Why Demonize a Healthy Teen Culture?

Two weeks after the school massacre in Littleton, Colo., anguished parents in a California suburb where murder is also rare found such tragedy “can happen here.” A 39-year-old man drove his Cadillac into a crowded preschool playground in Costa Mesa, killing a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old, leaving two small children in critical condition and injuring two more toddlers and an adult aide. His motive seemed to be incomprehensible rage: The driver was quoted by police as remorselessly seeking to execute “innocent children” because of a former girlfriend’s rejection.

But while the shootings in Littleton and schools around the nation have been cited as a horrific sign of America’s social breakdown, Costa Mesa’s tragedy was not used as a metaphor for apocalyptic social collapse by political leaders and scholarly authorities.

Why? Because, like other adults who commit mass killings, the Costa Mesa killer is viewed as an individual psychopath, representative only of his isolated rage. The commentators who magnify a teenage gunman into a poster child for “youth culture” gone terribly awry do not similarly portray a grown-up who commits atrocity as reflecting a diseased “middle-age culture.”

As another White House summit on youth and school violence starts, the reasons for the national panic over kids killing kids, versus the virtual ignoring of the far-more-common phenomenon of adults killing kids, raise sobering questions about the attitudes of authorities--and Americans, in general--toward young people. Why do occasional killings by students generate commentary demonizing a generation of young people, when the more prevalent killings by adults draw no similar fears of widespread grown-up pathology?

Here is the baffling paradox: While student shootings remain rare, rage killings by middle-aged adults, a group criminologists insist has mellowed out of its violent years, are epidemic. In the last two years in Southern California alone, seemingly solid, middle-class, midlife adults committed a dozen massacres--a bus yard of workers raked with assault-rifle barrage, an office filled with semiautomatic pistol fire, children gunned as they fled down a pastoral suburban lane--that left 40 dead, including 16 children.

Recent trends provide ample reason to view this inexplicable blood spilling by middle-aged adults of comfortable background as part of a larger, alarming reality. Drug abuse, family violence and breakup, felony arrest and imprisonment have exploded among adults age 30 to 50, the parent generation whose values are extolled by many. Defying every crime theory, felony arrests of white adults older than 30, California’s fastest-rising criminal and prisoner population, have tripled, from 31,000 in 1975 to 106,000 in 1997.

This raises a second paradox: Today’s middle-class and suburban teenagers are better behaved than kids of the past. Regardless of what dire theory of societal unraveling experts use to explain why two suburban Colorado teens went on a murderous rampage, a major fact is overlooked: The best evidence shows that rates of murder, school violence, drug abuse, criminal arrest, violent death and gun fatality among middle- and upper-class teenagers have declined over the last 15 to 30 years.

This is especially true in California. Compared with their counterparts of the 1970s, white teenagers of the late 1990s show sharply lower per-person rates of gun deaths (down 25%), suicide (down 30%), murder arrest (down 30%), criminal arrest (down 50%), drug abuse (overdose deaths down 80%) and violent fatality of all kinds (down an incredible 45% in the last decade). Nationally, surveys show 90% of today’s teens are happy and feel good about themselves; 80% get along well with their parents and other adults; more young people volunteer for charities and services than ever; and parents, religion and teachers are the biggest influences on youth.

With such statistics, it is hard to justify the widespread belief that today’s adolescents are alienated, angst-ridden and troubled. If pop culture, music, video games and Internet images affect teenagers, we should credit them for the fact that young people are behaving better. In fact, it may be that young people’s bewildering array of informal, “alternative families”--ravers, Goths, posses, ‘zine cultures, Internet forums, gay and lesbian groups, skateboarders, gay and lesbian skateboarder ‘zinesters--help insulate them from the difficulties of increasingly chaotic biological families and account for the surprising good health of youths who should be most at risk.

The shootings in Littleton and other schools are not part of a larger trend toward more student and school violence, but tragic aberrations. The political and professional theorists whose explanations for Littleton flooded the media and policy forums displayed a singular failure to get a grip. Twenty-five million teenagers attend 20,000 schools nationwide. Ten students in seven schools committed the widely-publicized shootings of the past 18 months. Teenage gunners are not representatives of all teens, even alienated, outcast ones, but are rare, extremely disturbed individuals. There is no evidence that adolescents are more troubled than adults or any more disturbed today than they ever were. As psychologist Laura Berk’s 1997 text, “Child Development,” notes, “the overall rate of severe psychological disturbance rises only slightly (by 2%) from childhood to adolescence, when it is the same as in the adult population--about 15% or 20%.”

But to say that murderous rage is rare and declining among middle-class and affluent youth does not mean its prevalence is zero. Teenagers are subject to the same environments and pressures that drive some adults to violence, and teens inhabit the same adult society whose infestation of superlethal firearms too easily converts anger into slaughter. Exaggerating rare instances of teenage rage into some kind of generation-wide craziness not only inflicts unwarranted paranoia, blanket surveillance, draconian restrictions and harmful interference with normal growing up on a generally healthy generation of young people, it also severely hampers investigation into identifying and forestalling the narrow, individual psychoses that produce rage killers of all ages.

The baseless panic about young people inflamed by so many politicians, leading psychologists, pundits and institutional scholars is more damaging to our social fabric than the isolated teenage murders they seize upon. Ignoring clear statistics and research, authorities seem to lie in wait for suburban youth killings, months and thousands of miles apart, to validate a false hypothesis of generational disease, even as they ignore more compelling evidence of deteriorating adult behavior. This subversion of health and safety goals to politically warped, crowd-pleasing nostrums about “saving our kids” endangers kids in reality and helps perpetuate America’s dismal reputation as the deadliest, most bullet-riddled, unhealthiest nation in the Western world.*