 In these days when school
shootings and hazing incidents appear with disturbing frequency in the
headlines, it is easy to conclude that our society is suffering from an
epidemic of teen violence. School districts across the United States have responded with
extreme no-tolerance policies leading to the expulsion of students for the
smallest of infractions. But are these extreme measures backed up by the facts?
Have our schools truly become less safe in recent years? Is teen violence
really a growing problem or is all of the hysteria merely a product of the media hungry for sensational headlines?
Starting with the tragedy at Columbine High School
in April of 1999, all the way up to a more recent violent outburst at Virginia Tech University,
threats to the safety of our institutions of learning seem to be a new
frightening trend.
Lost behind the 24-hour news coverage of the bloodiest, most
sensational incidents however, there are a few sobering facts to be
considered. First of all, violence in our schools is certainly not a new phenomenon
limited to the past decade.
In 1987, 12 year-old Missouri honor student, Nathan Ferris
brought a pistol to school and ended his own life and the life of another
student over a teasing incident. In 1979, San
Diego teenager, Brenda Spencer inexplicably killed 2
people and injured 11 (including 8 children) by firing into an elementary
school across the street from her home.
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went
on a shooting spree from the University
of Texas tower for 96
minutes, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more. On May 18, 1927, Michigan resident,
Andrew Kehoe dynamited his local school building killing 45 people, mostly
children, because taxes for the new school had led to the foreclosure of his
farm...
So, the bad news isn’t really that our schools have become more dangerous
in the past 10 years; the truly bad news is that there has been appalling acts of
violence in our schools going back as far as records have been kept.
The good news, on the other hand,
is that these sorts of incidents are exceptionally rare and actually declining
in frequency in recent years. The National School Safety Center reports a 70%
decline in school homicides between 1993 and 2005; the National Center of Vital
Statistics reports that a child is 500 times more likely to die in an accident
than in a school related shooting; and the National Center for Educational
Statistics reports that students are at much less risk of facing serious
violent crime on school grounds than outside of school.
Investigative reporter,
Bill Dedman of MSNBC, reported that even including gang related
violence, there are only 12 to 20 homicides a year in 100,000 schools
throughout the United States,
and the rate of assault and other violence in schools has fallen by almost 50%
in the past decade. In other words, when we look past the handful of headline
grabbing reports, our schools are remarkably safe and growing safer.
What about teen violence outside
of a school setting? Once again, the news reports are disturbing and chilling. In 2006 five juveniles were arrested in Orlando,
Florida on second degree murder
charges for beating a homeless man to death. The National Coalition for the
Homeless reports that there were 122 attacks and 20 murders against the
homeless in 2006, the majority of which were committed by teens. Not only are
these attacks increasing in frequency, they are also being videotaped and
posted on the Internet by remorseless young thugs.
The easy access to guns that many
teens have in the United
States continues to add to the tragic
headlines as well. In Youngstown,
Ohio, a round of verbal sparring
on MySpace led to a fatal drive-by shooting. Teenage gang members shot a
young woman in the back during a memorial for another teen who had been shot in
the head outside a bar earlier that same week in Philadelphia. A teenage driver
unleashed a hail of bullets at a Kansas
City police officer during a routine traffic stop a few weeks after that.
According to the Coalition Against Gun Violence, ten children die every day in
the United States
from gunshot wounds, and three of those deaths are suicides. From 1995 to 1999,
two children on average were murdered each day by another child using a handgun.
Thankfully, the reports that lead
off the evening news don’t tell the whole story. The statistics say that
contrary to popular opinion, the overall youth crime situation is improving.
According to the Criminal Justice Statistics Center in the California
attorney general’s office, criminal arrests for violent crimes by juveniles in Los Angeles have fallen
sharply in the past 30 years. Murder arrests are down 55%; rape arrests are
down 81%; robbery arrests are down 21%; and assault arrests are down 44%.
Other California cities show a
similar downward trend in arrests of children for violent crimes in spite of
record increases in population growth. According to the Bureau of Justice
statistics, the percentage of juvenile victims of violent crime across the country
has been cut in half in the past 3 decades.
Much of the alarm raised concerning teenage
violence is based upon public perception rather than cold hard facts. A 1994 Gallup poll found that
American adults believed that 43% of all violent crimes were committed by
juveniles, when in fact only 13% are committed by people under the age of 18.
Critics suggest that there is a deliberate effort among police, government
officials and the news media to overstate the “epidemic of teen violence” in
order to boost ratings, promote the hiring of additional police officers and
justify the erosion of our basic civil rights.
In August 2006, for example, at
a Washington D.C. gathering of police and city government officials calling for
increased federal funds for law enforcement, police chief Dean Esserman of
Providence, Rhode Island expressed concern over a spike in armed robberies in
his city by saying "We are turning the country over to our young people,
and they are killing each other. Violence has become gratuitous. Where is the
moral outrage?" But a review of crime statistics on his department’s web
site for robbery and other violent crimes actually showed juvenile arrests
falling between 2003 and 2005 compared to the previous three years.
Not all news providers are in agreement
concerning the statistics on juvenile crime. Conservative “tough on crime”
commentaries in particular, seem to cite numbers indicating an “explosion” in
teen violence in recent years. But overall, the numbers from a wide variety of
sources seem to suggest a trend toward the lessening of violence among the youth of
today. This is not to suggest however that there is no reason for concern.
The
U.S. Department of Justice reports an 8% increase in marijuana use in the past 12
years among high school seniors, a trend which could foretell greater drug
addiction problems in the years ahead. Suicide is the third leading cause of
death among teenagers. Almost 5% of high school students say that they have
carried a gun within the past month and 25% of teenagers say that they have
easy access to firearms at home. The Associated Press warns that the number of
sex offenses committed by juveniles appears to be on the increase and the
Canadian Centre for Justice Studies reports a jump in violent incidents
committed by “swarms” of teens.
All in all however, there doesn’t seem to be
convincing evidence that the young people of today are any more violent than
the youth of a generation ago. If there is any change at all, it seems to be in
the direction of a decrease in juvenile crime and an increased level of safety
in our schools.
Certainly this is no reason to decrease our vigilance or to cut
back on positive school and community programs aimed at teens, but it is a
definite sign that draconian measures are certainly not needed or warranted.
It’s time to return sanity to our schools. Practices such as arrests,
suspensions and expulsions resulting from an innocent mistake, no-tolerance
guidelines and overzealous school officials need to end.
Today’s headlines are
no excuse to dismiss the maturity and potential of many of our young people and
certainly no excuse for throwing common sense out the window altogether.
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