NCJ Number
80894
Journal
Public Interest Volume: 64 Dated: (Summer 1981) Pages: 3-18
Date Published
1981
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This article blames the social maladies suffered and inflicted by youths in American society on the role that courts have gradually come to play, undercutting legitimate adult authority with children's 'rights' and pettifogging litigation.
Abstract
Levels of youth suicide, homicide, and out-of-wedlock births are cited to show a macrocosmic tendency for contemporary young whites toward destructiveness. Incidents of school vandalism illustrate destructiveness at a microcosmic level. A general climate of permissiveness, poor enforcement of rules, and an avoidance of disciplinary measures, particularly on the part of courts, has become characteristic. Courts have tried to reduce educator control over pupils or at least to increase students' formal rights. In response, stripped of their former authority and their aura of infallibility, educators have abdicated their parental duties and have become mere custodians. The children, now contained in legal rather than traditional bounds, find themselves in schools without authority and without community. Their response to these conditions is alienation and destructiveness, particularly self-destruction. The flaw seems to lie in the basic rationale of 'freeing the young' from the demands and constraints generated by adults. Young persons are as liable to err as are adults and, given their relative immaturity, they may display their flaws in more destructive ways. The traditional posture of the law recognized these probabilities and subjected young persons to certain forms of more intense protections, scrutiny, and constraint. One graph is included.