The Scapegoat Generation:
America's War on Adolescents
by Mike A. Males, Common Courage Press, 329 pp., $17.95, paperback.

[The following review originally appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of Youth Today.]

By Keith Hefner

Imagine, if every time a person born Jewish killed someone the headlines read "Jewish Killer Caught," Or, if stories reporting the incidence of out-of-wedlock births were titled "Jewish Illegitimacy Rates Show Steady Increase."

Of course, no respectable newspaper would print such headlines, and few politicians make direct appeals to anti-Semitism nowadays. That's because scapegoating-blaming a person or group for a problem they did not create-is perceived as immoral and poisonous to our political culture. Especially when it comes to religion. But not America's teenagers.

In his richly documented The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents. Mike Males lays out the extent to which open season has been declared on youth as scapegoats for many of society's ills. The book offers scores of examples of respected columnists, talk show hosts, youth advocacy organizations, and President Clinton himself, blaming teens for such problems as violence, unwed births, drug use, welfare dependency-the familiar litany of hot-button issues that have figured prominently in this year's presidential election campaign.

If teen behavior was truly aberrant-that is, if teens were in fact contributing to those problems at rates far above and beyond those of the adults around them, then such attacks might be justifiable. But, by plotting teen trends and adult trends on the same charts, Males shows, again and again, that teen behavior is not unusual.

In fact, by most statistical measures, it mirrors adult behavior. Nonetheless, opinion leaders single out teens for blame. For example, when a young person commits a violent act, it becomes "teen violence"-regardless of the fact that trends in teen and adult violence largely parallel each other. "There is no such thing as 'youth violence,' any more than there is 'black violence' or "Italian violence'." Males says. "The recent rise in violent crime is so clearly founded on social conditions, not age-group demographics, that experts and officials have had to strain mightily to ignore or downplay them."

Distorted Lens Of Blame

When politicians or columnists talk about unwed mothers, their usual target is teenagers, though the unwed birth rates of adult women have been similar to those of teenagers for 50 years. And when the President calls a news conference to talk about drug abuse, you can be sure that teens will be in for a scolding, even though they have far lower rates of drug-related deaths than adults. (The highest rates are among 35-44-year-olds, whose rates are five times that of 18- and 19-year-olds.)

After working with young people for 20 years, I recoil at political demagoguery and media stereotyping that blames teens for complex social problems that adults lack the courage to tackle. And I've learned (without benefit of statistics) that "pathological" behavior among teens usually reflects the adult-created conditions in their families, neighborhoods and schools. I've learned that children who are sexually active at very young ages are not trying to offend my morals. Rather, they are often responding to sexual abuse at home.

Violent kids have usually been the targets of violence from their parents or other adults in the home. Drug abusing teens have often been subject to unspeakable mistreatment.

And many children who display these kinds of anti-social behavior have been raised in neighborhoods that are cut off from good jobs, schools, health care, and social services.

They, and their families, are breaking under the stress of increasing poverty and government neglect. That doesn't mean teens shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. I ask that of teens every day in my job. But Males, a former youth worker at the Montana Conservation Corps, points out the hypocrisy of blaming teens for problems and social trends created by adults.

Fifty-five years ago, he says, about seven births per thousand were to unwed mothers. The rate for teens and adults was identical. By 1990, the rate had risen to 45 births per thousand. Again, however, the rates for teens and adults were identical.

I am astonished by that statistic because, like most Americans, I have been subjected to a barrage of propaganda which portrays unwed teen pregnancy not as a subset of a clear trend among adult women, but as a bizarre phenomenon of shameless, sex-crazed teens. That's scapegoating.

What about teen violence? The scapegoat effect is dramatic. A 1994 Gallup Poll found that American adults believe youths commit 43% of all violent crime. The true figure: 13%. While no one would deny that violence by teenagers is a serious problem, Males cites a raft of statistics which undermine traditional assumptions.

• Children killing children? It happens, of course, but 70% of murders of people under age 18 are committed by adults, according to the FBI's 1994 Uniform Crime Reports.



• Impulsive, "violence-prone" teens? If teens are naturally violence-prone, why do many teens (e.g. Europeans, various suburban and rural subgroups, etc.) have murder rates lower than the rates of 30-40-year-olds in those areas?



• Super predators? More like super prey. In 1993, 350,000 juveniles were arrested for violent crimes. Meanwhile, 370,000 were officially confirmed as victims of violent and/or sexual assaults by their parents or other caretakers.

Teens do commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. But Males convincingly argues that the major cause is poverty, not any inherent criminality among youth. When poverty rates are held constant, Males shows, the rate of teen violence arrests drops below that of 30-39-year olds, just as in Europe, where young people are not disproportionately poor. (We don't yet blame children for being poor, do we?)

For those who argue that people were poor in the Depression, but didn't go around murdering each other, Males points out that the 1933 and 1993 murder rates were virtually identical (at 9.7 and 9.5 murders per 100,000, respectively).

What accounts for the dangerous distortions of teen behavior by powerful adults? Males argues that it is self-interest. Today's American adults are the wealthiest the world has ever seen.

They have the lowest taxes among the Western industrialized countries, and they're angling to keep it that way. Though themselves the beneficiaries of vast public investment (well-funded public schools, the GI bill, heavily subsidized public universities, mortgage tax credits, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc.), they are now working to radically reduce those benefits to the next generation.

To get away with it, he says they have to portray youth as depraved and unworthy.

"America's level of adult selfishness is found in no other Western country." Of the 17 major Western nations, he points out, the U.S. has the highest per capita income, and the highest child poverty rates.

Teen Defenders Needed

While one can argue about adult motivation, and one can quibble with some of Males' sweeping assumptions, it is hard to argue with the facts or his central theme: since teen behavior closely resembles adult behavior, blaming teenagers for that behavior is scapegoating, pure and simple.

As long as scapegoating continues-as long as adults are able to shift responsibility for real and imagined moral and political failings onto teenagers-it is unlikely that we will secure adequate funding for the schools, youth centers, day care, social services, and other interventions that young people need for a healthy, productive start in life. (And it is all too likely that prisons and other punitive responses will continue to boom).

The founders of the Anti-Defamation League knew that facts were a necessary but insufficient defense against bigotry and scapegoating. To prevent (or undo) scapegoating requires vigilant monitoring and a tenacious response to misinformation.

It is not teens who need to be shamed, but journalists, politicians, grant seekers, and everyone else who trumps up teen pathology to serve their own ends. The Scapegoat Generation will help you rebut the next teen bashing story that appears in your favorite magazine. It will become your constant companion for letters to the editor.

But the book's full value will be realized only if it prompts an organized response to our culture's rampant demonizing of youth. Foundations, which spend millions trying to correct teen "problems" after they've happened, would do well to consider investing in a "Youth Anti-Defamation League," which would subject opinion leaders to the same strict scrutiny on youth issues that the Anti-Defamation Leagues does when rooting out anti-Semitism.

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Keith Hefner founded Youth Communication in 1980. Prior to that he was the executive director of Youth Liberation Press.