Explaining violent crimes

The spate of teenage violence in the United States over the last few years has transformed this innocence into a teenage nightmare.

We will now try to understand killings in Guyana through explanations of violent crimes in the US.

The Jonesboro schoolyard killings snuffed out the lives of four girls and one teacher.

Schoolyard shootings included 25 murders in five years from 1993 through 1998 in Grayson, Kentucky; Amityville, New York; Redlands, California; Blackville, South Carolina; Lynnville, Tennessee; Moses lake, Washington; Bethel, Alaska; Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Stamps, Arkansas; and Jonesboro, Arkansas.

In 1997 alone, nine fatal schoolyard shootings occurred. The average age of these teenage killers is 15.

These add up to 11 multiple killings, all commiitted by boys from rural areas.

The Shabazz tragedy of the Malcolm X family, too, has sharpened the spotlight on violent crimes executed by teenagers.

Traditionally, teenagers mainly committed property crimes. But the increase of violent crimes among juveniles (persons under 18) induced the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to analyse arrest rates of juveniles for violent crimes.

Teenage arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter increased by 14 percent in 1990, and continued to rise to 15 percent in 1995.

For other violent crimes (aggravated assault and robbery), teenage arrests increased from 16 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 1995.

Two examples of the violent horrors perpetrated by teenagers follow:

1). A 12-year-old pleaded guilty to arson and murder, thereby confessing to killing his babysitter, aged 53, but denied that he did it to see how it feels like to kill somebody.

2).Harvard University denied admission to Gina Grant in 1995, after having learnt that she beat her mother to death with a candlestick.

The legal situation in the US

Both the House of Represen-tatives and the Senate pushed through a bill to enable teen-agers to be tried as adults, and which is now law. This law would only provide federal funding to those states that would allow prosecutors and not judges to determine whether a teenager should be tried as an adult.

Some criminologists have referred to these violent teen-agers as “superpredators” to signal the intensity and frequency of teenage violence.

Age 14 is the minimum age at which a child can be tried as an adult in 17 states.

We can look for easy targets to explain these gruesome juvenile killings. One easy target is television.

But the American society has always historically been violent. The media merely reflects this societal violence.

By overly focusing on television as a cause for teenage killings, we seek answers and solutions in the wrong places.

Juveniles still are under the protection of the family that is the primary agent for socialising the child.

It plays a significant role in determining how the child copes with the larger society.

The family is saddled with facilitating the juvenile’s personality to take on the meanings of culture and opportunities of society, and directs it into functional behaviour.

When this functional behaviour emerges, the family can be assured that it has solidified its social control over the child’s upbringing.

Many criminals (both teen-agers and adults) believe that their criminal acts are logical and rational.

To do this, they develop techniques of neutralisation that enable them to justify illegal or deviant behaviour, according to Matza (1957).