cycle of street violence that they see all around them. But it should be teachers or people that they respect who teach them these things. Also, until there are economic conditions where parents are off welfare and have jobs, kids will continue to grow up in broken homes with parents who have no stability or respect for themselves. When parents have no respect for themselves or jobs, kids are less likely to have respect for their parents and have no good role models. So organizations like CeaseFire will not be very successful by just trying to break up fighting between gangs unless the lives of the young gang members at home are improved.