I want to challenge a general assumption running through this thread: youth are getting ever more violent.

I started researching the realities of this assumption and found this simply is not true.

The trend for youth violence goes something like this, youth violence increased dramatically throughout the 80's and peaked in 1993. Ever since '93 the rate of teen violence has consistently decreased (though we haven't reached pre 80's levels for all age groups).

The following is taken from "Executive Summary Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General"

http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/librar...ce/summary.htm

"Since 1993, when the epidemic peaked, youth violence has declined significantly nationwide, as signaled by downward trends in arrest records, victimization data, and hospital emergency room records."

The following is taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a component of the Office of Justice Programs in the U.S. Department of Justice.





As you can see, rates of violent crime and homicides has decreased since '93 for younger age groups.

So what about all this school violence? Yup, that's lower too. Virginia University summed everything up nicely at:

http://youthviolence.edschool.virgin...tatistics.html

So where is the perception of increased violence coming from? The media continues to run increasing numbers of stories featuring teen violence despite the steady decline of said violence. Check out this article published by the McKnight Foundation: http://www.mcknight.org/hotissues/framing_youth.aspx

In conclusion, the youth are not more violent now, we're just more aware of it because of increased media saturation.

Hopefully this is taken by all as good news.

Cyran0