NCJ Number
167324
Date Published
1997
Length
5 pages
Annotation
Describing the brutality of several attacks committed by teens during 1993, this paper maintains that many youthful offenders take pride in their ruthlessness.
Abstract
Ever since the "wilding" spree in 1989, when a gang of New York City youths attacked a woman jogger in Central Park, adolescent sexual aggression or violence has seemed increasingly commonplace. In the spring of 1993 a group of California high- school jocks called the "Spur Posse" boasted of keeping score of the number of girls with whom they had sex. That June in Montclair, N.J., six boys, aged 13 to 16, were arrested on charges of sexual assault on a seventh-grade girl. The following month New Yorkers learned of a practice called "whirlpooling," after police arrested two youths for allegedly assaulting a 14- year-old girl in a South Bronx pool. Michael Cox, head of a sexual-abuse treatment program at Texas' Baylor College of Medicine, calls the trend in youth violence a "downward extension of the dysfunction we're seeing in society -- with drug problems, guns, split-apart families." Richard Pesikoff, a Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrist for children and adolescents, calls the escalating violence a "Molotov explosive experience" fueled by aggression, drugs, alcohol, race, and an ever-darker attitude toward women. Further, gang members encourage each other to perform more and more heinous acts. Some experts blame the breakdown of families and their extended support networks, which have become replaced by gangs, whose socialization influences are toward predatory behavior and violence. An 18-item bibliography