hat it meant when it promoted diversion." The problem was not necessarily that diversion was a bad answer to delinquency but rather that the meanings of diversion and delinquency were not sufficiently shard by the policy makers to make a meaningful impact in the problem the program was meant to solve. More generally, Whitehead declares that the juvenile justice system is characterized by "uncertainty and change" (Whitehead, 2003).
In recent years, the issue of juvenile delinquency has been at least partly located in adolescent internalization and enactment of anger. The source of adolescent anger, while not unimportant in a given case, is less decisive in respect of delinquency than the issue of intervention modalities aimed at alleviating the acting-out of this extreme emotion. The character of intervention, like the character of reasons for aggressive behavior, remains a matter of disagreement on both the theoretical and practitioner plane. As one critic of an essay collection on youthful violence notes in that connection, "The world of juvenile misconduct is so varied and nuanced that it is difficult to imagine that 'we know enough'" (Krisberg, 2004, p. 521).
There does seem to be consensus, however, that anger equates with aggression and a tendency toward enactment of such aggression in the form of violence (Dodge & Coie, 1987). By the same token, research has established that delinquency, a fairly reliable indicator of tendency toward violence, both in adolescent and adult years, can partly be traced to childhood physical aggression (Tremblay, et al., 1996). Such views are born out in statistics on youth violence Daley and Onwuegbuzie (2004) note the "epidemic" violence in adolescent demographics, citing statistics showing that a child is murdered on average every two hours and that every day, guns kill or wound 43 children, with some 5,700 teenagers becoming victims of violent crime. Currently, some 2,300 adolescents are in ...