Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Mike Males
Further thoughts on Walter's question—in addition to racial diversity, another unique and intriguing aspect of the USA's hostility toward adolescent precocity is our contradictory puritan tradition. While most Christian and non-Christian religions recognize community responsibility, puritans (whose emigration to America concentrated their presence here and diminished it in Europe) emphasize individual salvation. Further, puritans regard children as innately evil, requiring stern measures to break their satanic spirits. These doctrines discourage collective government responsibility for the welfare of citizens at the same time they promote the view that youth must be harshly, even violently controlled and kept away from the corrupting influences the young naturally seek. This, I believe, is the basis of Americans' majority views today that children (and adolescents, which we call children except when they are needed for war or employment) are vastly different creatures than adults, a frightening and mentally limited sub-species that only understands swift, severe punishment and can be allowed no freedoms whatsoever (which teens, a liberal-conservative consensus holds, will only misuse to take drugs, have sex, and commit crime--in other words, act like adults). It is also the basis for opposition to social insurance for families, which Americans see as autonomous units, not members of communities.

There is another aspect to American Puritanism in its conjunction with the notion that the USA is a meritocracy, and that is its reverence for social status. Americans allow much more lax moral standards for high-status people (witness Clinton, Bush II, Bennett, Gingrich, Giuliani, etc.) and to reserve punishing, absolutist, zero-tolerance, abstinence demands on low-status populations (such as youth and welfare recipients). This is not simply unfair, but absurd from a social policy standpoint, for it makes the most dissolute behaviors of higher-status people (for our purposes, adults) norms that lower-status ones (youths) seek to emulate. Our tolerance for dubious behaviors at the top, and our attempts to reform from the bottom up, is a major reason the USA seems unable to effectively address major social problems other nations have largely controlled.

I don't mean to imply that religion is an excuse for Americans' attitudes--the question then becomes, why have Europeans largely progressed beyond their barbaric past treatment of youths (which Dickens and others described) while Americans have, if anything, regressed? Has white/affluent reaction to our growing racial diversity hampered development of the more communitarian attitudes found in other nations?

Mike Males
Alex (first posting)—I agree that every culture subjects young people to the most abuses, least power, worst jobs, etc., and that is oppression. However, I disagree that this constitutes equivalence. The USA is an egregious, off-the-charts country in our combination of vicious anti-youth punishments as if adolescents were super adults and restrictions as if adolescents have no more maturity than grade-school children. It seems exemplary to examine our own country's failings first. If other societies are worse, I'd be glad to be informed.

Participant
In a conversation this morning with an American friend now living in Paris, she pointed out that Americans are simply afraid of everything, including what is happening to their children, and from her point of view, have reason to. She thinks it is just more dangerous living in America.

Mike Males
Douglass--Europeans' cruelty toward children is legendary. Yet, I think what lawyers call "the evolution of decency" has led Europeans, Australians, and Japanese to more humane treatments of children over the last century, in recognition that children are an extension of adult society. In the USA, to refer back to previous comments, we do not regard children/teens as extensions of adult society, but alien and fearsome. Exhaustive, intrusive, and even violent corrections are recommended here to pull the young back in line.

Ironically, the result of the greater respect accorded youth in other cultures can be barbaric. Government troops in Mexico, for example, opened fire on middle-class student demonstrators in 1968, killing hundreds. Students were recognized as legitimate players in national politics, and therefore subjected to the same violent repressions that labor unions, agrarian reformers, and environmentalists. This is an extreme example that illustrates that adolescents in most other nations are considered more adultlike, both good and bad, than in the USA. In European nations, students play key roles in political disputes. One avenue I think American youth should explore--and Alex has been active in promoting this--is greater political involvement.

"Kids" is a negative term, but I find adolescents regard the term neutrally—smile when you say it, and it's just shorthand; spoken condescendingly, it's an insult.

A constant, historical fear of middle/upper class US parents is that their teens will indeed emulate the behaviors of lower-class youth. Their biggest fear historically, and especially today, should be that their teens will emulate the behaviors of middle/upper-class parents, who (statistically) are the most provably drug-addicted, violent, arrested, imprisoned, obese, materialistic, socially indifferent, parentally unstable, medicated, TV-dependent, and otherwise disarrayed generation ever. Just as the best in youths tends to derive from their family and adult community, so the worst in youth does also. The historical fear that outside forces corrupt our kids is unfounded--corruption is an inside job.

