Beyond the Celebrations

The disturbing things LIS students find out about real YA programming and professionals’ ethical obligation to improve YA experience

It becomes more difficult each year to convince LIS students that they need to demonstrate service impact on YAs.

It is especially difficult when they see so little professional commitment to it coming from practitioners in the field. Why is it that so few YA librarians exhibit curiosity about the outcomes their users derive from their professional interventions? It certainly is a rare instance in which librarians demonstrate this curiosity to their future colleagues.

Before you get too angry at this revelation, however, let’s establish a few basic definitions. First and foremost, let’s differentiate library inputs and outputs from outcomes.

• Inputs count the resources libraries offer their users: number of public access hours, number of computers and staff and programs, size of collections, and so on.
• Library outputs are things libraries traditionally count that occur as a consequence of inputs: visitor or “gate” counts, log-in hours on library computers, program attendance or “head-counts,” circulation statistics, etc.

Inputs and outputs help the library keep track of the resources it uses – something comparable year after year, for example.

Neither, however, address nor reflect . . .

• The degree to which actual users value their visits, benefit from computer use, enjoy programs, or grow from borrowed materials. These are Outcomes that reflect impact and illustrate what users feel was useful to them. Outcomes document the quality of YA experience.

During the more than ten years I’ve been teaching graduate LIS students interested in youth services, I have assigned a field experience in which students evaluate a YA or youth services department or program. Students from all over the country take these classes – so we’re not targeting a particular region. What students find during these examinations of “real-life” YA services is that in only very rare circumstances are young adults asked about the degree to which they value, benefit from, enjoy, or grow from what libraries offer.

How, libraries are increasingly asked, do they know they’re throwing “strikes” (offering successful services)?

Yes, students collect, review, assess, and incorporate input and output measures into their overall analysis. Not all libraries willingly share these normally public statistics with LIS students, however; something already of a concern. But most do. Thus, students analyze such things as the number of professional staff hours a library assigns to YA services, the number of summer reading program sign-ups the library records, perhaps YA-specific circulation. These are not unimportant details, particularly when compared meaningfully across several years.

Nor does ignoring the degree to which young adults enjoy, value, appreciate, and grow from their experiences necessarily mean they do not enjoy, value, appreciate, and grow from them. They very well may do so.

But it also means, however, that few libraries exhibit curiosity about these questions. It means libraries seldom collect evidence about them. To be blunter, it also means that, during the past ten years, overwhelmingly few libraries even ask their YA users about their experience. How do libraries know they’re throwing strikes?

Moreover, it means that when next year’s planning comes around, those same libraries possess no YA user data upon which to help modify and improve the services they offer. Are these the best service offerings the library can offer their YA community? How would they know? Are the appropriate resources (staff, skills, time, funding, space, planning, etc.) aligned to support the success of the services they offer? How would they know? If they don’t, what steps are necessary to better align resources with programming objectives? What other service/programming options might be better? Again, how would they know?

These questions cohere into one: To what degree do young adults value library offerings?

This is the question libraries must constantly engage to deliver professional-level YA services. Professionals must exhibit curiosity about the degree to which their interventions are valued. They must produce evidence to support it and the evidence must be easily understood by the library’s many constituencies – especially the public.

Are there obstacles to asking/answering these questions? Yes, of course. But if YA services are ever to be regarded as a professional specialization and add meaningful public value to the library and to LIS, then professionals must pursue them.

My students must assess the obstacles their example libraries face when confronting their lack of user-centric evaluation. These obstacles are familiar to any paradigm or organizational shift – such as the change from an institutional reliance on input and output measures to user evaluation in outcomes.

Students properly assess, for instance, that libraries do not align sufficient time for such evaluations during their service/program planning stages. They assess that staff do not possess sufficient skill to evaluate their own offerings – a skill set these students will certainly not lack. Another common assessment is that organizational culture would reject user-centric evaluations.

In most instances, I would suggest that these issues form common information needs or requests. How do I/we better align planning stages to demonstrate program value and effectiveness for our users? What skills do I/we need to evaluate professional services? How can I/we change the organizational structure to adopt professional-level service evaluation?

Project Outcome

Although this is a column, not a workshop, I’d like to serve temporarily as a reference librarian. In addition to several books and articles on outcomes, the Public Library Association is currently in the midst of offering Project Outcome (https://www.projectoutcome.org/) in response to these issues. The Project, free to all U.S. and Canadian libraries, addresses many of the obstacles about outcomes that practitioners face in everyday practice: how measuring outcomes can help demonstrate community impact; a Project Outcome Toolkit; examples of how to apply the toolkit in the library.

PLA’s Project Outcome is not intended simply for the otherwise privileged service profiles of adult and children’s services but is as applicable (and urgent) for YA services. During this period in which public services of all kinds find themselves under ideological and fiscal attack from so many quarters, YA services (already limping from a weak basis in research) must find a way to document the value YA users find in what libraries offer.

