YOUTH VIOLENCE: ITS MEANINGS TO SOCIETY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Adolescent Psychiatry, 2003 by Huffine, Charles W

POSITION STATEMENT OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY PASSED BY THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES, MARCH 22, 2001

Youth violence is on our minds. We are worried, despite evidence that the incidence of youth violence has actually been decreasing steadily since the mid-199Os. Recent highly publicized school shootings; reports of gang violence; young people obsessed with violent video games, movies, and song lyrics; and media prone to publicize all incidents of violence no matter how tragic or trivial have left us with a sense of crisis and eminent danger. Individual incidents of violence involving youth are compelling, because they bring forth all our fears for our children. They mobilize our instincts to do whatever is necessary to protect them from a seemingly hostile world. Media attention to violence by youth has created a grossly distorted but socially important focus on this problem. As tragic as the school shootings are, the numbers of deaths is small to the point of statistical insignificance. But the social significance is great. seeing the halls of learning turned into shooting galleries has understandably galvanized the American public's attention. The meanings go beyond the issues of school safety. These incidents have provoked a great deal of soul searching and anguishing about the health of our society. Such a public reaction can, and should, prompt a more sober look at certain social phenomena that surround such incidents as school shootings. They should raise questions about how such unhappy children can be unrecognized by their families, schools, and communities until tragedy happens.

Uninformed reactions, born of frustration and a lack of understanding of adolescence, may have the effect of leading to policies that become part of the problem. In this atmosphere of fear, the U.S. Congress and many state legislatures have passed laws designed to protect our communities from youth who are out of control. A policy of zero tolerance has been a key feature of many of these laws. Legislative action in the area of juvenile justice has emphasized more harsh punishments. Some new laws aim to strip younger adolescents of their historical rights to protection in juvenile courts by allowing prosecutors to remand them to adult courts without hearings and providing them with adult punishments. Such reactive laws satisfy some in our society who wish to throw all troubled youth into a punitive system that will contain them forever. These new laws are vulnerable to being selectively practiced with youth of color, with the poor and the unattractive. In contrast to the barrage of harsh punitive measures, few resources have been allocated to understanding the phenomena of youth violence or to understanding etiology or changes in prevalence, the meanings of violence to the youth involved, or the appropriate societal response when tragic incidents occur.

The American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP) is an organization devoted to the study of adolescents and their difficulties. ASAP advocates for conditions that allow healthy adolescent development and promulgates best practices in the treatment of mental disorders in adolescents. ASAP has long been a leader in understanding the interplay between individual psychological issues and their manifestation in a social context. This has led ASAP to study and define appropriate policies in areas related to youth violence since its founding in 1967. In concert with many other groups concerned with the welfare of children and youth, ASAP offers the following observations on the current phenomenon of youth violence and our societal response to it. We offer our thoughts in the hope that they will contribute to a wise and effective response to serving our youth and our communities.

YOUTH VIOLENCE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND PREVALENCE AT THE MILLENNIUM

It has been said that the American society has always been a violent one. Historians trace a tradition of civil strife born of a strong value on independence, suspicion of the state and the value of personal honor. These traits in our forefathers led to the founding of our country through violent revolution. These traditions were nurtured by white males in the social order of the old South. They were exported to the West with the march of settlers in the 19th century and exploded in the American Civil War (Butterfield, 1995). The institution of slavery, endemic to American society from the beginning, has been called as brutal and violent an institution as has existed in the history of man. Traditions of proud, independent men claiming and defending their territory, or fighting the social order to redress grievances, are part of our 20th and 21st century life. Labor organizers warred with company agents, Southern men lynched blacks for presumed breaches of honor and the Black Panthers horrified us all by waving guns and threatening retribution. America is the great hope for the dispossessed around the world. Many immigrate to our country and contribute much to American society. But they also bring the residua of their trauma from civil strife in their home countries. Some bring with them the effects of severe psychological trauma and an urge for retribution. Sometimes their continuing conflicts with their countrymen explode on our streets and become the content of a newspaper story on violence. Gangs of home grown socially disadvantaged youth roam the streets of poor neighborhoods and engage in fratricidal warfare; the poor killing the poor. But in the process, such youth menace us all with their posturing. They play out a social drama whose meanings transcend the sad issues of who "disses" who in the "hood." Most of us can insulate ourselves from this frightening drama. We don't want to know the history or have to acknowledge that it is there now, in front of our faces. When forced to deal with the ugliness of violence and its social context, we see it as aberrant and monstrous. We seek to isolate such terrifying drama because it scares us.