Youth Violence on January 13,

¶ … Youth Violence

On January 13, 2007, thousands of television viewers watched a late night news program in horror as two teenagers were shown beating a homeless man to death with baseball bats. The incident, caught on surveillance camera in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was the newest episode in a disturbing - and burgeoning - national trend of youth violence committed against the homeless. In fact, the National Coalition for the Homeless recorded 122 attacks and 20 murders of the homeless in 2006 (Fantz). Authorities point to a number of factors - both primary and contributory - for these seemingly purposeless violent behaviors in adolescents. By all appearances, the main cause of the Fort Lauderdale incident - and other nearly identical incidents - is boredom and an aggressive personality. Contributory factors include presumptions about the homeless, peer pressure, and a prevailing national culture of violence. This paper is designed to reveal these factors in greater depth and to shed some light on how their coincidence can bring a seemingly harmless adolescent to commit murder.

In all the recent cases of children assaulting or murdering a homeless person, the children's uninformed views and narrow understanding of homelessness facilitated their callous actions. As described by Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, these are crimes of opportunity, crimes that likely would not have been committed if certain conditions didn't coincide, one significant condition being the identification of the victim as homeless (Weiner). In many of the recent cases of youth violence against the homeless, the perpetrators later admitted during interrogations that they chose the particular victim because he or she was homeless. In this sense, the crime is similar to crimes we traditionally associate with hate, such as those perpetrated against gays or minorities. Criminologist Brian Levine says that homeless individuals are the new vogue targets (CBS staff writer). Children choose the homeless because they assume they are vulnerable to attack and unable to harm their attackers in response. Because the homeless are a scorned population, children think that they can get away with these attacks.

Mob mentality further solidifies this rationale. In almost all of the cases in which children attack the vulnerable homeless, they do so with cohorts - typically in a group of two or three. Rarely do the perpetrators act alone. Authorities describe this factor, under which most of these attacks are committed, as a group context (Zimring 489). The Fort Lauderdale attack was committed by at least two adolescent males - and by some accounts, three adolescents. News footage of the event shows the teens laughing and intermittently pausing to give one another "high-fives." In this way, the group as a whole unit, which offers explicit encouragement and permission, vindicates the individual conscience, which might otherwise balk at the action or fear the inevitable consequences. Peer pressure and the fear of being evaluated negatively by the group put enormous pressure on the individual children, many of whom have not yet developed the social capacity to resist peer pressure (Zimring 488).

However, peer pressure exerted by friends and associates of the attackers is not the only social force at work during these violent incidents. The pervasive culture of violence in society plays a large part in the formation of the violent inclination of these teens. After an attack on a homeless man in Milwaukee in 2006, a teenager involved in the attack told authorities that the violent attack was like playing a video game (Fantz). It is likely that these children are desensitized to the consequences of violence, because they have been socialized toward it at an early age by video games, violent television programs, and popular action movies (Moore 10). The popularity of a "bum-fighting" series of DVDs serves as evidence of this culture. The show depicts actually homeless men fighting one another and getting beaten up. A number of the teens involved in violent attacks on the homeless have indicated that they enjoy the series. Even sports seem to play a role in the violent propensities. In the case of the Fort Lauderdale attack, one of the perpetrators was the captain of the high school hockey team, a game in which on-ice fighting is largely tolerated and whose spectator brawls have drawn recent media attention. A possible third suspect in the beating described the attack to officers in sport terms, saying that it felt to him like "teeing off" (Fantz).

Finally, the primary causal factor in attacks such as took place in Fort Lauderdale last year is boredom. Surprisingly, many experts in youth behavior, violence, and occupational sciences describe boredom as being nearly ubiquitous in violent attacks such as those committed by adolescents against the homeless. In a study conducted occupational researcher Timothy Hartnagel of high school dropouts, 21% admitted that they'd gotten into a fight at least once just for fun (Hartnagel & Krahn 428). Violent offenders often describe these behaviors as a form of amusement, as in the case of another attack on the homeless in Florida last year. When asked by police why he had attacked the homeless man, the teenage perpetrator answered, "I guess for fun" (CBS staff writer). Scott Russell, a Fort Lauderdale police officer, observed firsthand this release of boredom, saying "If you looked at these kids, it is almost like it was fun and games for them. It looked like they were laughing and finding great joy in what they were doing" (Weiner). This observation, taken at face value, might describe a group of kids on summer break, enjoying a game of football or some videogames, but it does describes something far more heinous. These children are relieving their boredom by beating a homeless man to death.