School Shootings as a Natural Escalation of Less Lethal, Juvenile Violence
The issue of youth violence is one very much in the news since the Columbine High School shootings and the other incidents of schoolyard violence that have occurred with grisly regularity over the last several years. But while such shooting sprees are perhaps the most striking example of people under the age of 18 intentionally committing violent acts against other people, Columbine and other school shootings are in fact only a very small element of the overall picture of juvenile violence. Indeed, both these school shootings and other, more common acts violence by young people can be seen as merely the natural development of other kinds of less lethal juvenile violence.
Whenever we hear on the news about another crime committed by another juvenile - often a child who seems barely old enough to make their own after-school snacks -- it is tempting to ask, "Where were the parents? Why didn't they stop this?"
But the problem of youth violence extends beyond an attempt to assign blame to the parents or in applying ever-harsher legal penalties to young offenders. It requires a holistic approach to the subject. This paper considers three levels of response to the problem of youth violence, which has been addressed legislatively, judicially and administratively.
While many people have argued that parents should be responsible for any act committed by their children, others have argued that this would a fundamental change in our legal conception of the idea of responsibility and agency and that (especially in the case of older children) parents are only responsible for their own actions, not those of their children. Therefore a parent who was abusive to a child who then committed a crime (that psychologists believed to be linked to the abuse) could be charged with the abuse itself but not with the crime that the child had committed.
It may be useful to begin with some basic definitions. Under American law (and this is an inheritance from English common law), a crime is an illegal act committed by a person who has criminal intent. A long-standing presumption in the United States (as well in most other Western nations) has been that, although a person of almost any age can commit a criminal act, children under 14 years old were unlikely to have criminal intent. (Another way of looking at this is to say that children under the age of 14 may not understand the consequences of their actions or may not be able to distinguish in a fully realized way good from evil or both. Thus while they might steal, for example, this is not the same thing legally as committing theft, which requires the intent of taking depriving someone else of their rights to an object.) (Lawson, 1994, p. 23).
Many juvenile courts have now discarded this so-called infancy defense and have found that delinquent acts can be committed by children of any age. This reflects less a change in the understanding of child psychology, however, than it does a change in cultural and social ideas about criminal agency (http://128.192.30.16/LegisGame/g7/issues/A10.htm).
The creation in the late 19th century of a separate justice system for youths reflected a combined legislative, judicial and administrative response to the need that society felt for punishing youths - but not too much. So many offenders were juveniles that it was believed that some system must be established to deal with their unique needs and to help them from becoming lifetime criminals.
Jurisdiction over criminal acts by children was transferred from adult courts to the newly created juvenile courts in 1889. One of the principal reasons for the new system was to avoid the harsh treatment previously imposed on delinquent. Official U.S. crime reports in the 1980s showed that about one-fifth of all persons arrested for crimes are under 18 years of age. In the 1970s, juvenile arrests increased in almost every serious crime category, and female juvenile crime more than doubled (http://128.192.30.16/LegisGame/g7/issues/A10.htm)
However, although the idea of a juvenile criminal made sense to many, over a number of years it became clear that the current model was not working and that young people were not being deterred from committing crimes - including violent crimes. The statistics rise and fall for juvenile crime rates, but the number of youths who commit violate crimes remains shockingly high. And the crimes committed by the most violent youths are becoming increasingly violent.
In the early 1990s, the overall crime rate fell, even as the number of crimes committed by juveniles continued to rise. But the juvenile arrest rate for violent crime in 1996 dropped 9% from 1995 and 12% from 1994, marking the second year of decline after steady increases since 1990. In addition, the juvenile arrest rate for murder dropped...
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