Mike Males
Walter—good question that, to me, gets to the heart of this forum. What I am interested in is not so much the general climate of a country, but whether the country treats its adolescents differently from its adults. Teenagers in military dictatorships or fundamentalist religious states have little freedom--but neither do adults. Where I find the USA unique is that we grant the world's most expansive freedoms to adults--even to the point of legitimating adult drunkenness, abandonment of families (by men), etc.—while demanding absolute abstinence, intrusive surveillance, public banishments, and primitively harsh punishments of adolescents. It is this "adult-teen disconnect" that concerns me about the USA, for it appears to be spiraling out of control.

This disconnect can be found in other societies, though more rarely. In Japan, for example, there was fervent official and media condemnation of teenage girls who advertised online for sexual contact with older adult men, but no opprobrium visited on the middle-aged men who advertised for teenage sex partners. What occurs occasionally in other nations, mainly as part of lingering racist and sexist mores, is routine in the USA. For example, the Urban Institute--a most established Washington liberal institution--issued a prominent 1996 report arguing that adult men having sex with, and impregnating, teenage girls was "squarely within societal norms" while harshly criticizing teenage girls who have sex and babies. Bad enough that this assertion represented a pre-1950s double standard, it went un-criticized in the 1990s USA.

In terms of legal drinking ages, those nations that have liberal standards for adults tend to have them for teens; those who ban alcohol ban it for all ages. Those that impose draconian punishments for crimes either treat teens and adults the same or treat teens more leniently (i.e., no other nation legally imposes the death penalty on youths under 18). Most nations I am familiar with give adolescents a break for engaging in adult behaviors--recognition of fairly equivalent rights, lesser punishments for transgressions. Italy, for example, permits public drinking at 16 (no age limit on private drinking), allows young teens to attend discos at all hours, and expects teens to be sexually active--as do most societies I'm aware of. Here, for example, is the link to a 1998 report on drinking ages worldwide, which are far lower than ours:

http://www.icap.org/publications/report4.html

The pattern abroad is that societies expect their teens will grow up to be like their

adults, whether availed of wide options (as in Sweden or other liberal states) or severely restricted (as in dictatorial countries). The USA stands as a distinct backwards exception--lenient on adults, draconian on teens, to the point that we punish our youth for acting like adults. I cannot stress how out of sync we are. While our adults can buy a case of Everclear and an arsenal of automatic weapons at will, our teens are less free than those in dictatorships even to be in public--let alone exercise other rights. So, I argue, we rank at the bottom of nations on earth in terms of youth rights in the context of the larger rights we accept as fundamental for grownups. And that is dangerous, for it promotes both limitless crackdowns on young people and a blind eye toward damaging adult derelictions that are tearing our country apart.

Participant
Mike, thanks much for that clarification. I was having some trouble buying into the main thesis--and general drift of comments--of this conference, but this puts it all into a framework that I find much more persuasive.

Participant
Thirty years ago, when I wrote my book calling for full Constitutional rights for children, I thought that the children's liberation movement would follow, more or less, the lines of other liberations movements underway. I knew there were two kinds of advocates for children--those who believed that adults should intervene and protect children from the ravages of the adult world, and those, like me, who felt that the best protection was first to make sure children were protected by civil rights. I was disappointed to see that the former won out almost completely. Protectionism, as women discovered, is usually counter-productive, the kind of repression that Edgar Friedenberg describes as "caring". In fairness to the "protectors", they often do believe that they are helping. I hadn't associated it with a difference in left/right political philosophies, but looking back, that's how it worked out. Interesting.

Mike Males
Except that we in the USA have a weird idea of protectionism. We're the only nation on earth to legally execute juveniles--we've executed more than 300 people for crimes committed prior to age 18 in our history, including nearly all of the juvenile executions worldwide in the last decade. (I recognize some poorer nations may execute juveniles illegally.) Certainly we're the only Western country to impose death or life imprisonment, corporal punishment, the worst levels of child hunger and poverty, and systematic defunding of virtually every institution serving youth. While parents may care about the safety of their own kids, we as a society don't care about endangering kids in general. I argue that is barbaric.

Recently, I traveled to a number of countries, and my prejudices were largely confirmed. To those of you with more experience in other countries, let me know if you think I'm overstating the case. It seems youths everywhere I visited have considerably more freedom than here.

In Ontario, Canada, I saw 18-year-olds queuing in liquor stores and drinking in pubs alongside elders. In Toronto, I asked a Mountie if there was a youth curfew. He looked at me incredulously. "What sort of youth, sir?" he inquired. When I suggested 16 year-olds, he laughed. "Sixteen year olds come and go as they please," he said. "Now, if we saw a genuine CHILD out at two in the morning, say a six-year-old, with no adult in sight, we'd take him to a child protection agency."

