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Unit 2 Culture and Social Structures
Chapter 3
Enrichment Reading Cultural Explanations
for Teen Violence
from an article by James Gilbert
Every social crisis generates its share of easy explanations, but adolescent crime wins the contest for pat answers. Not
only is everyone an expert, but out-of-control children are often already the focus of uneasiness about social change, general anxiety, and just plain undisguised dislike. The tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, have generated more than the usual number of theories. Few of these are original, and, in fact, many of them repeat a formula tried out almost 45 years ago, during the national panic over juve- nile delinquency. True, the supposed cultural influences have changed, with blame pointed now at the dark lyrics of Marilyn Manson or virtual- reality, murder-and-mayhem computer games, but the ultimate message is pretty much the same: our children’s behavior is out of control because our culture is out of control. The only solution is to find a form of censorship that can
block adolescents’ access to the violent images that impel them to behave
violently.
One problem with
the cultural explanation for teen violence is that, notwithstanding numerous scientific attempts to do so, it is impossible to prove— there are simply too many other possible causes to factor into the equation. Not
that this should necessarily deter critics of our current teen culture. But it is one thing to regard what young people listen to, play, or consume as strange or vulgar or even mildly threatening, and another to argue that it incites specific behavior. Teenagers might be persuaded by advertising to buy a Big Mac or smoke a Camel, but that doesn’t mean that song lyrics can make them commit mass murder.
Another problem with the cultural explana- tion is that we have been there before and ought to recognize from our experience some of the outcomes and implications of the argument. In the mid-’50s, especially between 1954 and 1956, Americans worried as deeply about juvenile delinquency as they did about the cold war, atomic annihilation, unemployment, and other social ills. The reason for this is not hard to fig- ure out. Government commissions, the FBI . . . , and a number of leading psychologists and social critics were all warning of a terrible scourge of juvenile crime. Cities and towns rushed to pass new ordinances . . . . The favorites of these were local curfews, naming the hour when children under 18 had to be home. Quite naturally, this led to some increased incidence of lawbreaking by youths. But, overall, during the ’50s juvenile crime was no higher than the decade that pre- ceded it. Yet fears of juvenile delinquency con- tinued to soar.
While there were many explanations offered for delinquency, the one most printed in the pages of popular magazines and voiced during congressional hearings convened to examine the problem was the malevolent influence of crime