Youth violence and its myths of cause

The quarter century between 1970 and 1995 served up a bewildering stew of social and economic change to the American population. The demographics of the regions of the country shifted rapidly, and the old North-east and Mid-west industrial strongholds crumbled, without a concomitant equivalent rise in the economic and political power of the newly populated areas, the South and West. The cities emptied out into the suburbs between 1970 and 1980 much more rapidly than in the two previous decades, and suffered from a host of ills ranging from homelessness, tuberculosis and low weight births to substance abuse, mental illness and youth violence. Multitudinous references could be listed to document the validity of the above statements. A combination of local and national public policies interacted with economic processes such as deindustrialization and increasing influence of international trade and manufacturing (globalization) to produce these changes and urban woes. National public policies included the famous ‘benign neglect’ (1). In New York City, local public policies included ‘planned shrinkage’ (2), which is the deliberate withdrawal of essential services from targeted neighbourhoods, resulting in what could be considered an urban triage system. Criminologists such as Sampson and Groves (3) and Skogan (4) discussed youth violence and gangs in the context of social and economic changes attendant on urban decay. This violence forms part and parcel of the physical and social destruction of the poor, mainly minority communities targeted by the public policies and buffeted by the economic processes. It arises from the weakening of social control, from the narrowing of economic opportunities, and from the psychosocial scarring which is a consequence of the slow, manmade disaster that the community destruction brought. It also feeds back into the destruction (5). Besides the quantitative criminologists and urban ecologists, a bevy of other scientists and pseudoscientists have added to the list of possible explanations for the youth violence epidemic. These other scientists include environmental health scientists, geneticists, molecular biologists and social scientists with a strong genetics allegiance. Readers may remember how Johns Hopkins University, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), intended to organize a conference on the genetics of violence. Two different sectors objected strenuously to the conference and the NIH funding: several African-American organizations and several researchers in social psychology. The former saw the conference as a step towards the stigmatization of black males as congenitally violent, a step which would legitimize with a scientific veneer blatant discrimination against black male youths. The latter objected to the reductionism and oversimplification of the phenomenon of violence which the conference agenda indicated. Because mice with certain mutations show extreme aggression and violence, and because a few families have been found with a high incidence of violent behaviour in members with a particular mutation, the geneticists hint that the violence American society is experiencing has its foundations in flawed base pairs of genes. If violence, like cystic fibrosis, expresses a deleterious mutation, the obvious answer is gene therapy or a programme of eugenics. The social scientists with a genetic bent look at the violent crime statistics by age, sex and race, and conclude that a statistical association exists between violent crimes, on one hand, and 14–25 years of age, male sex and black race, on the other hand. They conclude that in the population of Americans of African ancestry, a violence gene(s) is present at high frequency. Wilson and Herrnstein published a book detailing such associations (6). From similar statistical associations of low academic achievement and IQ with the same three characteristics, Murray and Herrnstein, Editor: J. H. Kilwein.