Youthful violence

[Blind groper]

Another idea coming from Prof. Stephen Pinker's book.

There was a major upsurge in crime, and especially violent crime, starting in the late 1960's and lasting till the early 1990's, before falling back sharply. This was universal through the western world.

Pinker ascribes it to an outcome of youth culture. Those of you who, like me, belong to the grey brigade, will remember flower power, and "don't trust anyone over 30", and youth culture starting in the late 1960's as the baby boom generation became teenagers. According to Pinker, the problem was young people of the time erecting a barrier between them and the older generation, so that the energy and aggression of youth was unmodified by the moderating influence of the older generation. Of course, and predictably, when the younger members of the baby boom generation reached an age of greater maturity, the crime rates fell, and fell dramatically.

Rock and roll, and rebellion had its nastier side, it seems. Youth has its power, and its goodness, but there is a black side to that coin also.

[Audley Strange]

Baby Boomers. I recall watching a programme about the 60's radicals from Baader-Meinhoff to the S.D.S and the Weather Underground. The main thing these people had in common was that they believed the previous generation were monsters. In Germany their parents were Nazis and in the U.S. they kept invading countries and sending the youth out to die. So for many of them the barrier was already there. Not easy to take advice from people who were complacent about slaughter.

[Blind groper]

Yes, but most violence is by young men in the 15 to 30 year old bracket. Since the baby boom generation was spread over a couple decades, this meant youth in the affected range were prominent from the late 1960's to about 1992.

Most such young people were good and non violent people, of course. However, it only takes a relatively small percentage (1 to 2%?) to boost violent crime. Since part of the youth culture was a rejection of the older generation, that small minority felt that rebellion through violent crime was OK. There was even a best selling book by an African American guy who boasted of raping white women, and justifying it as revenge against the whiteys who enslaved the blacks. He did not mention the harm to those innocent women!

[Audley Strange]

To him they were not innocent. Was it that prick Eldridge Cleaver by any chance? It sounds like the sort of shit that fucking poisonous idiot would have gleefully stated.

[MrJonno]

Best way to decrease domestic violence is to increase foreign violence. Get all your young men sent of to the trenches and wiped out and crime will fall for a generation (which it did between the wars)

[Beatsong]

Not sure I buy this.

My main problem is the fact that "youth culture" predates the late 1960s and postdates 1990. Kids in the 1950s already had a perfectly strong sense of forming their own subculture different from their parents, and their parents found Elvis and Little Richard every bit as shocking as they themselves found the Sex Pistols two decades later. And kids in the 1990s and 2000s had if anything, even more of all that going on because they had more money to spend, and now social media to connect through.

I think this is one of those self-fulfilling arguments of looking for the dates you want to make work and making them work.

There's also the fact that the flower power generation was all about peace. Why would a generation of people dedicated to making the world a more peaceful place full of kindness and flowers and Buddhist meditation, turn en masse to a life of violent crime?

[Rum]

I think it is more complex than this proposes and perhaps rather more prosaic. I worked as a Youth Offending Officer for two years in the early 90s. (hated it so moved on..). The amount of car crime in the Midlands (very urban and high crime for the UK) was astronomical at the time. One young charmer I dealt with was done for stealing 35 cars in three months.

Car manufacturers worked hard to making cars much harder to break into and start and were successful right at about that time and car theft dropped like a stone. At the same time the punishment for burglary was boosted (one can debate if this was a factor I am sure) and securityt alarms suddenly sprouted everywhere. Prior to that periods they were pretty rare.

I am sure there are social factors involved in the reduction of crime, but prevention and the reduction of opportunity is a big factor too.

[Blind groper]

To Rum

Worth noting that this is about homicide rate, not car theft. Not that I disagree on the idea that the causes may have been several. But the youth culture of the baby boomers fits the rise as well as the fall in violence.

To Beatsong.
I do not agree that the 1950's represent youth culture, any more than any previous era. The sheer number of young people boosts the history of late 1960's to early 1990's into youth culture. The 1950's were influenced by young people, just as every era before or since was. But the degree of influence was less, simply because the percentage of the population that was young was less.

The era of greater violence was characterised by a contempt for authority, as comes from young people. Such a contempt supports crime, and especially violent crime.

[JimC]

My peer group in the late 60s and 70s was very non-violent in general, but other sub-cultures at the time in Oz were into alcohol fuelled brawling - but so is a sub-group of todays youth...

[cronus]

Violence hasn't gone away rather been sublimated by video game culture. Why knock a old mans walking stick from under him when you can play a first person shooter? In the event of power outages, for any reason, normal activity will resume.

[Beatsong]

I do not agree that the 1950's represent youth culture, any more than any previous era. The sheer number of young people boosts the history of late 1960's to early 1990's into youth culture. The 1950's were influenced by young people, just as every era before or since was. But the degree of influence was less, simply because the percentage of the population that was young was less.

How much less?

You're presumeably comparing people who were born after about 1940 (thus coming to the critical crime-committing age of late teens into twenties, from the late 60s onwards) with those born before. Do you have any stats about just how markedly birth rates took off at that point? Your thesis might be strengthened if the change in birth rates shows a strong correspondence with the change in crime rates twenty years later.

[Blind groper]

Not my thesis, Beatsong, to be frank. This is from Prof. Stephen Pinker. He showed the graph in his book, and, yes, the increase in birth rate was marked post WWII, and the increase in crime happened 20 years later.