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A Generation at Risk: What Can be Done?
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19901 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1992 |
2,454 Words |
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Thomas L. Jipping
Thomas L. Jipping is director of the Free Congress
Foundation's Center for Law and Democracy. |
Coming to grips with the homicide plague among America's youth is daunting indeed. Stories of dead teenagers are filling America's newspapers.
Just a year ago, the over of U.S. News and World Report decried the "epidemic of teenage murder" that claims more young men every 100 hours than were killed during the Persian Gulf War. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, teenagers are victims of violent crime at a rate three times that of adults. During the 1980s, arrests of minors for murder jumped by more than 20 percent.
The picture is even more bleak in the black community. Firearm homicides by young black men more than doubled during the 1980s. Columnist Don Feder states that "statistically, a young black man is 10 times more likely to commit a homicide than a young white" man, while a National Center for Health Statistics study found that young blacks are five times as likely as whites to be homicide victims.
As my father used to say, liars figure and figures lie. Is there really a "homicide plague" among America's youth or a new "epidemic of teenage murder"? Ira Schwartz argues in his book (In) Justice for Juveniles that "we are not in the midst of a juvenile crime wave" and that "minority youth, particularly black youth, do not account for a substantially disproportionate amount of serious juvenile crime". Indeed, it remains true that the large majority of black youth are not out killing for Reeboks, but are going to school and church, working, and just trying to grow up.
What we do know is that the numbers themselves really cannot tell the whole story. This generation of America's youth is "at risk," to use the currently fashionable buzzphrase, and we all know it. Whether it is suicide, drugs, sexual promiscuity and abortion, or rebellion, many indicators even outside of the homicide statistics establish this loud and clear. And simply telling the grim tale alone permits copping out by wringing hands at the relative size of the problem. Listing stats is the easy part, while going beyond to address the cause and cure is the real job here.
In a society of individuals who do not seem to believe in much anymore, who want license rather than ordered liberty, and rights rather than responsibility, people often refuse to either face the obvious or address the important. As such, most attempts to get on with the task of examining cause and cure are left stagnantly tinkering with symptoms and fail entirely to
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