The rising tide of juvenile violence is one of the core issues facing contemporary American society and, indeed, many other societies in the world. Attempts to explain, or even to understand, why young people today are resorting to levels of violence almost unknown a decade ago are often just vague generalizations which have been similarly applied to (less or non-violent) teens in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s.
Academicians have theorized that there is a
subculture of violence [which] proposes that variations in the use of violent behavior stem from the adherence to subcultural normative systems that support and encourage violence. . . . [T]he violent subculture promotes a relatively greater number of conditions under which violence is expected or required of its members. Subcultural norms serve as guides for the perception and interpretation of certain situations (the jostle, the derogatory remark, the appearance of a weapon) where violence is viewed as an appropriate
And others have suggested that gang violence "revolves around
insult and honor . . . that honor is a normative code that stresses the inviolability of one's manhood and defines breaches of etiquette . . . in an adversarial idiom."
Less formal observation may paint a picture closer to
It's easy to see how Arnie Hall, 17, became a criminal. His mother was a dope addict, his stepfather an alcoholic. He grew up in a South Dallas slum, and before he dropped out of fifth grade, he was selling dope and doing drive-by shootings. Arnie is at Giddings (State Home and School for youthful offenders, near Austin, Texas) for killing a man. He committed the murder when he was 13. He shot the man in the back for cheating him out of $9 in a crack buy. . . . He said of the murder that it was "no big deal, it was just another crime.
Something is dreadfully wrong in society when teens view
as "no big deal." But what is wrong?
Sociologist Murray A....