Disconnected

The city's Vietnamese population is turning to Harvard for help in understanding the problems its youth are facing - problems that are often manifested through violence.

As court guards led away Thu Phan, 18, his mother stared at him intently, dumbfounded by charges that he had instigated the brutal beating of two young teens last summer.

"I don't know what happened to my kid," said the Vietnamese woman, who declined to give her name, after her son's arraignment earlier this month. "They go out and play and then I don't know what happened."

She is not alone. Vietnamese teenagers are more likely to feel disconnected from their parents and are less inclined to open up to them about their problems than other teenagers in the city, according to a 2006 survey of Boston schoolchildren conducted by the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. The survey, known as the Boston Youth Survey, is conducted every other year and focuses on students in Boston's public high schools.

Leaders in Boston's Vietnamese community have asked Harvard to conduct a separate survey solely of Vietnamese teens, to figure out whether the gap between Vietnamese adults and children could lead to the kind of violence exhibited last August in the brutal beating of two Vietnamese-American teens.

Phan and four other Vietnamese teenagers and young men have been indicted for their alleged involvement in the fight, which was captured on videotape and sent a shockwave through the community.

Leaders said they hope the survey's results will help give them ideas about how to narrow the rift between immigrants who arrived decades ago and their children, most of whom were born here or arrived in the country when they were so young that they can no longer speak Vietnamese well enough to communicate with their parents.

"We hope that we can get to understand the young perspective about the cause of youth violence," said Hoa Mai, program director at Viet-AID, a community development organization in Dorchester. "We want to see what the kids see as the root cause of violence and what kind of support they need from the community."

Many young Vietnamese Americans said they appreciate the effort.

"I think the Vietnamese youth of Dorchester nowadays are doing worse than ever," said Robinson Le, a 16-year-old sophomore at Monument High School, who took the survey and said he knows boys his age who are taking drugs and are on the verge of dropping out of school.

Le said most teenagers he knows feel lost.

"We need adults to tell us what to do, because we don't know what to do," he said.

On Aug. 13, 2007, nearly two dozen Vietnamese-American teenagers stomped, kicked, and punched two others, a 13-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, behind a church in Dorchester's Fields Corner. The victims were left unconscious. During the fight, the girl's neck was distended and the boy broke a facial bone near his eye.

An onlooker filmed the fight, posted it online, and within weeks the video was viewed by teenagers in the neighborhood, police, and horrified parents and community leaders.

A grand jury has indicted five men, ages 18 to 24, on charges that include assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Two of them have been accused of trying to intimidate the girl so she would not talk to police. Four of the men have been arrested and are facing trial, though one, Duong Phan, 19, remains a fugitive.

The beating forced parents and community leaders to confront the violence their children face and the gang culture that has become prevalent in the insular Vietnamese-American community.

A large parents meeting was held at Viet-AID in March. At least 85 people showed up and many of them said they were desperate to relate to their children but felt unable to do so. In April, community leaders asked Harvard researchers to come to the neighborhood.

The survey is similar to the one taken in 2006, which compiled responses from 1,233 Boston public high school students, including 42 Vietnamese-American teenagers.

The sampling was small, but the Vietnamese teens' responses were telling, said Mary Vriniotis, a research specialist at Harvard.

They were more likely to get better grades and regularly attend school than other teenagers. But 53 percent of Vietnamese girls said they never or almost never talk to adults in their house about their problems, compared with 34 percent of other girls. Only 73 percent of Vietnamese youth reported they knew adults who encouraged them often, compared with 87 percent of other youth surveyed.

The new survey, which began in April and is expected to conclude within a few weeks, has targeted not just schoolchildren, but youth who are truant, involved in gangs, or have been arrested. They have been asked questions ranging from what neighborhood they live in to whether they have been threatened with a knife, choked, or shot at.

Vriniotis said she hopes to reach 200 Vietnamese teenagers with the survey, which also delves more deeply into teenagers' feelings about being Vietnamese. The survey asks the children how connected they feel to Vietnamese culture, how well they speak the language, and if they have experienced any kind of discrimination in the last 12 months. Vriniotis said she hopes to release the survey results by the end of the summer.

Tung Mai, 15, a freshman at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury, took the survey and said the questions about violence seemed foreign to him.

But Mai, who said he comes from a loving, strict, two-parent home, believes the questions will be all too familiar to other children his age.

"The gang mentality is out there," said Mai. "The questions, sadly, while they are irrelevant to me, they are extremely realistic to other people."

Hoa Mai, who is not related to Tung Mai, said parents have to learn how to talk to their children. Language is not the only barrier, she said.

Most Vietnamese parents in Dorchester are struggling with full-time jobs each, which usually have long hours, are low-wage and low-skill, and are too busy to talk to their children, she said.

The parents' primary focus is that the children succeed in ways they could not, Tung Mai said. So they tell their children it is important to get good grades and go to college, but they do not have time to talk to their children about what is happening in their lives.

"They don't think that is as important," said Mai. "Just focus on study, stay home, and finish homework."

For a long time, Le said, he could not talk to his parents about his emotional problems even when they became unbearable. The long-haired teenager, who loves to break-dance, said he became so depressed that he had to be hospitalized. It was then that his parents realized they needed to communicate better.

"Now they're very supportive," Le said. "We talk a lot. A lot of people take that for granted."

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.