What causal factors contribute to juvenile problem behavior?

Over the years, criminologists have put forth a wide variety of motives for what causes crime (see Lecturette: Motives For Crime). People who deal with young people cite the following root conditions: poverty, family factors, the environment, media influence, and declining social morality. These will be taken up in order:

Poverty

    Although it is considered passe to say poverty causes crime, the fact is that nearly 22 percent of children under the age of eighteen live in poverty. Poverty, in absolute terms, is more common for children than for any other group in society. Ageism, they say, is the last frontier in the quest for economic equality. Adolescents from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families regularly commit more violence than youth from higher SES levels. Social isolation and economic stress are two main products of poverty, which has long been associated with a number of D-words like disorganization, dilapidation, deterioration, and despair. Pervasive poverty undermines the relevance of school and traditional routes of upward mobility. The way police patrol poverty areas like an occupying army only reinforces the idea that society is the enemy whom they should hate. Poverty breeds conditions that are conducive to crime.

Family Factors

    One of the most reliable indicators of juvenile crime is the proportion of fatherless children. The primary role of fathers in our society is to provide economic stability, act as role models, and alleviate the stress of mothers. Marriage has historically been the great civilizer of male populations, channeling predatory instincts into provider/protector impulses. Economically, marriage has always been the best way to multiply capital, with the assumption being that girls from poorer families better themselves by marrying upward. Then, of course, there are all those values of love, honor, cherish, and obey encapsulated in the marriage tradition. Probably the most important thing that families impart to children is the emphasis upon individual accountability and responsibility in the forms of honesty, commitment, loyalty, respect and work ethic.

    There may be other ways to accomplish these things, but the traditional vehicle for them, marriage, has been in sharp decline over the last four decades. In 1996, the number of children being raised in single-parent families rose to about 18 million. Divorce accounted for most of this, and it is generally accepted that about 50% of American marriages end in divorce. The American divorce rate is the highest of any known society in history. Another contributing factor is the number of out-of-wedlock children. This rate is running at about 33% of all childbirths, and at a higher 68% for African American babies (32% for Latinos, 21% for whites). Political pundits claim these figures show "the breakdown of the family structure", and put words like "unwed" and "mother" together to create convenient scapegoats, but social scientists argue against any automatic conclusions about the effects of family breakdown.

    Most of the broken home literature, for example, shows only weak or trivial effects, like skipping school or home delinquency. Another area, the desistance literature, shows only that children from two-parent families age-out of crime earlier. In fact, there is more evidence supportive of the hypothesis that a stepparent in the home increases delinquency, or that abuse and neglect in fully-intact families lead to a cycle of violence. To complicate matters, there are significant gender, race, and SES interaction effects. Females from broken homes commit certain offenses while males from broken homes commit other kinds of offenses. Few conclusions can be reached about African American males, but tentative evidence suggests stepparenting can be of benefit to them. SES differences actually show that the broken home is less important in producing delinquency among lower-class youth than youth from higher social classes. Most research results are mixed, and no clear causal family factors have emerged to explain the correlation between fatherlessness and crime, but it is certainly unfair to blame single mothers, their parenting skills, or their economic condition for what are obviously more complex social problems.

The Environment

    Unless we are willing to believe that testosterone (a male stimulation-seeking hormone) causes crime, the only feasible explanations left are environmental ones. The heredity-environment debate in explaining juvenile crime is shaped by divided opinions about what factors are really important: genetic tendencies, birth complications, and brain chemicals, on one side; and being a victim of abuse, witnessing domestic battering, and learned behaviors, on the other side. The idea that all behavior is learned behavior is associated with environmental explanations. Sure, everyone has a potential for violence, but we learn how to do it (in all its different forms) from observing others do it. In fact, most of us are suckers for observing violence, glamorizing it to the point where we like more and different forms of it everyday, in the news, on TV shows, in action movies. So when you're talking about reducing the need to see violence on TV, you're really talking biology or psychology. The study of environmental factors, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with social considerations. While violence may be part of everyone's behavioral repertoire, the temptations (triggers, cues) to do it are embedded (lodged, locked, firmly put in place) with social networks (relationships and situations) that more or less make this kind of behavior seem acceptable at the moment.

    The unfortunate truth is that, in many places, there are a growing number of irresistible temptations and opportunities for juveniles to use violence. Brute, coercive force has become an acceptable substitute, even a preferred substitute, for ways to resolve conflicts and satisfy needs. Think of it as the schoolyard bully who says "Meet me in the parking lot at 4:30". Under circumstances like these, the peer pressure and reward systems are so arranged that fighting seems like the only way out.

    Now think for a moment about the crucial importance of peer groups: whether there are people who would respect you for standing up to fight, or whether there are people important to you that would definitely not approve of your fighting. What environmental learning theorists are saying is that there are fewer and fewer friends available to help you see the error of your ways in deciding to fight.

    Most of the recent research in this area revolves around "neighborhood" factors, such as the presence of gangs, illicit drug networks, high levels of transiency, lack of informal supports, etc. Gang-infested neighborhoods, in particular, have no effective means of providing informal supports that would help in resisting the temptations to commit crime. Such neighborhoods would more likely have an informal encouragement policy, with five or more places where you could buy a gun and drugs available to give you the courage to use the gun. Firearms- and drug-related homicides have increased over 150% in recent years, and the clearest drug-violence connection is for selling drugs because illicit drug distribution networks are extremely violent.