I saw teens in Quito, Cuenca, and Riobamba, Ecuador, and San Jose, Costa Rica, thronging to late-night discos. Unchaperoned Ensenada, Mexico, middle-schoolers strolled along late-night downtown streets after emerging from unrated movies. Latin American cybercafes (often managed by teens or children) overflowed with unsupervised youths clicking unfiltered computers. The net cafe I patronized in Ensenada was managed by a child who looked about 10 years old; around 11 pm, he was replaced by his sister, who looked about 14 (both were adept at making change in virtually every world currency they were presented with, as well as being experts in Internet sites). Ditto the younger teens that ran the cybercafe in downtown Tijuana. There were no filters on the computers of any kind. Around 3 a.m. one night, there was a massive celebration in downtown TJ over a Mexican World Cup soccer victory in Europe, and I saw teens and adults alike out cheering and carousing.

The legal drinking ages in these countries ostensibly is 18, but I saw and heard of no ID checks--though bars with live sex shows had more insistent signs about keeping children out. There was no hint of youth curfews anywhere I went.

In London, it was the same. I saw middle-school kids playing soccer and other games in a plaza at midnight. There were teens in pubs; those over 18 were often with dates or peers, on their own. I rarely saw an age limit sign of any kind, though there was a movie rating system I didn't figure out. Adolescents were clearly a part of London night and late-night life, as they were in other cities I visited. I was quite surprised at the rowdiness staid London adult bus riders tolerated in middle-school kids--for the most part, they seemed to regard boisterous kids getting out of school as normal, not worthy of much attention, even a bit entertaining.

These contrasts were accentuated when I returned to the United States. The first thing I saw in the Houston airport was an ugly headline reporting the arrests of 425 teens simply for "hanging out" in the corner of a local mall parking lot (they weren't accused of causing any trouble other than scaring away adult customers, mall business owners said--a crime apparently sufficient for mass youth roundup and police charges). Another news story told of a strategy by Davis, California, city officials to drive teens away from the downtown mall by playing loud classical music. I suddenly noticed age-limit signs everywhere. When I checked the latest summaries of American research on youth, I saw authorities urging even stronger age-based clampdowns--including draconian crackdowns on "underage drinking" and banning all youth through R ratings from movies depicting cigarette smoking ("Breakfast at Tiffany's" rated R?).

Pardon me for shouting, but... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?? Let me qualify this by asking if my view of youth freedom in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Canada, and UK, and by extension other Latin and European societies, is too pollyanna. I have no knowledge of Japan, China, or Middle Eastern countries, but I talked with representatives from a number of nations on various panels and have not encountered a society even remotely approaching the US in terms of repressing youth. For example, I was told that there is no legal drinking age in Beijing; youths are constrained only by the cost of alcohol and family controls. I realize other countries do have age limits, but they are set at much younger ages than here, and they are enforced much more laxly, often not at all. I also realize that family, religious, and community controls on youths can be quite severe, but at least they hold out the option of treating adolescents as individuals--and they don't seem as collectively severe as the USA's punishing legal restrictions. And in other societies, cultural constraints typically apply to adults as well.

Frankly, for reasons we can get into in the last couple of weeks of this forum, I think the specifics of our treatment of youths in terms of harsh criminal justice, violent and even deadly punishments, disinvestment in their services, and banishment from larger society and culture constitute major human rights violations.

Participant
Here is a brief quote from Jensens' book that talks about the root cause of hatred and violence.

"From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with -- and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with -- the perceived entitlement. That's where Nietzsche's statement comes in, and that's where hatred of the sort I'm trying to get at in this book becomes manifest. Several times I have commented that hatred, felt long and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state--where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised--to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred wait in the wings, ready to explode."

Are we insisting to our children that they MUST participate in the culture of entitlement and observe the roles we have assigned them? If so, and if they seem to offer any resistance, then perhaps this dynamic may explain somewhat the hatred towards children.

Participant
Margaret Mead, You should be here!

It was she who invented the word 'teenager' and did the first (perhaps only) comparative study of youth round the world. She would rejoice in this conference.

Nowadays anthropologists are too busy with their own regional specialization to have much time. In the seventies the feminist movement empowered anthropologists to do something very similar, comparative and typologizing, for understanding the rights of women. That was a tremendously valuable effort at self-understanding and liberating for the class of women. Someone should encourage a similar programme of research for rights of youth. The best idea on the subject that I have seen is 'dangerization', which brings together the topic of risk and the newly developing fear of youth.

