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Juvenile Crime: An Overview
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16960 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1990 |
3,256 Words |
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Karl Zinsmeister
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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 years. In Washington, D.C., a group of youths robbed, gang raped, and murdered a ninety-nine-pound middle-aged mother while singing and joking. In Brooklyn, three teenagers methodically set fire to a homeless couple in 1987. When rubbing alcohol wouldn't ignite the pair, the youths went to a local service station for gasoline, which worked.
And at strata below the headline-grabbing level, the damage done by juvenile criminals is even more pernicious. For instance, more than three million street crimes (assault, rape, robbery, or theft) are initiated inside schools or on school grounds yearly by young victimizers. The results of the first National Adolescent Student Health Survey, which queried eleven thousand eighth-and tenth-grade of 1987, indicate that 169,000 boys carried handguns to school daily that year. An additional 338,000 students packed pistols at least once in the course of
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