Teens to pitch peace to peers

A week from now, Kahrie Hinson, 18, will be counseling other teens in his South End neighborhood on how to avoid violence and resolve territorial disputes without resorting to bloodshed.

Hinson is one of eight teens picked from 50 applicants to take mediation training at Boston Centers for Youth and Family in the South End. In a week, the teens go into their neighborhoods as promoters of peace.

But yesterday, in preparation for hitting the streets, the group took a walking tour through Castlegate Apartments and Tent City. They were led by Talia Rivera, 29, a city street worker, and Matt Parker, 23, a youth worker.

''What do you know about the turf issues and violence in this area, the beef between Cathedral and Villa Victoria?" Parker asked the teens as they sat attentively near a playground at Castlegate Apartments. Melissa Pagan, 15, who is from the Cathedral projects, responded, ''Some dude shot someone from the Villa and that's how it started."

In choosing teens to mediate in familiar territory, the program is taking a grass-roots approach to address the rise in violence in Boston since early 2005. Last year there were 75 homicides, the most in 10 years.

Through April 4 this year, there had been eight fatal and 88 nonfatal shootings, compared with 52 shootings at the same time last year. Almost half of this year's shooting victims are teens, according to the latest police statistics.

Pagan, Hinson, and the other teens were chosen for the privately funded program because they represent the middle ground between ''goodie two-shoes and rough kids," said Selvin L. Chambers, director of youth development for the Centers for Youth and Family. ''We were very deliberate with who we chose. We wanted participants who could galvanize other youth in their neighborhoods, who other kids would be comfortable in meeting."

Hinson said he was huddled with a group of friends at the Cathedral projects in the South End last March, talking about nothing in particular, when Rivera approached him and asked him if he wanted a job.

''She said it was about doing outreach in the neighborhood," said Hinson, 18. ''I thought it would be great because I was in the streets wasting time and doing nothing when I could be doing something positive."

The program is being evaluated at every step by a four-person team from the Center for Social Development and Education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

In eight weeks, those researchers will determine which mediation practices used by the teens are most effective, said Melissa Pearrow, lead researcher and a faculty member in the school's Graduate College of Education.

The results will be handed off to similar programs expected to be launched this summer in Mission Hill and Bromley Heath areas in Jamaica Plain and in Grove Hall in Roxbury.

Pearrow sat in on the interview process for the mediators and took notes on what the applicants said.

''We asked them what [they] thought were the big issues in their neighborhoods and how those issues could be addressed," she said.