Libraries can begin by developing curiosity about what our YA users experience in library services, in developing evidence about those experiences, and using that evidence to improve library offerings to sharpen our strike zones.

“Members” Now: Citizens Later?

America does not appear in the mood to broaden its notion of “citizenship” for the next while. This fight doesn’t end here, of course, but the current environment is a minefield of political kryptonite and recrimination.

For several years, however, I have been urging librarians to define YA users (within the context of the particular work librarians do) broadly and locally as citizens–not as psychologists (who define youth as “patients” or research subjects) or the different ways in which police officers, school counselors, or social workers variously define young adults for their own institutions.

I previously argued that libraries adopt and redefine the notion of “citizen” to include young people in localenvironments, outside and beyond the reach of formal or legal definitions, as citizens of their cities, towns, and neighborhoods. I advanced this argument to help libraries (as local institutions) become more mindful about youth in the here and now, instead of how Youth Development’s Grand Agenda does, fixated upon distant futures mired exclusively in privileged middle-class aesthetics and aspirations.

A recent study of African American youth demonstrates that a broader citizenship vision of youth may be asking too much of this adult culture. The study documents young people in public space peacefully observing a live performance. Immediately they became characterized by police, journalists, and judges as a flash mob, as terrorists.  These American citizens, exercising their right to a non-violent public gathering, their rights to their city, facilitated by the very digital tools we want them using, attract ire and punishment for simply raising anxiety.

“Citizens are afraid,” the sentencing judge proclaimed, “to go downtown because [name of city] children are terrorizing them.” Note who gets referred to as “citizens” and who gets denied. “I’m removing you from civilized society,” he said.

These are not unique circumstances, attitudes, or even consequences.

Perhaps I’ve chosen my recommendation poorly. Perhaps my timing is off or out of phase with national trends. In any event, this nation does not appear in the mood to explore more expansive or subtle definitions of citizenship. It’s certainly not in the mood to extend the idea for its young people.

If advocating an LIS definition of young adults as citizens appears untenable at present, then what vision ought the field create to represent its young adult users?

It’s an important question.

Fortunately, the work of Roberto Gonzales comes along at the right time. Gonzales, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, recently published a provocative new study, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press, 2016). Similar to the fears illustrated by the civil authorities referred to above, Gonzales explores the consequences of a society entangled in fear: this time it’s fear of immigrants. Another judgment follows: the destruction of the life chances of the 2.1 million youth permanently trapped, “undocumented,” by careening public policy.

Gonzales’ thesis is clear: a “double-edged” existence for youth without papers. These young people grow up in the United States. While they’re young, he finds, they experience a fairly normal community life – they attend school, practice their family’s faith, and develop social capital.

About the time they turn sixteen, however, due to no fault of their own–their worlds split in two. Without “those nine digits” (a Social Security number), and regardless of school success and staying out of trouble, they’re forbidden from enjoying the benefits of citizenship and encounter exclusion from legitimate employment, housing, and many realms of well-being, including obtaining a driver’s license. For these millions “illegality” assumes the defining feature of their lives.

Gonzales opens up something libraries can use in meeting their “free to all” responsibilities and professional obligations. While he rather conflates formal “citizenship” with “community membership,” libraries don’t need to. His key point highlights the fundamental unfairness current immigration policy holds for undocumented young people living in permanent uncertainty and instability–constantly vulnerable to being identified and deported to places they have never known.

Libraries do not need to reproduce “illegality” as the master narrative in serving young people locally. Libraries can define the notion of “membership” wide enough to include all youth, embracing even those reviled by national policy.

On the one hand, as public service agencies located in nearly every community, libraries can build upon this notion of local community “membership.” Library cards and access to materials and services don’t require “those nine digits.” Libraries don’t play favorites about where one’s parents were born. Libraries don’t place youth in untenable betwixt and between positions–sifting out only the native born for access to resources and respect.

On the other hand, however, neither do libraries appear interested in evolving away from constructing youth as “students,” or as undeveloped pre-adults (“Youth Development”), ever requiring the acquisition of particular and discrete “skills” for some distant future. Libraries currently do not exhibit any more interest in defining young people as present members of the local community than they did in exploring the notion of them as entitled citizens.

Community membership roots itself in the here and now, not in the speculative future. A community member contributes their current experiences to their local environment and is not ignored because they’re “only” a teenager. A community member participates in current library affairs such as serving on a Teen Advisory Group (TAG), for example, or on a library’s new building design team, or serving as a Summer Reading Program volunteer or library page.

These opportunities offer young people access to membership in ways that our nation’s immigration policy currently forbids.

We’re not likely to see our national organization provide the necessary leadership to wean libraries from viewing young people as developmental projects. So librarians at local, regional, and state levels must think through these questions themselves.

Envisioning young people as entitled and valued present members of their local communities offers a good place to start.

Are U.S. schools dangerous places for gun violence?