Michaelis Lianos is a Greek sociologist in the university of Southampton, (in England, should I add?). He starts from a bird's eye view of modern society, and fastens attention on the changes in our ideas of other persons due to the mechanization of identity. The old skills of recognizing friends and foes, the old ways of demonstrating who one is and where one belongs have been superseded by the practice of showing cards for identity, in shops, and admissions to public places. These old social skills enabled us to tell at a glance who was a potential malefactor, and alerted a complex store of security concepts about strangers and dangerous characters.

Now that proofs of identity depend on a packet of specialized rights of admission, the ordinary social mechanism of mutual recognition is atrophied. Furthermore, the dissolving of old social classifications goes on apace with the advance of technologies of communication. So we really can't tell friend from foe in the market place or in the street. The result is what Lianos calls a dangerization of society. Our lost security gives a diffuse anguish to our contacts with strangers. We use crude stigma of dangerous categories, and one of these is Youth.

The young adults become stigmatized as potential threats to society. An adult approaches you to ask you the time in the street, Okay, but a youth disengages himself from a group of two or three young men, and accosts you with the same words and all your danger signals are alerted.

Recently in Camden Town, next district to ours in North London, this happened, a youth left his friend and approached an older citizen, and politely asked the time—he was immediately punched in the face, and fell beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic, and died.

Michaelis Lianos can tell you more than I can about dangerization studies and how youth have become objects of fear in many Western cities.

Thank you for giving me this slot to introduce him. Mary Douglas

Mike Males
Mary--Amazing. Earlier today, I picked up a copy of Margaret Mead's Culture and Commitment, a book I haven't read in 25 years, with the intent of incorporating her ideas into the class on California adolescence I'm teaching at UC Santa Cruz this fall. (Also a copy of Hunter Thompson's latest autobio on the USA as of 2001, "Kingdom of Fear," in which he states: "Weird behavior is natural in smart children").

So, some of the anti-youth fear infects London as well? I trust things have not deteriorated in the UK to the point that, as happened in Los Angeles, a man with a gun explicitly went hunting for Latino graffitists and gunned down two unarmed kids he alleged were spray-painting a bridge underpass. The local prosecutor charged the murderer only with misdemeanor illegal gun possession--and was widely criticized for doing even that.

I live in Beach Flats, a poorer, mostly Salvadorian slum of Santa Cruz where minimum-wage Beach Boardwalk workers live, reputed to be infested with gangs and crack. I walk everywhere and encounter several dozen kids, mostly young Latino males as well as a few white, black, and Korean teens, every day, and have for years--thousands in all, I'm guessing. A few even presume to ask me the time or other routinalities. So far as I can determine, I am still alive, not even in traction. I must be very lucky indeed to have survived such dangerments.

I would like nothing better than to hear the likes of Mead, Friedenburg, Piaget, Twain, de Tocqueville, Jessamyn West, James Baldwin, Octavio Paz, et al, unload on America today, especially and including our paranoid mistreatment of youth. What are today's radical thinkers thinking of in their mindless obsession with moronic culture wars--Are caffeine ads seducing our children? Is "South Park" making our kids foul-mouthed?--when so many real "dangerizations" go begging for attention.

I'll look up Lianos; do you have any titles to suggest?

Participant
I would like to thank Mary Douglas for her introduction to this forum and Participant for his invitation to join. I just caught up with messages to date and I find the discussion very interesting. I hope my European perspective is of some use and I am sketching very schematically an approach that has not so far been part of the debate. I apologize in advance for this long message.

As Mary said, one of the questions that are overlooked is that of the decline of value-based culture and its replacement by environments that enforce 'external' rules of behaviour, rather than adherence to belief systems. Columbine is a flagrant example here; the young killers were highly deviant in cultural terms but behaviourally ‘compatible’ in institutional terms (e.g. school, peer group, family, etc.) Conscience can, and does disengage from action, in today’s Western societies, which poses the question of youth in new terms.

One can think that the very invention of childhood and adolescence in the 18th century was a consequence of problems in socializing children whose parents were separated from them all day because they started working in the factories. The school, and the battery of peripheral institutions surrounding youth (activities, entertainment, media, etc.) are in fact a poor substitute for enforcing value systems. We need active social relations to do that. At the same time, the general dynamics of Western societies is focusing on maintaining predictable and competitive life trajectories, mainly through work. The combination of fragile beliefs and values with feelings of vulnerability over the future gives way to a ‘negative’ approach of reality where one looks to avert possible dangers before they turn into threats. It is pat of this ‘dangerisation’ that all Others are scanned for their threatening potential.

