COMMENTARIES ON VIOLENCE : We Live in Comfortable Suburbia and Now We, Too, Are Afraid : Crime has invaded our lives. What has changed? Could it be we’ve altered our lifestyles and the way we raise our kids?

A young San Clemente man, only a boy really, died recently, years before he reasonably should have. Steve Woods was 17 years old, and he had been in critical condition for almost a month after the metal portion of a paint roller had been impaled in his head while he was riding by a group of youths--said to be gang members--as he was leaving a beach area.

Some people maintained that not as much would have been made of this death if the victim had not been white, and they may be correct. Gang behavior and sudden violent death are associated with things that go on in the black, the Latino, and, increasingly, the Asian communities.

Such behavior has become so routine in some parts of the county that no one attends to it unless there is a particularly bizarre angle.

White residents in San Clemente and the other upscale Orange County communities often moved to these places to escape violence, to find a peaceful haven in which to raise success-bound, law-abiding children.

Drive-by shootings, kids armed to the teeth in school classrooms and an abundant supply of drugs everywhere are the sorts of things from which they expected to escape.

Those who dwell in what they once believed were islands of tranquillity now find themselves ominously menaced by marauding groups of youngsters seemingly out of control, or, at least, beyond the control of law-abiding adults.

Nor have the police with their anti-gang task forces and their endlessly innovative programs been notably successful in stemming the rise and the spread of vicious gang activity into places where it rarely had been seen before.

What has gone wrong? What happened to sunder the dream of peaceful suburban paradise?

Gangs, it has to be appreciated, always serve a purpose for those who belong to them. Membership can confer prestige and power, or it may simply provide a means to avoid being beaten up.

The distinctive gang name offers a special kind of identity, not unlike that conferred on those of us who belong to the Elks, the Rotary Club, the Ku Klux Klan or the American Civil Liberties Union.

People are afraid of you when you belong to a powerful gang, which is a considerable improvement on being ignored.

Besides, there is friendship and camaraderie and, equally important, the opportunity to get out from under the demanding supervision of adults--parents, relatives, teachers, ministers--those people who want a kid to behave in ways that are too difficult, too unrewarding, too boring--just no fun at all.

This, of course, has always been true of gangs, both in the United States and abroad (remember the English “Teddy Boys” and the Australian “bodgies” (boys) and “widgies” (girls)?

What has changed now, and pushed gang behavior into places where it had not previously existed, are some fundamental alterations in how we live our lives and raise our kids.

These changes have made gang activity more appealing and less plagued by the powerful supervision that adults and the community once exercised over young people.

Some of the changes are beyond the control of most of us. Life prospects for young people who hew the line and keep their minds on their studies have grown dimmer than in any recent time.

Either because they want to or because they need to, suburban mothers have moved out of the home into the work arena. This leaves their children largely unattended and, as importantly, leaves the neighborhood unwatched by a cadre of housewives who would report to parents any waywardness among their children.

Car ownership is far more plentiful among young people in the suburbs than it ever has been, and automobiles always have represented freedom from adult supervision and the opportunity for mischief and more criminally destructive enterprises.

Then there is the astonishing precocity of young people, doing things, such as sexual shenanigans, that were barely known, much less practiced, by those of us in the older generation until we were beyond our teens.

Kids swear, fornicate, race cars, carry weapons, try drugs, drink liquor and flaunt conformity much earlier than ever before.

To do otherwise is to be out of it, to be a nerd, or to belong to some other colorful category of contemporary juvenile jargon.

Not all kids do these things at an early age, or ever, of course, but enough do to make those living in what once were cozy suburban retreats very uncomfortable.

All the honesty, this openness of our times, however admirable on some grounds, exacts a price that is manifest in gang behavior. Depicted violence is gorier, more extravagant, more coldblooded. Kids become numb to the emotional impact that death carries to people sensitive and empathetic to human hurt.

What can be done?

Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize journalist, a generation ago studied gangs in New York City and thought he knew the answer: “We have gangs not because we do not know how to prevent them but because we do not have enough interest or energy to do the things we already know will bring an end to delinquency. We do not lack knowledge. We lack will.”

Would that it were so.