By Mike A. Males, YouthFacts
April 24, 2023

A number of mass shootings have made the United States’ K-12 schools the focus of the gun safety debate and often extreme “solutions” to prevent them. However, a straightforward risk analysis shows the chances of being shot or suffering any kind of gun incident, fatal, injurious, or otherwise, is far lower in a K-12 school per hour spent there than elsewhere in American society. Even assuming maximum risk, an American student or adult staff would have to attend school daily for 397 years to suffer even odds of a gun incident of any kind, and for over 200,000 years to risk personal gun injury or fatality, about the same risk as a resident of Germany. An American child is many times more likely to be murdered by guns at home than at school. Drastic measures such as arming school personnel and/or mass screenings of students using dubious psychometric instruments are unwarranted. Gun safety policy should be based on reasoned assessments of dangers, not emotional campaigns.

Highly publicized mass shootings have made K-12 schools in the United States the focus of intensive fear, media coverage, and proposed solutions to the country’s epidemic of gun violence. Commentators regularly state that students should be “terrified” of being shot in schools, parents should be afraid to send their children to school, and extreme measures including mass psychiatric screenings of students and hundreds of thousands of armed guards in schools at annual costs of tens of billions of dollars should be implemented.

Fears of school shootings began in the late 1990s and escalated with the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School. The numbers of school shootings, along with mass shootings in general, have risen beginning in 2017. From 2018 through 2021, 144 people died in 602 school shootings, broadly defined as all fatal, injury, non-injury, stray-bullet, and gun brandishing cases in or around a K-12 school (Reidman, 2022). This study covers July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, a period which includes the Uvalde, Texas, mass school shooting, which accounted for 43% of the student school shooting deaths during the period and which boosted the death toll from school shootings substantially above those of previous years. Despite these horrific occurrences, the hypothesis of this analysis is that schools will prove safer from gun violence than other areas of American society.

Should children be “terrified to go to school”?

The widespread assumption that schools are dangerous places for gun violence suggests that to be persuasive, this analysis must deliberately adopt assumptions and measures that make the above hypothesis affirming relative school safety harder to prove. To that end, this analysis incorporates the broadest possible definition of a school shooting, the maximum enumeration of school shooting victimizations, and the one-year period during which the most shootings occurred – all pessimistic, counter-hypothesis assumptions – to calculate the risks of experiencing a shooting in a school per hour spent there.

How much time do Americans spend in K-12 schools? In 2022, the National Center for Education Statistics (2022, 2022a) estimated that 55.7 million students, 3.6 million faculty, and three million additional staff were enrolled or employed in 130,930 public and private K-12 schools. At an average daily attendance of 93.2%, 55.3 million persons would be present in K-12 schools for an average of 6.64 hours per day for 167 days per year.

School shootings are defined by the School Shooting Safety Compendium compiled from 25 sources by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS, 2022) as including “each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits

K-12 school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, day of the week.” All shootings, including suicides and those of unknown intent, are included regardless of whether they occurred during regular school hours or involved school-related participants. This analysis counts all school shootings in the SSSC database from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, victimizing persons under age 19, including all those whose ages are listed simply as “child” or “teen”, as student victims whether they were enrolled in school or not. The few victims of unknown age are apportioned to students the same as those of known age.

Corresponding national firearms death totals used to estimate dangers elsewhere in American society are tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control (2022) for calendar year 2021. Ideally, comparison of school shootings would be to the exact same time period, but 2021-2022 national figures are not yet available. Further, in keeping with the study goal of “stacking the deck” to maximize the impact of school shootings, 2021-2022 is chosen for school shootings to include the Uvalde mass shooting to maximize school victimization numbers, while 2021 is chosen for the national comparison even though preliminary projections indicate 2021-2022 gun mortality numbers will be higher. The analysis thus uses the most recent data available at this writing.

Based on these assumptions, Americans spent approximately 69.4 billion person-hours in K-12 schools in 2020-21. On a full-time annualized basis, then, American K-12 schools amount to a “nation” of 7.9 million people, between the national populations of Denmark (which suffered 84 shooting deaths in the most recent year) and Belgium (143). Assuming that the 72 total annual fatal shootings and 258 shooting injuries (including minor injuries) in 329 school firearms incidents in 2021-2022 represent the new normal, there would be 1.02 fatal and 3.75 injury shooting casualties per billion school person-hours. Focusing only on students, persons ages 5 17 spent 62 billion person-hours and, under maximized assumptions, suffered 44 fatalities and 175 injuries from shootings in schools in 2020-21. How does American school gun safety compare to other venues?

=Based on the most pessimistic assumptions from the highest year for school shootings and a broad definition that includes shootings originating off-campus and outside of school hours, a student or adult school employee would have to attend school every school day for 397 years to experience even odds of having a firearms incident of any kind – fatal, injurious, missed-firing, stray-bullet, or gun-brandishing – occur at their school. A student would have to attend school every school day (allowing for average daily attendance) for 208,000 years to risk being personally killed or injured in a shooting, and for nearly 1.2 million years to suffer even odds of being killed in a school shooting.

