June 16th, 2008
CNN:
Passing notes in study hall or getting your best friend to ask a boy if he likes you or, you know, LIKES you, is so last century. Nowadays, teenagers are snapping naked pictures of themselves on their cell phones and sending them to their boyfriends and girlfriends.
Many of these pictures are falling into the wrong hands — or worse, everyone’s hands, via the Internet — and leading to criminal charges.
[...] Psychologists said the phenomenon reflects typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment, with technology multiplying the potential for mischief.
I’ll be honest: sensationalist, condescending media coverage of adolescent behavior is near the top of my list of topics that challenge my objectivity. But whatever my emotions, how articles like this proliferate is an interesting academic puzzle.
That the kids are alright—relative to previous years, anyway—isn’t a secret among sociologists. Most measures of what we define as deviant behavior among youths have been declining for decades. The most respected ongoing study of teen drug use, Monitoring the Future, finds that except for a spike in the mid-1990s, rates of use have consistently held steady or declined since 1979 [pdf]. A CDC study published the same day as the CNN article above found significant “overall improvements in health-related behaviors,” including rates of sexual activity, drug use, and attempted suicide.
Mainstream media coverage about deviant youth behaviors during this time, however, has tended to fixate on negative trends, often manufacturing hysterical mountains out of statistical molehills. The Just Say No crusade was launched in the midst of free-falling rates of drug abuse. Considerable fears of school shootings persist, despite the fact that no more than 42 students have been violently killed in any year since 1992. Although the aforementioned positive CDC story hasn’t received much media attention, a different CDC study from March estimating that 1 in 4 American teenage girls has an STD was featured prominently by ABC, CNN, FOX News, the New York Times, and USA Today.
Clearly, there are historical, economic, communicative, and even biological forces partly responsible for this phenomenon. But I wonder if this popular aversion to a positive outlook about younger generations has a particular resonance in American society.
“Blaming the victim” is commonly used in a criminological sense, but the origin of the term is actually sociological, and it has a different meaning in that context. William Ryan used it to describe the Moynihan Report’s “[attempt] to divert responsibility for poverty from social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.”
When it comes to youth today, there are many compelling social structural factors at work: nearly 1 in 5 living in poverty (the highest percentage of any age group), 11 percent of those under 18 and 29 percent between 18 and 24 without health care [pdf], unstable families, restricted civil liberties, and a compulsory educational system that both American political parties agree is in need of major reforms. These factors have been enumerated and scrutinized by social scientists such as Robert Epstein, John Gatto, Henry Giroux, and Mike Males, but aren’t cited nearly as often as perceived moral failings.
Why might we be motivated to emphasize behavioral and cultural factors at the expense of social structural factors when kids and teens behave badly? One possible reason is that American society is particularly susceptible to adopting a victim-blaming perspective. The tenet that ours is a “land of opportunity” in which anyone is capable of achieving material and social success is to a large extent one that denies or diminishes the influence of repressive social structures. Certainly many Americans have made astonishing achievements in spite of their lowly socioeconomic backgrounds, and certainly our degree of social mobility exceeds that of many other countries. But that doesn’t mean that repressive social structures don’t exist, that they aren’t strong enough to exclude many others from the possibility of mobility, or that those trumpeted rags-to-riches tales aren’t mere aberrations.
The secular “land of opportunity” narrative is reinforced by our religious roots. Blaming the victim, to a large extent, requires a belief in a just world, which lends itself to the brand of predestined Protestantism that proliferated in America’s early days. One of the granddaddies of sociology, Max Weber, argued in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that material and secular success became equated with spiritual success in the vacuum of religious authority following the Reformation. Though Protestantism certainly doesn’t contend anymore that bad things don’t happen to good people, for many years many denominations did.
Age in many ways is no different than gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. All are potential demographic vehicles for social stratification. All have been axes along which much historical subjugation has occurred, as the hegemonic category has enforced structural inequities. And all have been occasions for victim-blaming.
Today, respected media sources quote psychologists who sneer at “typical teenage hormones and lack of judgment.” Fifty years ago, they might have cited “experts” who would bemoan typical female hormones. Or typical African-American lack of judgment.
Although racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices still persist, most Americans have accepted after long struggles that traditionally subordinate populations aren’t biologically inferior, morally bankrupt, intellectually deficient, or a dangerously deviant fifth column set against the destruction of all that is good and healthy in our society. Yet even the most politically correct adults, after the next school shooting, will attribute those very misguided qualities to their children’s cohort without irony.
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