This is the point where (poor, male) youths become very relevant as potential offenders. They combine the lack of value-based social integration with low socio-economic incentives to adhere to the mainstream social structure and enough fatalism to join any challenge that looks thrilling. The mix is highly explosive and people feel its threatening potential, particularly in connection with fear of low class and minorities. There is perhaps no better place to watch that the underground (subway). It would be unbelievable for previous societies that adults be intimidated by adolescents and pre-adolescents, as it happens every day in Western cities. In this sense, youth has somehow turned into a great source of danger and vulnerability at the same time. From pedophiliac sexual predators to bullying and the fascination of (pre-)adolescents with the occult, we are living through the effect of a widening social deficit which is more visible there where socialization is most important: in the integration of young people into society and the behaviour of adults towards young people.

I could follow-up with some ideas on the rights and obligations of youth that these conditions entail, e.g. the huge investment on the education and activities for children and adolescents, and their simultaneous postponement of their maturity towards the full social and civic status of a competitive working citizen.

Participant
A very interesting approach to these issues, Michalis. I do hope you follow up with the further implications.

Are all Western nations alike in this respect? Can you draw distinctions between Europe and America? Mike's main concern is the antipathy toward youth expressed by adults, which he argues rather persuasively, is especially characteristic of the US. Is that from a generalized fear of others? In America, children are taught never to speak to strangers. In Scandinavia, children are taught to run to the nearest adult for help, stranger or not. Are there other such distinctions of which you are aware?

Mike Males
Interesting. The invention of adolescence in the US is more commonly ascribed to the primary need to create institutions to eliminate adolescents from the labor force as mechanization was eliminating jobs needed by adults. Our true values in America, however fervently stated in higher moral terms, always seem to turn out in practical terms to have something to do with making money and allocating resources.

We have also seem some peculiar trends in the US in the last 30 years that argue against the notion that young men form a generically explosive, socially subversive population. In the U.S in general and in California most dramatically, drug abuse, suicide, violent death, and both felony and misdemeanor arrest rates have declined steadily and sharply among teens while drug abuse and criminal arrest rates rose rapidly among middle-agers, a population thought practically immune to crime by past theorists. These trends occurred as youth in California became poorer (12.5% living in poverty in 1970, 21% today) and middle-agers became wealthier. These trends defy a lot of conventional theories (including mine re poverty), and I suspect that is why neither right nor left has shown much interest in admitting, let alone analyzing, them. They suggest that here, we may not WANT the older generation taking a more active role socializing the younger generation.

I am not aware of any documented trends in the US toward youth becoming more sexually predatory, and interest in the occult is hard to measure. Rates of arrest for rape and sexual offenses have declined sharply among teens over the last three decades (674 juvenile rape arrests in California in 1975; just 344 in 2001 in a juvenile teen population 1 million larger, and other sex offenses show similar declines). Even the disproportionate numbers of property crimes and vandalism attributed to youth have dropped sharply. Granted, statistics may not reveal some hidden pathology, but my exhaustive investigation convinces me that American groups who assert a massive increase or high rate of juvenile anti-sociality today are not able to document it beyond emotional claims.

In the US, there are plenty of reports of adults being intimidated by adolescents in public stretching back at least a hundred years. Example: in Philadelphia in 1952, a gang of teens assaulted streetcar passengers and raped one patron; assaults by youths against adults in schools in the 1950s were allegedly so common that a movie (The Blackboard Jungle) was made to expose them; urban youth gangs have frightened adults in the US at least as long ago at the 1830s. In the US, as far as I can determine, fear of youth has always been a dominant theme--though, in fact, youths suffer far greater odds of being murdered by grownups than the other way around.

As readers of this forum know, I have been unable to document generalized claims that US teens today are more alienated, violent, or otherwise anti-social; the most documentable trends seem to be in the opposite direction. Rather than demonstrating more disturbed personal behaviors, youth alienation (if that is the right word for it) seems to be expressed in withdrawal from the political system (in 1970, half of 18-24 year-olds voted; today, just one-third). Even this trend is offset by multigenerational studies showing youths today are more likely to volunteer time than youth of past generations.

I realize things may be different in Europe. The limited reports I have show murder peaking in 25-44 age groups in most European nations, and heroin abuse in particular seems acute among middle-aged groups. (Anecdotally, the rowdiest middle-schoolers I saw in any of the five nations I visited recently in Latin America and Europe were on London buses, though adults didn’t seem too perturbed.) I, too, would be interested in why, given similar economic progression and population aging, European adults don’t seem as frightened of their youth, nor inclined to hallucinate so many pathologies in them, as we are in America.

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