Mike A. Males. The Scapegoat Generation : America's war on adolescents. 
Monroe, Maine : Common Courage Press, 1996.

Kids are in the news lately, and the news has not been good.  Stories of teen
pregnancy, of youth violence, of smoking, drinking and drug use by kids
appear nightly in our homes.  Every news commentator seems to have an opinion
on what is making kids go bad, and how to fix it.  The villains are guns,
cigarettes, video games, television programs, rap or rock music, lack of
discipline ... or sometimes the villains are the kids themselves. 
Politicians are racing with one another to find tougher ways punish kids and
keep them away from harmful influences.  Adult America is angry and eager to
embrace any solution.

Mike Males is angry, too, that America's policy makers are ignoring the data
on youth which is there for all to see.  In The Scapegoat Generation, Males
presents a tremendous body of research which shows that the main problem that
youth experience, which leads them to crime, gangs, drug abuse, and unplanned
pregnancy, is poverty.  Poverty is the factor which leads people of all ages
to antisocial and self-destructive acts, but the number of children living in
poverty in the United States rose about 60% between 1975 and 1995, while the
number of adults over age 40 living in poverty declined.  A 1995 study of the
National Science Foundation of industrialized nations found that the United
States had the highest child poverty rate; even after welfare payments were
counted, 21.5% of our children fell below the poverty line.  And the
situation promises to become worse, as assistance to impoverished families is
cut off.

Males' data shows that, once the influence of poverty (and the child abuse
which often accompanies poverty) is accounted for, kids of today are probably
less violent and more responsible than their counterparts of the past.  He
reveals how politicians and special interest groups have ignored or misused
-- or even lied about -- statistics to support their own agendas.  The
Scapegoat Generation is packed full of its own statistics: the book includes
65 tables and figures from reliable, fully cited sources, which supplement
the statistics cited throughout the text.

Males criticizes the vicious double standards imposed on children by the
criminal justice system, which deprives minors of rights on the basis of
their status as children, but considers them "adults" when it enables them to
mete out harsher punishments.  He exposes the psychiatric community, eager to
welcome "troubled" kids into their mental hospitals when the parents'
insurance will pay the bills, but leaving the children without insurance
coverage to the juvenile justice system and its prisons.  And he condemns the
hypocrisy of adults who complain about "teenage mothers" without holding the
fathers -- mostly adult men -- responsible as well.

The book is well organized and readable, with healthy doses of outrage
between the statistics.  Since the book was published in 1996, there are a
few small comments that are already out-of-date, but overall the information
remains current and pertinent.  There is a bit of repetition of facts, as if
the author did not want a certain point to be missed.  One could argue that
Males' research was one-sided; since his research was intended to dispute
widely-held beliefs, it is not surprising that he chose the statistics that
would do so most effectively.  However, his citations are largely of
government documents and reports of research agencies, so there is little
question of their validity.

The paperback edition costs about $18.  Get a copy if you can and read it out
loud to your parents and friends; that's what I did.  If you can afford an
extra copy, donate it to your school or public library. The Scapegoat
Generation contains information worth sharing.