For all ages, 2.4% of total time is spent in a K-12 school, and 0.3% of all gun homicides take place in a school. Students ages 5-17 spend 12.2% of their total hours in school each year and suffer 3.0% of their gun homicides and 1.8% of their total gun deaths in or around the country’s K-12 schools.

These odds make schools among the safest places in the United States from shootings, fatal or otherwise. Per billion person-hours spent elsewhere in society other than at a K-12 school, the average American of all ages is 16.3 times more likely (including 7.3 times for homicides and 211 times more for suicides), and the average 5-to-17-year-old is 6.7 times more likely (including 4.2 times for homicides and 50.7 times for suicides), to suffer a fatal shooting.

However, the United States does not set a high bar for gun safety. How do American schools compare to the greater safety from guns found in other Western nations? Figure 1 compares firearms death tolls per billion person-hours for the United States and U.S. schools to those of Mexico and 18 affluent Western countries (World Population Review, 2020). While the United States ranks the worst by far for shooting deaths, its schools rank favorably with other Western countries as a whole. A person walking the hallways or campuses of an American school risks about the same odds of being shot as a person in Germany.

This risk calculation in no way diminishes the disturbing reality of school shootings or shootings elsewhere, mass and otherwise. Incomplete tabulations indicate that while U.S. schools are much safer from gun violence than elsewhere in American society, U.S. schools are much less safe from gunfire than schools in other Western countries. “The notion that school shootings are a uniquely American crisis" is difficult to dispute given their alarming frequency in the U.S. compared to the rest of the industrialized world,” World Population Review’s analysis concludes. Of 330 known school shootings worldwide in 2022, 288, or 87%, occurred in the United States (World Population Review, 2022), which has around 4% of the world’s K-12 students. The extent to which nations other than the United States keep complete records of shootings in schools is not known, perhaps because such shootings are rare in other countries. The paradox that American K-12 students are much safer from gunfire in schools than elsewhere in American society and at the same time much more in danger of shootings than students in other Western nations’ schools is the kind of innovative information that can yield powerful policy insights.

Conclusion

Americans who fear gun violence should be more frightened when a child or youth leaves a school than when they enter one. As other Western countries have shown, the shooting death of anyone, anywhere is a preventable tragedy, but we attach a special sadness to the death of a young person because of the greater loss of years and potential. It is because the shooting of a young person is a tragedy – especially in the quantity child gun victimizations occur in the United States – that the most accurate information and carefully designed policies must be applied to preventing them.

The unreasoning panic over school shootings to the exclusion of broader gun violence concerns damages effective policy and endangers young people. Gun-rights activists’ campaign to arm school officers and teachers is particularly alarming. If just a fraction of 1% of the hundreds of thousands of personnel armed with assault weapons who would be installed in schools at costs of tens of billions of dollars annually under gun-rights proposals turn out to be mentally or criminally disturbed, children would be in far more danger of being shot in school than they are now. Indeed, unwarranted shootings of other officers, adults, students, and themselves by armed school officers already have occurred. That policy recommendations like these are gaining traction results from vast overestimates of the dangers children and youth face in schools and misallocation of limited resources available to ameliorate gun violence.

The failure to set rational priorities means more people, including young people, will be shot.
The small fraction shot in mass school shootings by young peers are granted such high-priority
status for grief and policy remediation that the vast majority of child victims who are shot at
home by grownups are treated as unimportant and unworthy of mention. The FBI’s tabulation of age of shooter by age of victim shows more than three-fourths gun murder victims under age 12 were shot by adults ages 25 and older; just 5% were shot by peers under age 18, fewer than are shot by grownups age 50 and older (OJJDP, 2022).

Why are schools relatively safe? That, even in a country with staggering gun fatality, American schools suffer gun violence levels comparable to those found in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Belgium appears to relate to one commonality: like other Western nations, and unlike other American venues, American schools are almost all gun-free. Straightforward mathematical analyses of state gun-law strictness, proportions of households with guns, poverty levels, and gun death rates by type consistently show that gun proliferation and poverty levels are the major predictors of firearms homicide and overall gun death rates. Domestic violence inflicts a much higher gun violence toll on children than shootings in schools.

The clear desire of political, interest-group, and major-media commentators and authorities to avoid the uncomfortable implications of these realities shows the gun debate is more about advancing partisan agendas than protecting young people. While it is unarguably true that school shootings are tragic and deserve outrage, the exclusionary fixation on them has produced extremist “remedies” that would increase, not decrease, danger to students. We do not need hundreds of thousands of assault-weapon armed vigilantes roaming school hallways and campuses. We do not need mass screenings of tens of millions of students using dubious psychometric scorings (see Ferguson, Coulson, Barnett, 2013, 2011). It is long past time to move into a realistic era of reasoned assessments of real gun violence dangers and scientific responses.

