“Violent ‘teen takeover’ chaos” reads a July 6 NBC News headline. The news segment features footage of fights and arrests in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Raleigh, North Carolina, over the holiday weekend. If you’re a regular consumer of news, this and similar footage from elsewhere in the nation may be familiar to you, as the supposed “teen takeover” trend has lawmakers and law enforcement worried from Chicago to Charlotte.

What actually is a teen takeover? It’s rarely defined precisely. PBS NewsHour simply describes them as events “where teens coordinate on social media to show up en masse at the same place and same time,” which doesn’t, on its own, sound particularly dangerous. But as Marc A. Levin and Khalil Cumberbatch from the Council on Criminal Justice noted in a recent Washington Post op-ed, the concern is that “these gatherings of hundreds of teens too often spiral into fights, robberies and assaults on police.” Viral footage from news outlets and social media has helped turn a mix of local incidents into something of a national trend.

There are real reasons why these gatherings have drawn concern. Social media has made it easier to organize large, impromptu gatherings, and some of those events have involved serious violence. Those are legitimate public safety issues that require thoughtful policy responses. The question is whether broad punishments aimed at young people as a group are the most effective way to address them.

In response, law enforcement and elected officials have proposed stricter curfews, organized crime penalties, or even prosecuting the parents of minors caught committing crimes, as U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has threatened to do in Washington, DC. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier recently announced a statewide “zero-tolerance” strategy, pledging to pursue anti-gang and organized crime charges against the organizers of events where crimes occur. President Trump has even suggested that Chicago “should call for help” from the federal government to deal with these events.

But how much of a problem are teen takeovers, and how should public officials respond to them? One challenge in answering that question is that the term is applied to wildly disparate events, varying in both size and seriousness. Because the label is so vague, any incident involving young people in a public setting can be folded into the same category, blurring the line between ordinary gatherings and events where serious crime occurs. The result is that young people—especially in urban areas like Washington, DC, and Chicago—can come to be treated as a collectively suspicious group, one targeted for broad punishments like curfews.

At the same time, it is difficult to assess how common or how dangerous these events actually are. That makes it hard to design responses that are proportionate to the problem rather than driven by the most visible or viral incidents.

To start, it helps to understand what’s driving the trend. News outlets and public officials have reached for sociological and psychological explanations, with some blaming the COVID-19 pandemic and social media. But when you ask teens themselves, as the Chicago Tribune did, the answers are usually more straightforward. Malik Fedrick, 19, told the paper his peers are simply gathering “to have fun and take their mind off stuff.”

Fedrick notes that his neighborhood has few teen-friendly entertainment options. The trampoline park and the movie theater are 30 to 45 minutes away by car. These social media-driven gatherings happen, he says, because “there’s not a lot of stuff to do. To have fun and be able to go outside.” No amount of punishment, of the teens or their parents, will address that underlying reality.

Stripping away the novelty of the term “teen takeover” helps clarify how to respond to these events. Rather than treating them as a new nationwide trend requiring a new set of policies, it is more useful to see them as simply a new manifestation of normal problems, requiring solutions we know work rather than overly punitive responses. Investing in safe third spaces for kids to socialize can foster well-being and positive social connection, and research has shown that programs like summer youth jobs can reduce crime—especially violent crime—significantly. Curfews, on the other hand, are not an effective tool to prevent crime and may even make it worse.

An evidence-based approach, focused on interventions like summer job programs, also works politically. Polling by Vera Action and YouGov found that voters are more supportive of expanding opportunities for young people, like organized sports, than of measures like curfews and prosecuting parents for their children’s behavior. And just last month, in Washington, DC, where concerns about youth crime featured prominently in this year’s mayoral primary, the candidate promising a stricter crackdown lost to Janeese Lewis George, who opposed harsher curfews, saying they “do not result in fewer instances in youth-involved crime, public disturbances, or high-risk behaviors.” The election shows that messaging centered on prevention and opportunity can resonate alongside concerns about safety.

To support young people and help deliver community safety, politicians should propose greater investment in parks, recreation programs, and youth spaces. They should expand summer youth employment opportunities that help young people use their time constructively, earn money, and prepare for the workforce. And they should support parents with the resources they need to succeed rather than threaten to prosecute them.

Some political leaders are trying this approach already. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Office of Neighborhood Safety worked with violence intervention organizations to launch a new city website to help connect youth with summer activities. And last year, in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott expanded the summer hours of recreation centers and added organized activities for city teens. These are the kinds of investments that make communities safer over time. Rather than reacting to headlines with mass punishment, policymakers should focus on preventing harm in the first place.