We’re All at Risk From Violent Youth : * It Isn’t ‘Just’ High-Crime Areas--There Are No Havens

In Mission Viejo they were marching. In Lake Forest, they met at a motel. And in San Clemente, they hung a sign over the freeway overpass: “Take Back Your Community.”

These places would qualify for most any list of safe havens in suburbia. But they and an older section of the county, Santa Ana--which shed blood in five separate shootings on one autumn weekend--were struggling to come to terms with the violent month that was October, 1993.

In South County, where the crime rate is among the lowest in the region, residents were trying to figure out what to do next after a 17-year-old boy was stabbed in the head with a metal rod in San Clemente. While some sought to view the stabbing as an isolated event, others looked to the spread of youth violence, the new mix of ethnic groups in the suburbs, and a sense of alienation among youth as elements of a deeper problem with the country at large.

Much of the problem is indeed national in scope. The United States has the highest homicide rate among developed countries, and the culture of violence has affected even the young people living in quiet suburbia.

Some examples: When a seventh-grader was expelled in March for bringing a loaded semiautomatic handgun to Niguel Hills Middle School in Laguna Niguel, he said he had brought the gun in self-defense, and that adults of today didn’t understand the violent threats to today’s children.

And in an interview with The Times last summer, one Orange County family described going to R-rated films as a family ritual, with children 8 and 10 years old routinely seeing movies containing beatings, stabbings and other mayhem. Nobody seemed terribly worried about any consequences.

These examples suggest both that we have much to learn about the violence around us, and that solutions inevitably must lie deeper than mere expressions of regret or outrage. How is it that adult communication with youngsters like the seventh-grader is so poor that he has concluded that he has to take the law in his own hands, and that his elders simply wouldn’t understand? What kind of parental judgment is being exercised in the latter case, with youngsters fed a steady diet of movie violence?

And what of the infrastructure we have created? Many of our suburbs spread out in the confident 1980s without much concern for whether the new subdivisions and malls sufficiently encouraged a sense of community. We have built our modern utopias, but not always mindful of whether they adequately served a central mission of the newest communities, the nurturing of families. And it is not as if we don’t have the experiences of older parts of the country to tell us what has worked and what hasn’t. Now suddenly aware of its urban-style problems, Orange County has no choice but to come to terms after the fact with the consequences of change.

Its northern communities already have begun an earnest search for appropriate responses. Such measures as the gang hot line, and the attempts by the Orange County Gang Prevention Alliance to link police with educators, business leaders and county officials to build coalitions are beginning to address some of the problem, and now will have application for southern cities.

But for the longer term, in the older experienced communities and in the newer ones, there is much yet to be done. The violent suburbs used to be an oxymoron, but no more. Our families, educators and community leaders have their work cut out.