There is no Epidemic of Teen Violence

by Randolph T. Holhut

The media does much to reinforce this perception by giving major play to any criminal activity by youths, even though the statistics do not back it up. An 1994 Gallup Poll found that the average American adult believed that youths commit 43 percent of all the violent crimes in the U.S. The true figure is only 13 percent.

For example, some might think there's an epidemic of violence in our nation's schools after the saturation coverage given to the five school shootings that occurred in 1997 and 1998, as well as the recent massacre in Littleton, Colo.

But consider this. There are 23 million teenagers enrolled in 20,000 school nationwide. Murder in high school is extremely rare. For most teens, schools are the safest place they'll be in each day.

There's more danger for teens waiting for them when they go home. All of 1998's school massacres combined killed fewer kids and adults than two average days of domestic violence. According to the National Child Abuse Coalition, about two dozen kids are murdered at school each year while 2,000 are murdered and 475,000 are injured in domestic assaults.

Teenagers are not naturally violent. If age alone was an indicator of violent behavior, one would see a similar epidemic of teen violence in other countries around the world. There isn't. Violence in the media isn't the sole cause, nor is drug use, nor is gun ownership. There is one factor that is consistent, and is rarely discussed: poverty.

The United States has the most extreme disparities in income between rich and poor of any nation in the industrialized world and has the highest rate of youth poverty. Of the over 40 million Americans that live below the federal poverty line, half of them are children and sixty percent are non-white.

Mike Males, a social ecology graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, has cut through some of the myths associated with teen violence in his books, "The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents," and "Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation," both published by Common Courage Press. The more that the corporate media distorts its portrayals of teens in America, the more important Males' work has become.

"There is no such thing as 'youth violence,' any more than there is 'black violence' or 'Italian violence,'" Males wrote a couple of years ago. "The recent rise in violent crime is so clearly founded on social conditions, not age-group demographics, that experts and officials have had to strain mightily to ignore or downplay them."

Males maintains there's no epidemic of "kids killing kids." Seventy percent of murder victims under age 18 were killed by adults and not other youths, and 91 percent of adult homicides were committed by adults. Parents are six times more likely to murder their teenage children than the other way around.

The familiar conservative villain for teen violence is media violence. But that excuse doesn't wash. Males has found that the media in other Western nations is just as violent as America's. Japan has extremely violent media, much more so than the U.S., but that nation's nine million teens accounted for just 35 murders in 1992.

The familiar liberal villain is gun proliferation. But if guns and blood-curdling media were the main reasons for teen violence, there should be an epidemic of murder among affluent white families. There isn't.

According to Males, white households are twice as likely to have guns in the house and one-third more likely to subscribe to the gorier cable tv channels than non-white households (those figures are from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S.). Yet in California, a state whose residents buy about 400,000 handguns a year, non-whites account for nearly nine of every of ten teen homicides and about 80 percent of all teen arrests for violent crime.

This leaves the poverty factor, which Males makes a convincing case for. The biggest difference between the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world is the number of youths, particularly non-whites, that live in poverty.

"While most impoverished people are not violent, there is no question among criminologists that the stresses of poverty are associated with much higher violent crime levels among all races and ages," writes Males. He points out that murder rates during the Great Depression were extremely high, peaking in 1933 at 9.7 murders per 100,000 (by comparison, the 1993 rate for 9.5 per 100,000).

Males states that if one divides the number of violent crimes by the number of people living in poverty, the so-called epidemic of teen violence disappears. Adjusted for poverty, the crime rate for 13-19-year-olds is almost the same as people in their 40s, and is lower than those in their 20s and 30s, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The same applies for the higher rate of violent crime committed by non-whites. If one adjusts the racial crime rate for the numbers of people living in poverty, non-whites have a crime rate similar to that of whites at every age level.

It would stand to reason that if poverty were reduced, the rate of violent crime would also be reduced. But that option is deemed unworkable and too expensive by conservatives. Better to hire more police, build more prisons and impose longer prison sentences at younger ages. Unfortunately, getting tough doesn't work. States such as California, Texas and Oklahoma have tried all these remedies and all three states have seen record increases in violent crime.

Drugs, easy access to guns and a violent popular culture are all contributing factors to why this nation is one of the most violent on earth. This cannot be denied. But it's politically easier to scapegoat teens than to do something about the alarming number of American kids that are growing up in poverty.