Children Killing Children

▪ 1999

by Elliott Currie

      On March 24, 1998, two boys, aged 11 and 13, opened fire with rifles on a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school, killing four of their fellow students—all girls, aged 11 and 12—and one of their teachers. The Jonesboro tragedy was particularly shocking because the shooters were so young, but it was neither the first nor the last of a string of similar incidents that had begun more than two years earlier. In February 1996 a 14-year-old boy shot and killed two students and a teacher in Moses Lake, Wash. In October 1997 a Pearl, Miss., teenager stabbed his mother to death and then shot and killed two girls at his high school; in December a 14-year-old in West Paducah, Ky., sprayed a high-school prayer meeting with gunfire, killing three girls. In May 1998, just two months after the Jonesboro slayings, a 15-year-old killed two students and wounded 22 others at his Springfield, Ore., high school after having shot his parents to death at home; in September two teenagers in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colo., gunned down four other teens and one adult.

      Though experts were quick to point out that serious youth violence had actually declined somewhat overall in the United States during the past few years, these shootings were a grim confirmation of the deadly seriousness of the problem of youth homicide in the U.S. They were also a chilling suggestion that it could happen anywhere—in supposedly placid towns in the semirural or suburban heartland as well as on the streets of the inner cities. Because of that, these shootings set off a national mood of self-searching about the roots of youth violence that a decade of inner-city carnage had not.

      Many observers blamed the tragedies on a lenient juvenile justice system unprepared to cope with a new generation of hardened "predators." During recent years, however, most states had already toughened their responses to teenage offenders. Between 1992 and 1995, for example, 41 states passed laws making it easier for teenagers to be tried as adults. Indeed, several of the youths involved in the recent spate of school killings received extremely severe sentences in adult courts—two consecutive life sentences plus 205 years for the Moses Lake youth, two life sentences plus seven consecutive 20-year terms for the youth convicted in Mississippi.

      Seen in international perspective, moreover, the U.S. was, if anything, unusually harsh on many young offenders; an American juvenile was roughly 11 times as likely to be sent to adult court as his counterpart in Canada. The U.S. also remained the only advanced industrial society that imposed the death penalty for homicides committed by youths under 18. Yet, despite being relatively "tough" on young offenders, the U.S. also suffered the industrial world's highest levels of youth homicide. The most recent international figures (for 1995 and in some cases 1994) revealed that an American male aged 15-24 was 22 times as likely to die of homicide as a French or German youth, 34 times as likely as an English youth, and 94 times as likely as an Austrian. Only in some less-developed countries (including Colombia and Venezuela) or in parts of the former Soviet Union (including Russia and Estonia) were the risks of being murdered higher. These differences persisted, if a bit less glaringly, for younger children and also applied, though less strikingly, to girls; at ages 5-14 an American girl was more than twice as likely to be murdered as a French boy and four times as likely as an English one.

      What accounts for these disparities? No one claims to have all the answers, but some important differences between the U.S. and many other advanced societies are noteworthy. The recent killings highlighted one of them—the prevalence of firearms in the U.S. and the ease with which children can find and use them. More than four out of five murder victims aged 12-17 in the U.S. are killed by firearms. Virtually all of the 116% rise in teen homicide deaths from 1985 to 1995 was accounted for by guns.

      Guns, however, are only part of a more complex story. Homicide deaths among American children by means other than handguns remain much higher than the overall rates in many other advanced nations. Also, it must be remembered that children in the U.S. typically had easy access to rifles and shotguns long before the shootings that stunned the nation in the 1990s. Beyond the sheer availability of the means of killing, therefore, part of the explanation for the U.S.'s tragic dominance in youth homicide must be sought in the broader social and cultural conditions that surround children and youth in the U.S.

      One of these conditions is the unusual severity of economic inequality among American children and their families compared with their counterparts in most other industrial nations. An American child is roughly four times as likely to be poor as a French or German child and six times as likely as a Swedish or Dutch child, and although the gap between affluent and poor families and children has widened in many countries in recent years, the trend has been sharpest in the U.S. These differences involve more than money income alone; many of the other industrial societies also provide a broad array of other social supports, including child care and universal preventive health care. Criminological studies have found strong links between extremes of inequality and rates of homicide.

      As with guns, however, the extremes of poverty and the social neglect do not fully explain the U.S.'s crisis of children killing children; the school killings during the past two years were not committed by the children of the very poor. It appears that some of the same forces that have bred high levels of youth violence in the inner cities may have been at work, in less-dramatic but still disruptive ways, in more mainstream American communities as well. Many such communities had, for example, suffered from long-term declines in public investment in activities and institutions that serve the young, including school counseling and adolescent mental health services. That decline, moreover, occurred just as other trends were eroding the capacity of families and communities to provide consistent support and guidance for their children. For example, stagnant wages for many American workers meant that parents often had to work longer hours to keep families afloat financially; others moved frequently in search of job opportunities, fracturing families and severing community ties. These changes forced many youths to negotiate the difficult trials of adolescence without much adult help—and arguably rendered them more vulnerable to sometimes destructive peer pressures and to mass media that were increasingly saturated with violence.

      By the same token, however, these troubling social deficits point to some of the elements of a more effective response to youth homicide. Some observers emphasize long-term improvements in social support services. Others stress the importance of more systematic strategies to keep guns out of childrens' hands—such as tougher laws mandating safe gun storage and trigger locks or other safety devices. During the 1990s a number of programs designed to work intensively with troubled youths to help resolve problems with family, school, and peers have shown remarkable success, even with seriously violent children. Many experts agree that such programs can help, in many cases, to prevent the kinds of tragedies that have recurrently devastated American communities. The harder question is whether a nation suffused by an increasingly punitive mood toward juvenile offenders and skeptical of the value of social spending will be willing to commit resources to such preventive efforts on a scale to match the urgency of the problem.

Elliott Currie is a professor at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

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