ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Adolescent Psychiatry, 2003 by Kalogerakis, Michael G

There is no doubt that, for an adolescent psychiatrist in our nation, receiving the Schonfeld Award is the greatest honor that can be bestowed by one's colleagues, and I deeply appreciate having been chosen as the award recipient for this year. The significance of the honor is all the more impressive-and humbling-when one looks at the roster of previous award recipients: It is by any standard a veritable pantheon of professionals who have dedicated themselves to working with troubled adolescents during lengthy and distinguished careers.

Being so honored is all the more satisfying when the theme of the Annual Meeting is adolescent violence, a subject that has occupied me throughout my professional life. In thinking about what I might wish to address on this occasion, I opted for a historical approach rather than the usual clinical paper, because we have reached a point in the evolution of the problem at which a review of developments, even if brief, can provide a needed perspective from which to view the whole. I draw upon more than 15 years of experience as chief of service of an inpatient adolescent ward in a major municipal hospital, 4 years as a public health official in a state office of mental health, and more than 35 years as a private practitioner treating adolescents and adults, chiefly as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.

As historians sit down to chronicle the 20th century, the advances in science and technology and the maturation of political and social institutions will figure prominently among the many accomplishments that have defined the past 100 years. Sharing the spotlight with these incredible and unparalleled examples of human progress, however, is the long shadow cast by the violence that also characterized the century. The great wars, tribal enmity, pogroms, and political assassinations, though not new to human history, have permeated the century beyond all comprehension, detracting from the progress and affecting its final kaleidoscopic form. The passage of time may yet prove that the scientific achievements will have the more lasting impact, of course. But the violence to which our world has been subjected has cut so deeply into the psyche, taken such a toll on human life, and elevated hate and its expression to such unprecedented levels as to raise fundamental questions about our very nature and the ability of our species to survive.

Broad forces-economic, political and social-are generally credited with having spawned these major upheavals of our times. Yet, too often have we seen these forces exploited by the actions of a single individual, who, being in a position of power at a critical point in time, sought to impose a perverse, belligerent, and grandiose agenda on the people of that nation and, often, of neighboring countries. As social scientists and clinicians we have struggled to understand this inevitably self-defeating and thoroughly malignant warping of the human mind, whether we are looking at a political figure, a criminal, or, for our purposes today, a troubled youth.

We start with the recognition that every violent person was at one point an innocent child who, invariably, by the time he reached adolescence, was well on his way to a misanthropic relationship to the world. We are left to make sense of the pathological ontogeny that eventuates in the behavior we call violence. It has been said that violence has its roots in childhood, takes its form in adolescence, and finds its ultimate expression in adulthood. What have we learned about this trajectory?

Although violence has always been part of the human landscape, every American is by now painfully aware that we have been through a serious epidemic of adolescent violence in our country, deeply scarring families, schools, and communities. There is reason to believe that it is not quite over. However that may be, the decade from 1983 to 1993 was marked by the most serious outbreak of teenage violence in the nation's history. In turning our attention to this phenomenon, I shall for convenience divide our recent history into three periods: a preepidemic, an epidemic, and a post-epidemic era. I should like to review with you, then, the historical unfolding of the problem of adolescent violence, what factors may account for the course it has taken, what research has revealed, and society's current efforts to deal with it.

THE PRE-EPIDEMIC ERA

It has been more than 40 years since H. Rap Brown portrayed the violence in our country in words that have become legendary-"As American as cherry pie" (1967). He made it clear that he saw our nation as differing from other nations on this score. Indeed, the data give considerable support to his thesis, as Table 1, which compares statistics on homicide by adolescents in industrialized countries throughout the world, shows.

More recent data comparing adolescent violence in England and Wales, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy with that in the United States showed prevalence rates that were 30% lower in the European nations. The samples involved 16- to 17-year-olds in 1992 or 1993 providing self-reports of serious violence (Junger-Tas, Terlouw, and Klein, 1994).