References

Center for Homeland Defense and Security (2022). Data map for shootings at K-12 schools.
https://www.chds.us/ssdb/data-map/ 

Centers for Disease Control WONDER (2022). Provisional mortality statistics, 2018 through last
month. https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html

Education Week (2022), Education Statistics: Facts About American Schools.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts-about-american-schools/2019/01#:~:text=How%20many%20schools%20are%20there,for%20Education%20Stati
stics%20(NCES).

Ferguson, C.J., Coulson, M., Barnett, J. (2013, 2011). Psychological profiles of school shooters:
Positive directions and one big wrong turn. Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, 11:1–17. At:
https://www.christopherjferguson.com/ProfilesSS.pdf

National Center for Education Statistics (2022). Digest of Education Statistics, Tables 201.10,
208-20, 213.10. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_208.20.asp?current=yes,

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_213.10.asp?current=yes,

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_201.10.asp?current=yes

National Center for Education Statistics (2022a). Schools and staffing survey.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) (2022). Easy access to the Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980-2020.
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezashr/asp/vic_selection.asp

Reidman, D. (2022). Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Defense and Security. K-12
school shooting database. https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings

World Population Review (2022). Gun deaths by country, 2022.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country. School shootings
by country, 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-
country. Total population by country, 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries

“Listen to us:” Youth Are More Resilient Than We Deserve

Wynter, 14, demands “listen to us.” Hunter, 14, answers the question “The best thing about being young my age is… ‘Having friends and learning more and more stuff in school.’ “Your childhood is something you’ll never get back,” says 12-year-old Trinity, “And I feel like you’re an adult for a long time, way longer than your childhood.” (1)

Kids today have every justification for dwelling in fear and gloom. But they aren’t. Instead, they’re demonstrating a resilience that this society does not deserve.

Just look what we’ve been putting them through recently:

• A post-pandemic return to national childhood poverty rates
• Massive social and educational disruptions during Covid
• Universal live shooter “lockdown” drills brought on by a gun fetish
  culture and hundreds of fabricated “swatting” scares in schools across the
  nation
• Massively exaggerated moral panic and anxieties about youth mental
  health
• Banned book campaigns
• Seldom acknowledged daily violence and exploitation many face at
  home – at the hands of parents and caregivers

And what do they have to look forward to…

• Growing neoconservative austerity systematically eviscerating public
  infrastructure – especially public schools and libraires
• Women’s rights to self-determination evaporated by Supreme Court
• A Hunger Games future of environmental devastation

We don’t deserve the resilience they display.

Amid the fear mongering they’re exposed to daily, through metal detectors, lock-down drills, armed police on campus, and the psychology profession constantly pressing claims about its newfound youth market. Still, there are some recent reports offering a counternarrative to cruel
public policy and mercenary surveillance “experts” in “security” and “mental health” fields.

What the New York Times reported in its younger teen focus group is mirrored not only in resilience but the dramatic upswing of political activism of older teens. Today’s teenagers are mobilizing for sane gun control, for humane immigration policy, for identity and gender equity, and for a viable planet upon which to grow old.

The new PEW Research Center’s “Connection, Creativity and Drama: Teen Life on Social Media in 2020,” also documents positive outcomes reported by youth themselves:

• 80% report greater social connectivity
•  71% report feeling more confident in showing creativity
• 67% connect with people who support them

While moral panic fretting proliferates, evidence illustrates how these technologies overwhelming facilitates pro-social youth behaviors. Yes, it’s true and should be more widely acknowledged, that during the early days of the pandemic the federal government responded admirably and swiftly to poverty, particularly to child poverty. Federal government action aimed to avert economic catastrophe and, in the process, rolled back more than half of children in poverty. (2)

