Cultural Competency Training and Program Development

Cultural competency can be defined as a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that interface with each other in a system, an agency, or a network of professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations (Cross et al., 1989; Isaacs and Benjamin, 1991). The term culture refers to integrated patterns of human behavior— including thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions— associated with particular racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups. The term culturally competent describes the capacity to function effectively within the context of the behavior patterns characteristic of such groups. Operationally, cultural competency entails transforming knowledge about particular individuals and groups into culturally appropriate (as those individuals or groups define them) standards, policies, practices, and attitudes that increase the quality of services, thereby producing better outcomes ( Davis, 1997).

Providing cultural competency training is one way in which agencies can increase the effectiveness of staff at all levels. Cultural competency training can engender a deeper awareness of cultural factors (e.g., differences in communication styles, body language and demeanor, language use, beliefs about the family, attitudes toward authority figures) that typically influence decisionmaking about youth (OJJDP, 2001:42). Such training seeks to increase knowledge about different cultures, address cultural biases and stereotypes, and produce changes in the practices of individuals and the organizations to which they belong.

Cultural competency training can alter the beliefs and behaviors of juvenile justice personnel, system administrators, elected officials, and the general public in far-reaching ways regarding minority overrepresentation. Through such training, for instance, juvenile justice professionals could gain essential contextual information regarding Native American and Alaska Native youth, including the history of conquests by white traders and settlers, genocide, decimation from disease, forced loss of cultural heritage and sacred land, and the evolution of alcohol use, violence, and chronic disease (DeBruyn et al., 2001). A working knowledge of the history, traumatic losses, cultural frameworks, and cultural change of different racial and ethnic groups could help these professionals identify the combinations of risk and protective factors that violence prevention strategies should address to be most useful for youth in each group. If this type of cultural competency training was mandatory and provided systematically throughout the juvenile justice and related youth-serving systems, cross-cultural understanding within organizations would improve and interventions would become culturally relevant and more likely to be successful (Ellis, Klepper, and Sowers, 2001; DeBruyn et al., 2001; Federle and Chesney-Lind, 1992).