|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Juvenile Crime: An Overview
| Article
# : |
16960 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
3,256 Words |
| Author
: |
Karl Zinsmeister
Karl Zinsmeister is a an Ithaca, New York, writer and adjunct
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is currently
at work on a book about the state of American families for
HarperCollins publishers. |
One of the deepest human impulses is the desire to shelter and protect the young from predation. We know that physical safety and psychological security during childhood are essential to the development of healthy personalities. Frights and hurts experienced early on can damage in ways that are very hard to heal. And when criminal habits take root in children themselves, they can be difficult to stamp out. While the subject of crime is a disturbing one under any circumstances, the involvement of children in violence and lawlessness is, for these reasons, particularly unnerving.
The first worry about crime touching children is over innocent victimization. Particularly - although not exclusively - in our inner cities, it is shocking how far we have strayed from the notion of childhood as a protected interval. Dr. Howard Spivak, deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, points out that these days "when you go into a Boston high school and ask how many kids know of someone who has died from homicide, nearly all the hands go up on the room." The same phenomenon exists in most other major city public school systems. For a large fraction of today's youth, crime and violence ranging right up to the level of life-taking is now a fact of life.
A study completed recently by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore helps quantify with some grim precision the extent of childhood trauma taking place in our inner cities today. A sample of 167 teenagers who visited an inner-city clinic for routine medical care were surveyed as to their exposure to various incidents of violence. The results: A stunning 24 percent had witnessed a murder and 72 percent knew someone who had been shot. These teenagers had themselves been victims of some type of violence an average of one-and-one-half times each, had witnessed and average of more than five criminal episodes each, and knew nearly twelve persons who had been crime victims. Twenty-three percent of them had had their own lives threatened; and 9 percent had been raped. The doctors collection the information point out that because of the nature of their clinic population, nearly 80 percent of the respondents were females. Among a sample of adolescent males, it is likely that the levels of exposure to crime and violence would be even higher.
The second aspect of the childhood-crime link that worries observers concerns children as perpetrators rather than victims of crime. The Central Park "wilding" incident of 1989 was merely the most glaring in a disturbingly long spate of brutalities committed by youngsters in recent
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
