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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Culture War Against Kids |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Males, AlterNet
(No verified email address) |
23 May 2001
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This story is timely, with the ongoing controversy about whether to it is a good idea to spend $62,000 on putting another cop in Urbana schools. Besides the questionable educational value of the intimidating message being sent by the presence of armed officers in the schools, it is foolish for to think that this is a responsible use of taxpayer’s money. ML Thanks to Sam Smith for calling my attention to this article on his website: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm |
The whole article is worth a read by following the link at the end.
The excerpt below begins by questioning the basis for the hysteria and fear connected with fears of, and about, young people.
What\'s the evidence for these frightening claims? Little more than anecdote and assertion. In rising panic, culture warriors left to right indict explicit video games, television, gangsta rap music, R-rated movies, Internet images, and \"toxic culture\" for causing teenage violent crime, drug abuse, sex, and unhealthy behavior. From 1990 to 2000, rap sales soared 70 percent, four million teen and pre-teen boys took up violent video games (as 1992\'s Nintendo Mortal Kombat evolved to 1994\'s bloody Sega version and sequels), and youth patronage of movie videos and Net sites exploded.
As \"toxic culture\" dysfluences spread, did Lord of the Flies ensue? To the contrary. Perhaps no period in history has witnessed such rapid improvements in adolescent conduct. From 1990 through 1999, teenage violence and other malaise plunged: homicide rates (down 62 percent), rape (down 27 percent), violent crime (down 22 percent), school violence (down 20 percent), property offenses (down 33 percent), births (down 17 percent), abortions (down 15 percent), sexually transmitted diseases (down 50 percent), violent deaths (down 20 percent), suicide (down 16 percent), and drunken driving fatalities (down 35 percent).
Unhealthy youth indexes have fallen to three-decade lows while good ones -- school graduation, college enrollment, community volunteerism -- are up. Pointedly, the only teenage misbehaviors to increase since 1992, smoking (monthly rates up 13 percent) and drug abuse (overdose deaths up 11 percent, but still low), are the two most subjected to the \"culture war\'s\" zero-tolerance interventions. Overall, 80 percent to 90 percent of today\'s supposedly \"depressed, lonely, alienated, confused\" younger generation consistently tell surveyors they\'re happy, self-confident, and like their parents.
These aren\'t just recent trends; teens as a generation have improving for several decades. Teenage girls, far from being messed up as Kilbourne and Pipher insist, are far safer today from most major risks (violent death, sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy, homicide arrest, suicide-related deaths, traffic deaths, fatal accidents, drug abuse, heavy drinking, smoking, school dropout, etc.) than girls of 20-30 years ago. Teenage binge drinking has dropped 25 percent since the 1970s, smoking declined 20 percent to 50 percent depending on the measure, and drunken driving deaths are down 40 percent -- especially among girls. California, which keeps more precise statistics by race and type of death than other states, records phenomenal declines in teenage suicide, drug abuse, felony crime, and other serious problems over the last 25 years.
The few bad youth trends were related to socioeconomic disadvantage, not culture. The temporary increase in homicide and other violent crime in the late 1980s was not a general youth trend; it was confined to the poorest young men involved in gang conflicts. In 2000, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found that law enforcement \"policy changes\" rather than a real violent crime increase might have sparked more arrests. Contrary to Garbarino and others, murder and other violence by youth is not spreading but becoming more concentrated. Today, America\'s poorest youths are 40 times more likely to die by homicide and gunfire than the wealthiest, and five-sixths of California\'s teenage gun deaths occur in just one-tenth of its populated zipcodes. While the mega-threats clarioned by the culture war should have killed every American teenager five times over by now, teens today actually display the lowest violent death rate in 50 years!
NONE of culture warriors\' dire claims of epidemics of depressed, alienated, self-destructive, murderous youth are even remotely verifiable -- and younger, pre-teen kids are safer still. No matter. Culture critics aren\'t concerned with reality, but with sin: blood-spewing video games, bikini-team beer ads, and other repulsive cultural manifestations must be causing damage. Culture warriors\' phoniness is revealed by their indifference when real-life killers cite unexpected media triggers: the stalker who shotgunned actress Rebecca Schaeffer worshipped the anthemic Irish band U2, Oklahoma\'s 15 year-old school shooter idolized the PG movie \"Patton,\" and numerous mass-killers quote the Bible.
The culture war is not just phony, but reactionary. It commodifies powerless groups to project a fearsome image of constantly escalating menace, suppresses discussion of real social inequalities, and promotes repressive government solutions. Youth are the most convenient population upon which to project damage, keeping the debate safely away from questioning adult values and pleasures that form the real influences on youths. In short, the culture war is not about changing genuine American social ills such as high rates of child poverty, domestic violence, and family disarray, but fomenting an endless series of moral panics that obstruct social change.
Political movements to strip youth rights and institutional youth-fixers have proliferated to profit from fear, generating more scary \"studies\" proclaiming ever \"new,\" \"alarming,\" and \"rising\" youth crises that are then recycled by culture warriors as if special-interest self-promotion equaled science. The Carnegie Corporation recasts the healthiest, safest generation of young teens age 10-14 ever as a mass of \"grim statistics\" and \"tragic consequences.\" (In truth, violent fatality rates among today\'s younger teens are an astounding 48 percent lower than in the supposedly pastoral 1950s Carnegie extolled). Carnegie deplored the \"freedom, autonomy and choice\" among teens for unprecedented \"threats to their well-being.\" |
See also:
http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=10904
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