That was then. This is now. With the pandemic viewed largely in the rear-view mirror so is anti-poverty assistance. No, we don’t deserve youth’s current resilience. We certainly didn’t pay
for it. And until we obey young Wynter’s admonition to “listen to them” all we offer is hopes and prayers.

~~~~~~~~~~~

1 Ariel Kaminer, Adrian J. Rivera, and Margie Omero, “12 Teens and Tweens on America Today, New York Times,
26 March 2023, page 12.

2 Matthew Desmond, “The High Cost of Being Poor,” The New York Review of Books, 20 April 2023, pp. 55-57.

Los Angeles’s Astounding Youth Trends Terrifying Everyone

Photo by Yingchou Han on Unsplash

Amid the dire commentaries about youth currently dominating public forums, the real question we should be asking is: how are supposedly reckless, impulsive, risk-taking teenagers achieving such strikingly low rates of drug overdose, suicide, and violent crime that afflict grownups?

In fact, increasingly racially diverse younger Millennials and Generation Z are bringing astonishing improvements in youth behaviors. They are not the “teen-agers” adults have long disparaged.

Guns

Start with guns, dominating news after every mass shooting. Commentaries feature the statement that “guns are the leading cause of (external) death among American children.” This is true in L.A. County, where 68 teens died by gunfire in 2021. What no one mentions is L.A.’s teenage gun toll has hovered at half-century lows over the last five years, down 85% from 470 in 1990 and 161 in 1975.

Further, while commentators endlessly clarion a small increase in teenage gun homicides during the COVID pandemic (up from 57 in 2019), none mentioned that gun deaths among parent ages leaped even more – from 119 to 196 among ages 30-39, and 53 to 101 for ages 40-49.

Bizarrely, commentators either dodge the big question – who is shooting kids? – or lie (“just kids killing kids”). The real answer is too disturbing: “The biggest reason guns are the leading death cause for American children and youth is because American grownups are shooting them.” If taken seriously, that would upend the entire gun debate.

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report showing age of victim by age of murderer for over 3,000 Los Angeles homicides since 2010 show only 17% of the suspects in gun murders, and 12% in total murders, of victims under age 18 also were under 18. Grownup shooters age 21 and older murder many more kids and nearly all adult victims.

L.A. is on the leading edge of vanishing crime by youth. Over the last half-century, LA’s youth (five in six of whom now are of color) reduced their criminal arrests by a staggering 96%, from 108,298 in 1975 and 63,177 in 1990 to 7,935 in 2019 and 3,344 in 2021 (no, these are not typos).

While the press trumpets “surges” in “youth violence,” the latest (2021) L.A. law enforcement statistics report arrests for violent felonies for their age groupings: 20-29 (8,449), 30-39 (7,387), and 40 and older (6,995). All teens under age 20: 1,198. Violence arrests among juveniles have fallen by 85% over the last generation. The popular, unscientific myth that teenagers’ “undeveloped brains” render them innately impulsive and risky is being demolished by teens themselves.

Drugs, suicide, pregnancy, dropout

The Centers for Disease Control’s latest tabulations of fentanyl (synthetic opioid) deaths in Los Angeles County from 2020 into 2023 contain a shock for those believing teens are the crisis: Ages 20-29 (899 deaths); 30-39 (976); 40-49 (629); 50-59 (528); 60 and older (277). Ages 19 and younger? 136.

The CDC’s figures on suicide and suspected suicides in Los Angeles since 2020 are similar: ages 20-29 (426), 30-39 (429), 40-49 (380), 50-59 (384), and 60 and older (623). All ages under age 20: 109.

Unfortunately, commentaries repeat scary-sounding but meaningless cliches (which fooled even the astute late comedian George Carlin) like, “suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers.” That’s not because teens are uniquely vulnerable to suicide (just the opposite), but because teens rarely die from big killers like heart disease, cancer, and Covid-19.

We can lament the tragedies afflicting young people that still happen without scapegoating, stigmatizing, and abandoning fact, fairness, and context. The crusade across the nation to blame every social crisis on youth may invoke tones of caring and concern, but it is ugly and dangerous, spawning policies that threaten teens’ rights and social media access they use to reduce risks.

Births by L.A. mothers under age 20 (still mostly fathered by men 20 and older) plunged from 24,746 in 1990 to 2,751 in 2021. High school dropout rates among local 15-24 year-olds plummeted by 71%, while college enrollment and graduation rates rose by 62%.

Why did these dramatic improvements occur?

America did something right after all, but no one knows about it. Research by ChildTrends, economist Rick Nevin, and we at YouthFacts and the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice show teenage behavior trends closely track levels of child poverty and its hazards, like children’s toxic lead exposure. What we mislabel as “adolescent risk” actually results from economic and environmental conditions, not adolescents’ allegedly innate recklessness.

Since the early 1990s, the Earned Income Tax Credit and related government transfers have slashed youth poverty levels by 80% while Environmental Protection Agency regulations reduced lead in children’s blood by 95%. The EITC, EPA, and teens themselves are America’s biggest crime fighters.

Unfortunately, revolutionary improvement and comparative safety threaten the scary image of teenagers interest groups and media need. The Centers for Disease Control’s latest survey trumpeting a teenage “mental health crisis” finds the proportion of 12-17-year-olds reporting depression and anxiety has risen sharply over the decade. Authorities and media commentators are rushing to blame social media. Several in Congress propose banning younger teens from online platforms.

Bans like that potentially are dangerous. The Pew Research Center’s detailed 2022 study found large majorities of teens saying, “social media gives them some level of connection… reassures them that they have people to support them during tough times, and… makes them feel more accepted.”

