-by Susan Wishnetsky
Males, Mike A. "Kids and Guns" : How Politicians, Experts, and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth. Monroe, Maine : Common Courage Press, [2001].
Movie makers know how to keep an audience riveted. Without a villain or a threat of disaster, there's no story. Let the audience know who or what the evil entity is, before the intended victims know. If the impending doom appears in a harmless guise, someone or something the victims see every day, it's all the more exciting.
Like film makers, news reporters and politicians also have stories to sell, stories that have to be scary and entertaining. And they've got to keep their audience for longer than two hours; they need that fever pitch of excitement to keep the audience coming back for days or weeks or months (or, in the case of politicians, until election day). But since they are selling their stories as truth, not fiction, they must either make sure that their facts are undeniable or they must choose a villain they think is incapable of fighting back. Without the right to vote and with few means to defend themselves as a group, youth have been chosen to play the role of the perfect villain.
This scapegoating of youth is the topic at the heart of "Kids and
Guns,"
90 pages of valuable facts, examples, and references which set the record
straight on youth crime. Author Mike Males points out that there is less
justification for speaking of "tendencies" or "trends" of violence among
youth than there would be to call "middle-agers" or "senior citizens" especially
violent. Kids commit fewer crimes, violent and otherwise, than almost any
group one can name! Yet no other group is so frequently represented in
the media by their few worst-behaving members (although U.S. Postal workers
might have some understanding of the scapegoating process). Males explains
the press tactics:
"While it's not surprising that the press focuses on hyping rare crimes by youths, the problem is that reporters are not content to portray them factually as extremely uncommon, isolated events. Instead, reporters artificially aggrandize their stories by attaching larger significance to them. An isolated incident is linked with another isolated incident months and thousands of miles away to manufacture the image of "an alarming new trend" that is "sweeping the young" .... The result is that each rare event now becomes super-newsworthy by means of representing it as commonplace-a pattern, a trend, an "epidemic". This unethical media tactic is reserved for the purpose of demonizing powerless, unpopular groups .... the media do not link more common mass shootings by middle-agers into a "spate" [of crime] sweeping midlifers; older adults are a powerful group and therefore not subject to demonization."
Politicians benefit from and use this method as well. Males cites the
portrayals of youth by former Californial Governor Pete Wilson and other
backers of California's recent ballot proposal, Proposition 21, the "Gang
Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act":
Wilson and Prop 21's backers faced a clear dilemma: they were pushing a lock'em-up initiative state fiscal analysts estimated would [cost] ... "at least hundreds of millions of dollars annually" .... Yet, most inconveniently, youth violence was way down, as it has been throughout the 1990s .... youth homicide fell by 42% in 1999 to 77% below its 1990 level. Violent crimes by youths dropped 6% in 1999 and stood at 25% lower than the early '90s. Juvenile crime declines, which include a 47% drop in felony arrest rates over the last 25 years, were far larger than occurred among adults.Wilson and initiative backers didn't mention that, of course. Instead, he warned of a "31% increase" in serious violent crime" by juveniles in southern Orange County from 1997 to 1998. The juvenile crime leap he cited occurred. It amounted to a whopping 30 more arrests in the south county's ... 600,000 people-97 youths arrested for violent offenses in 1997, 127 in 1998. For perspective, these same cities reported 2,300 cases of domestic violence, 1,600 involving weapons, in 1998.
But Governor Wilson's scare tactics worked-Proposition 21 passed with
69% of the vote in Orange County and 62% statewide. Males describes a focus
group of ordinary citizens of Orange County, who believed that people under
18 were responsible for most crimes:
I asked the two dozen average countians who they pictured as the typical violent criminal lurking to prey on innocent folks .... The citizenry, polite before, erupted. "A 12-year-old gang member who has no conscience about life and death," a Costa Mesa clerk spat. "A high-schooler or gang member-no value on human life," shrilled a Santa Ana mother. An African-American grandmother snapped that gangs of "eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds are killing people" in here Westminster neighborhood .... I asked what proportion of the county's violent crimes the focus group believed was committed by youths-which I specified as "persons under 18 years old". A junior college student guessed 40%. "At least 80%," trumped a dapper Anaheim Hills whitehair. On average, the group believed kids committed two-thirds of the county's murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.(Truth break: county law enforcement records show youths account for 14% of the county's violent crime arrests and probably less than 10% of its total violent offenses. In the last two decades, a total of one 12-year-old, one 11-year-old, and zero children younger than 11 were arrested for homicide-and none during the 1990s).
Whoa, I thought, these focus-group folks must have taken heavy casualties from brutal gangbangers to harbor such fury. Turned out NONE of them had been victimized personally by a violent juvenile or knew anyone who had been .... So, if none had been brutalized by pistol packing cherubs, where did these good citizens get their paralyzing fear of youth crime? From newspapers, broadcast news, and police, the group agreed ...
Males research is meticulous. Some of his arguments, especially those including tables and figures, are difficult to follow with a casual reading, and require close attention and rereading (at least for me). But even a quick skim yields a wealth of useful information.
The greatest feature of "Kids and Guns" is that it is free! Common Courage Press, the publisher of Males' earlier books, has made this one available in pdf format on its web site at <www.commoncouragepress.com>. All you need is a computer with web access and Acrobat software (which can be downloaded for free by following a link on the site). If you don't have these things, drop me a note at the e-mail address or P.O. Box below; maybe I can send you a disk or printout. It's well worth reading.
ASFAR
P.O. Box 11358
Chicago, IL 60611-0058