    In such neighborhoods, families, school authorities, and even community organizations are often incapable of providing any protection for children. There are no peer-level social supports to reinforce the conventional lifestyles that these agencies want their children to emulate. The reality of street life, its illicit economy, and quick and easy pathways to success and prestige through violence and crime all offer rewards that offset the risks associated with these activities. And, even if a child experiences the risks of street life firsthand, like by getting shot or stabbed, this only reinforces the child's desire for more exposure to the learning of street life, to do better next time by listening more closely to delinquent peers and not to the advice of legitimate authorities. Victimization and perpetration go hand in hand. This is what is meant when criminologists say that the best predictor of future delinquency is past behavior, or age of onset. The strongest (primacy) effect is when violence is modeled, encouraged, and rewarded for the first time. It determines the type of friends one chooses, which in turn, determines what behaviors will be subsequently modeled, established, and reinforced.

Media Influence

    Popular explanations of juvenile crime often rest on ideas about the corrupting influence of television, movies, music videos, video games, rap/hip hop music, or the latest scapegoat du jour, computer games like Doom or Quake. The fact is that TV is much more pervasive, and has become the de facto babysitter in many homes, with little or no parental monitoring. Where there is strong parental supervision in other areas, including the teaching of moral values and norms, the effect of prolonged exposure to violence on TV is probably quite minimal. When TV becomes the sole source of moral norms and values, this causes problems. Our nation's children watch an astonishing 19,000 hours of TV by the time they finish high school, much more time than all their classroom hours put together since first grade. By eighteen, they will have seen 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders. Every hour of prime time television carries 6-8 acts of violence. Most surveys show that around 80% of American parents think there is too much violence on television.

    Most of the scientific research in this area revolves around tests of two hypotheses: the catharsis effect, and the brutalization effect; but I am giving this area of research more credit than it deserves because it is not that neatly organized into two hypotheses. Catharsis means that society gets it out of their system by watching violence on TV, and brutalization means we become so desensitized it doesn't bother us anymore, but there are also "imitation" hypotheses, "sleeper" effects, and lagged-time correlations. The results of research in this area are too mixed to give any adequate guidance, and it may well be that social science is incapable of providing us with any good causal analysis in this area. Only anecdotal evidence of a few cases of direct influence exist.

    Since the early 1990s, a number of films, music videos, and rap music lyrics have come out depicting gang life, drugs, sex, and violence. Watching or listening to these items gives you the feeling that the filmmakers or musicians really know what they're talking about and tell it like it is, but there have been unfortunate criminogenic effects. In 1992, for example, 144 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty. That year, four juveniles wounded Las Vegas police officers and the rap song, Cop Killer, was implicated. At trial, the killers admitted that listening to the song gave them a sense of duty and purpose. During apprehension, the killers sung the lyrics at the police station. Another case involved a Texas trooper killed in cold blood while approaching the driver of a vehicle with a defective headlight. The driver attempted a temporary insanity defense based on the claim he felt hypnotized by songs on a 2 Pac album, that the anti-police lyrics "took control, devouring [him] like an animal, compelling his subconscious mind to kill the approaching trooper". Two of the nation's leading psychiatrists were called as expert witnesses in support of this failed defense.

Social Morality

    It has become prevalent, especially among the slacker generations, GenX and Gen13, to join the old WWII generation in self-righteous, totally gratuitous Sixties-bashing, as if all our social problems, especially our declining social morality, started with the free-for-all, "any thing goes" hippie movement of the 1960s. This time period is often blamed for giving birth to rising hedonism, the questioning of authority, unbridled pursuit of pleasure, the abandonment of family responsibility, demand for illicit drugs, and a number of other social ills. Sometimes, even the AIDS epidemic is blamed on the 1960s, although such accusers are off by about two decades.

    To sixties-bashers, today's juvenile "super predators" are nothing but a long line of troubled youngsters who have grown up in more extreme conditions of declining social morality than the generation before them. Their thinking is that each generation since the sixties has tried hard to outdo one another in expressing the attitude that "nothing really matters", culminating in the present teenage regard for angst and irony so common in contemporary culture.

    I remember the sixties, with all its collective violence, drug-crazed looniness, challenges to authority, and more social causes than you could possibly join in on. Maybe I'm biased, but I just don't see a connection between the idealism and cynicism of that period and the vacant, stone-cold, remorseless irony of today's juvenile offenders. In fact, I wish today's generations had more idealism and cynicism, but I understand that as a whole, they are facing some difficult challenges. They grew up with nothing but sound bites instead of reasoned discourse about social problems, they learned from AIDS that sex kills and you should always use a condom, they got MTV and syndicated talk shows as entertainment fodder, they continue to be exploited in low-paying McJobs and are told that this service sector is the fastest growing part of the economy, they are told that Social Security will probably not be there for them, and they are the first generation in American history to probably do worse economically than their parents.