It is much more likely that teens are more depressed because their parents are more depressed, suicidal, drug-abusing, and abusive. Adult depression has tripled in recent years. The same CDC survey found the proportions of teens reporting violent and emotional abuses inflicted by household adults have doubled and quadrupled, respectively, since 2014. More than half of teens report emotional abuses by parents, several times more than report bullying at school or online.

More depressed and anxious teenagers – especially LGBT youth, the most bullied by parents – are a normal response to more troubled grownups and oblivious authorities indulging the luxury to evade distressing realities teens cannot escape.

Humbly acknowledging crucial adult contexts and treating teenagers objectively would mean giving up the unwritten rule Americans apparently value more than safety: blaming powerless outgroups for mental illness, suicide, drug addiction, crime, and violence, stigmatized as evidencing weakness and deficient morals. We should eagerly acknowledge and understand this dynamic new generation, not lie about and fear it.

Unlocking Knowledge of Those Impacted by Juvenile Justice System

“The real crime lies in how society views us.” 

This indictment by a young individual cited in a report by the Shelby County Youth Council in Memphis stings because it is true.

Activists of all ages in Shelby County have no illusions about dislodging deep systemic racism but they demonstrate increasing impatience about how minors are treated in the largest county in Tennessee.

Salina Shamsuddin with the Youth Justice Action Council did not mince words with me when talking about how grownups need to behave.

“It’s oppressive to call us children and kids because it has a negative connotation that is
not empowering to us so we’d like to be referred to as youth … Catching them [adults] and
standing up for ourselves is one of the biggest things that works and people really
understand they cannot treat us like this anymore.”

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) centers its work on those directly impacted by the juvenile justice system in Memphis and developed 10 legal demands in its “Break the Chains” written petition and rap version . YJAC used these specific demands in its campaign to defeat the District Attorney and Juvenile Court Judge who tried many Black and Brown youth as adults.

Following this victory, the Youth Justice Action Council hosted a forum for the newly elected Judge, DA and County government officials. In small groups, two YJAC members shared their firsthand stories about the juvenile justice system and one of the other Council members facilitated. Adults were toldnot to interrupt or interrogate. Another one of the facilitators, Milana Kumar emphasized

“. . . the need to center on the experiences of systems impacted youth as opposed to just
recommendations. It’s harder to invalidate when they [DA and others] are faced with the trauma they have caused and cannot distance themselves.”

One Youth Justice Action Council representative serves on the five-member Shelby Countywide
Juvenile Justice Consortium, all appointed by the Mayor. This is not a token position. In fact, this repand the YJAC have credibility and clout plus strong rapport with the adult members.

“I don’t think we’ve ever made a decision that has not had a youth voice…They are our checks and balances. We are really led by them.”
– Rebecca Davis, Chair, Countywide Juvenile Justice Consortium

The Youth Justice Action Council (YJAC) is a youth-led organization that advocates for juvenile
system reform. It is sponsored by Stand for Children Tennessee, which advocates for improving
public education and for racial justice.The 100-year-old organization in Memphis, appropriately called Bridges USA that recently prioritized youth-adult equity and racial justice, provides the crucial structural support for this intergenerational symbiosis.

There’s a bit of disbelief that systemic change can actually happen. Even with the horrific murder by police of Tyre Nichols, the recent election fuels the determination of Salina, Milana and justice-impacted advocates to erase the superpredator view that sociologist Mike Males debunks in The Terrifying Plunge of Youth Crime .

The terrifying plunge in youth crime

By Mike Males | February 2023

Source: California Department of Justice

Why aren’t mammoth revolutions in youth behavior that make today’s teenagers a uniquely low-crime population that reduced gun deaths dramatically headlined in the news and studied excitedly in institutional forums?

Crime, gun killings, and arrest rates by youths have fallen faster in California than in any other state over the last three to five decades, a trend that apparently horrifies authorities and the news media across the political spectrum.

As California’s youth population age 10-17 grew and became more racially diverse (73% now are of Color), rates of criminal arrest plunged by 92% since 1995, and 96% since 1975. Teenagers under age 20 are now much less likely to be arrested than Californians ages 50-59, a stunning development that overturns decades of assumptions about crime and depresses major interests so much they won’t even talk about it. (One exception: the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent “Vanishing Violence” series.)

Around 8% of the youthful arrest decline is attributable to the decriminalization of marijuana in 2010, which reduced arrests for all ages. The COVID pandemic’s shutdown policies may have reduced crime in 2020, but youth arrests continued falling during the return to normalcy in 2021.

But the vast bulk of the decline is due to young people themselves. Violent crime rates among youth are down 75% over the last three decades, homicide arrests have fallen by 85%, and gun killings among youth have fallen by 72% — despite 1990s predictions of coming “hordes” of dark-skinned “adolescent super-predators” and scary recent headlines of a nonexistent youth crime “surge.” The crime plunge has saved the state over $10 billion in juvenile incarceration costs alone since 1995, with eight of 11 juvenile facilities closed already and the Division of Juvenile Justice slated to close altogether in July 2023.

