Youth Violence Myth With the media focusing so much attention on cases of juvenile crime. You might think that youth today are more violent and dangerous than ever. There is no such thing as “youth violence.” The levels of, and cycles in, violent crime and homicide among poorer, mostly minority young men occur because, for every race/ethnic group, poverty rates among the young are twice those of adults.
Factor out poverty differences, and murder and violent crime rates are higher among adults in their 20s and 30s than among teenagers. Adult violent crime rates would be higher still if the chances of being arrested for committing domestic violence approached those for street violence. Family violence is the chief danger to children and women, murdering three times more kids than all “youth violence” combined.
Nor are rare, public crimes such as school shootings a “youth” phenomenon. These are individual pathologies amply shared with adults, as more common mass shootings by grownups show. There is, in short, nothing in the behavior of young people as distinct from adults that merits tagging their generation with the pejorative term, “youth violence.”
In fact, such labeling rightly would be seen as bigoted if applied to racial or ethnic groups. Why, then, is it acceptable to single out young people for negative stereotyping? The reason illuminates America’s paralyzing institutional biases. Rather than attacking the conditions that underlie social problems, as leadership in other Western nations more often do, American leaders blame the personal flaws and misbehaviors of disfavored demographic groups: Asian and Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the early century, Japanese- Americans during World War II, Mexican migrants in various cycles, African Americans throughout.
Negative stereotypes applied in the past to scapegoat racial/ethnic groups (innately violent, biologically flawed, impulsive, menacing peaceful society in growing numbers) are identical to those politicians and experts use to describe adolescents today. Exhaustive research reviews show such claims are no more valid about teenagers than about racial and ethnic out-groups of the past. Given similar conditions, whites, minorities, adolescents, and adults behave in similar ways.
The designation of youth as the new scapegoat results in part from the fears of an aging, mostly white, society of a growing, increasingly nonwhite, youth population. But the recent negative stigma of youths suggests larger political motives as well. Statistics show the groups showing the most alarming increases in serious crime–over-30 adults, mostly white — are exactly the mainstream constituencies politicians seek to flatter. More by mutual self-interests than formal conspiracy. America’s politicians and institutions took the increases in middle-aged crime and drug abuse off the table and instead misportrayed these solely as youth problems.
But the truth is that the youth violence is based on lies and racism. Youth violence isn’t on the rise– despite the media’s frantic coverage of the issue. According to the U.S. Justice Department, despite a steady growth in the juvenile population over the past decade, juvenile violent crime arrests have dropped by 23 percent since 1995. Second, because the youth violence is racist to its core, Black and Latino children have suffered the brunt of the tough-on-youth-crime hysteria.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, three out of four youths standing trial in adult courts are children of color–despite the fact that white youths commit most juvenile crimes. For those charged with drug offenses, Black youths are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison. And for children charged with violent crimes, white youths averaged 193 days in detention, compared to 254 days for Black youths and 305 days for Latino youths. As the politicians have hyped their get- tough laws, programs that have been proven to reduce youth crime–after-school programs, summer- job programs, public mental health services–are being scrapped.
This is the real crime. The resources that could help youths to develop into healthy and happy adults are being wasted on tax cuts for the rich and bigger prisons to lock up the victims of an unjust society. Meanwhile, Bush claims Washington’s cutbacks in social services for the poor can be made up for by faith-based charities. With Bush in the White House, it appears that more scapegoating of America’s youth is on the agenda. But public discontent with treating youth offenders as adults is on the rise. We need to keep challenging the politicians who are prepared to condemn an entire generation of young people to the wasteland of the American injustice system–all for political gain.