California’s 35 Democratic-voting counties show larger declines in crime by youth, but both are down more than 90% since the early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, youth arrest trends have fallen by 90% in San Francisco, 90% in Siskiyou, 91% in Orange County, 92% in Los Angeles, 92% in Sacramento, 94% in San Diego, 94% in Santa Clara County (San Jose), 94% in Alameda County (Oakland), 95% in Fresno, 96% in Sierra County, and 99% in remote Mono County. California’s large urban counties had declines of 80% to 90% in violent crime rates among youth. In the early 1990s, California’s major counties suffered 500-600 firearms homicides among teenagers per year; in 2020-21, in a youth population 600,000 larger, around 150 per year – a rate decline of 80% to the lowest rate in at least 50 years.

The silence indicates a bad faith in institutional America, not only in protecting the profits of youth-crime industries from law enforcement to juvenile justice, treatment facilities, and prisons to sensationalist media, but an ego-flattering psychology that insists that adolescents are reckless and adults wise and mature. It’s time to abandon the 19th century myths that have governed crime discussion and move into the amazing opportunities the 21st century youth revolution offers.

Response to CDC’s “Teen Girls ‘Engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma” Report

MaryAnn Harlan | February 2023

I see we are at the stage in the media narrative where we are once again worried about our girls. On Feb 13th the headline at the Washington Post declared “Teen Girls ‘engulfed’ in Violence and Trauma, the CDC finds”. I don’t mean to make light of the CDC data on Youth Risk Behaviors because there is concerning data. But as someone who investigated media narratives about girlhood I couldn’t help but heave a heavy sigh. Are we really back here? It seems we are.

What was interesting is that after the first few paragraphs about an uptick in experiencing sexual violence the article focused on the mental health findings; significant increases over ten years in behaviors that could be considered symptoms of depression and suicidal thoughts and actions. It was left to the reader to correlate the uptick with the increase in suicidal ideation and depressive behavior. And that isn’t the correlation the article went on to make.

I was particularly frustrated by the gendered analysis. Girls, according to the WaPO expert, are more attuned to their feelings and therefore more likely to self-report depressive symptoms. Boys are more likely to “mask” symptoms and be aggressive. Not to mention, according to the
same quote, girls are more likely to be vulnerable to social media. Except the report didn’t actually ask about social media. So, we don’t really know if this is why girls are reporting higher rates of attempted suicide based on CDC’s data or that boys aren’t.

It is convenient to focus on girls’ emotions and so-called capacity to name their depression. But it ignores larger issues that CDC’s survey doesn’t address. Others will address some of these issues related to the actual questions, the stats, and what is missing from CDC’s report and problematic data, but I worry about the narratives the media creates.

Narratives about girls at risk quite frequently ignore race, class, age, geography, gender identification (beyond the binary), sexual orientation, disability, etc. As we saw the last time the girls at risk media narrative dominated the headlines, the imagined girl is generally white and middle class, not to mention able-bodied and cis. Monies, policies, programs flow into “fixing the imagined girl’s problem and left behind are girls who don’t fit this narrative.

Furthermore, it doesn’t take into account girls, or frankly all youth’s, own capacity to state what they need, to articulate what their actual problem is and act on it. The narrative becomes embedded in popular narratives, news articles heavily reliant on anecdote, after school special type plot lines on television and in books, popular nonfiction, and parenting advice. It is nothing short of disinformation using imagined girls as props. And I guess I am left asking who benefits from this narrative? Because that is in my estimation the real danger to youth.

What Gangs Can Teach Us

By Anthony Bernier | February 2023 

Back in them bad ol’ 1990s, when we were being taught to fear anyone who “looked like” a “gangster,” I worked at an “inner city” library. We were learning the language of “zero-tolerance,”gang injunctions and enhancements, immediate suspensions, and criminalizing something we used to call “ditching school” but now were taught to refer to it as “criminal truancy.”

The library was an example of the city’s separate-but-equal “inner-city” civic infrastructure – code for low-income immigrant and minority neighborhoods. The dilapidated building sat precariously at end of a cul-de-sac, butted-up to the side of a freeway embankment, at the dark end of a freeway underpass. It was so hidden that the police couldn’t find it! On Friday nights, the “Big Top” gang discovered that the parking lot was a great party spot. It was. Secluded from the street, the freeway screaming just feet away, they could play their music loud and not bother anyone. I wish we had a place like that when I was young…

The partying was one thing. But staff would arrive on Saturday mornings to busted beer
bottles everywhere and the side of the building, pathetic as it was, covered in graffiti.

The library’s administrative impulse here, almost by policy, and certainly reaction, was to call the police – even if they couldn’t find the building.

Then would come the lights and sirens, helicopters, and kids getting busted (if not
worse).

I honestly don’t know where it came from, but a different idea dawned on me. It just
seemed like a reasonable thing to at try.
I got this big piece of scrap cardboard, and wrote this [verbatim]…

Come on, you guys.
The little kids come in on Saturday. Do you want
them to think of Echo Park like this?

I taped the sign to the front door.
The next morning, staff came back into my office and says, “you gotta see this.” We
walk out to the front of the building and saw new tagging.
But rather than the usual stuff, this one simply said, in huge letters, “Big Top, sorry.”
And they never tagged the library again.

The point of the story is obvious.
Objectifying young people, like objectifying anyone, rarely brings about positive
outcomes. This is the lesson we never read or hear about in popular media.
Administrations treat kids like someone who sees every problem as a nail because all
they have is a hammer.
All we did here was ask.