FIGURE 7–21. Another form of violence against children
Psychological consequences aside, the moral case against bullying is ironclad. As Calvin observed, once you grow up, you can’t go beating people up for no reason. We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations, and social norms, and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other than laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view. The increased valuation of children, and the universalizing of moral viewpoints of which it is a part, made the campaign to protect children from violence by their peers inevitable. So too the effort to protect them from other depredations. Children and teenagers have long been victims of petty crimes like the theft of lunch money, vandalism of their possessions, and sexual groping, which fall in the cracks between school regulations and criminal law enforcement. Here too the interests of younger humans are increasingly being recognized.
Has it made a difference? It has begun to do so. In 2004 the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education issued a report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety that used victimization surveys and school and police statistics to document trends in violence against students from 1992 to 2003 .197 The survey asked about bullying only in the last three years, but they tracked other kinds of violence for the entire period, and found that fighting, fear at school, and crimes such as theft, sexual assault, robbery, and assault all ramped downward, as figure 7–22 shows.
And contrary to yet another scare that has recently been ginned up by the media, based on widely circulated YouTube videos of female teenagers pummeling one another, the nation’s girls have not gone wild. The rates of murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest level in forty years, and rates of weapon possession, fights, assaults, and violent injuries by and toward girls have been declining for a decade.198 With the popularity of YouTube, we can expect more of these video-driven moral panics (sadist grannies? bloodthirsty toddlers? killer gerbils?) in the years to come.
It is premature to say that the kids are all right, but they are certainly far better off than they used to be. Indeed, in some ways the effort to protect children against violence has begun to overshoot its target and is veering into the realm of sacrament and taboo.
FIGURE 7–22. Violence against youths in the United States, 1992–2003
Source: Data from DeVoe et al., 2004.
One of these taboos is what the psychologist Judith Harris calls the Nurture Assumption.199 Locke and Rousseau helped set off a revolution in the conceptualization of child-rearing by rewriting the role of caregivers from beating bad behavior out of children to shaping the kind of people they would grow into. By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.
Another sacrament is the campaign to quarantine children from the slightest shred of a trace of a hint of a reminder of violence. In Chicago in 2009, after twenty-five students aged eleven to fifteen took part in the age-old sport of a cafeteria food fight, they were rounded up by the police, handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon, photographed for mug shots, and charged with reckless conduct.200 Zero-tolerance policies for weapons on school property led to a threat of reform school for a six-year-old Cub Scout who had packed an all-in-one camping utensil in his lunch box, the expulsion of a twelve-year-old girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project, and the suspension of an Eagle Scout who followed the motto “Be Prepared” by keeping a sleeping bag, drinking water, emergency food, and a two-inch pocketknife in his car.201 Many schools have hired whistle-wielding “recess coaches” to steer children into constructive organized games, because left on their own they might run into one another, bicker over balls and jump ropes, or monopolize patches of playground.202
Adults have increasingly tried to keep depictions of violence out of children’s culture. In a climactic sequence of the 1982 movie E.T., Elliott sneaks past a police roadblock with E.T. in the basket of his bicycle. When the film was rereleased in a 20th-anniversary version in 2002, Steven Spielberg had digitally disarmed the officers, using computer-generated imagery to replace their rifles with walkie-talkies.203 Around Halloween, parents are now instructed to dress their children in “positive costumes” such as historical figures or items of food like carrots or pumpkins rather than zombies, vampires, or characters from slasher films.204 A memo from a Los Angeles school carried the following costume advisory:They should not depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary.
Masks are allowed only during the parade.
Costumes may not demean any race, religion, nationality, handicapped
condition, or gender.
No fake fingernails.
No weapons, even fake ones.
Elsewhere in California, a mother who thought that her children might be frightened by the Halloween tombstones and monsters in a neighbor’s yard called the police to report it as a hate crime.205
The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase. Now that children are safe from being smothered on the day they are born, starved in foundling homes, poisoned by wet nurses, beaten to death by fathers, cooked in pies by stepmothers, worked to death in mines and mills, felled by infectious diseases, and beaten up by bullies, experts have racked their brains for ways to eke infinitesimal increments of safety from a curve of diminishing or even reversing returns. Children are not allowed to be outside in the middle of the day (skin cancer), to play in the grass (deer ticks), to buy lemonade from a stand (bacteria on lemon peel), or to lick cake batter off spoons (salmonella from uncooked eggs). Lawyer-vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber, their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height, and their seesaws removed altogether (so that the kid at the bottom can’t jump off and watch the kid at the top come hurtling to the ground—the most fun part of playing on a seesaw). When the producers of Sesame Street issued a set of DVDs containing classic programs from the first years of the series (1969–74), they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children!206 The programs showed kids engaging in dangerous activities like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. Censored altogether was Monsterpiece Theater, because at the end of each episode the ascotted, smoking-jacketed host, Alistair Cookie (played by Cookie Monster), gobbled down his pipe, which glamorizes the use of tobacco products and depicts a choking hazard.
But nothing has transformed childhood as much as the risk of kidnapping by strangers, a textbook case in the psychology of fear.207 Since 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to a school bus stop in lower Manhattan, kidnapped children have riveted the nation’s attention, thanks to three interest groups that are dedicated to sowing panic among the nation’s parents. The grief-stricken parents of murdered children understandably want some
thing good to come out of their tragedies, and several have devoted their lives to raising awareness of child abductions. (One of them, John Walsh, campaigned to have photographs of missing children featured on milk cartons, and hosted a lurid television program, America’s Most Wanted, which specialized in horrific kidnap-murders.) Politicians, police chiefs, and corporate publicists can smell a no-lose campaign from a mile away—who could be against protecting children from perverts?—and have held ostentatious ceremonies to announce protective measures named after missing children (Code Adam, Amber Alerts, Megan’s Law, the National Missing Children Day). The media too can recognize a ratings pump when they see one, and have stoked the fear with round-the-clock vigils, documentaries in constant rotation (“It is every parent’s nightmare . . .”), and a Law and Order spinoff dedicated to nothing but sex crimes.
Childhood has never been the same. American parents will not let their children out of their sight. Children are chauffeured, chaperoned, and tethered with cell phones, which, far from reducing parents’ anxiety, only sends them into a tizzy if a child doesn’t answer on the first ring. Making friends in the playground has given way to mother-arranged playdates, a phrase that didn’t exist before the 1980s.208 Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New York Sun column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone: Columnist Stirs Controversy with Experiment in Childhood Independence.”) In response she started a movement—Free-Range Children—and proposed National Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day, intended to get children to learn to play by themselves without constant adult supervision.210
Skenazy is not, in fact, America’s worst mom. She simply did what no politician, policeman, parent, or producer ever did: she looked up the facts. The overwhelming majority of milk-carton children were not lured into vans by sex perverts, child traffickers, or ransom artists, but were teenagers who ran away from home, or children taken by a divorced parent who was embittered by an unfavorable custody ruling. The annual number of abductions by strangers has ranged from 200 to 300 in the 1990s to about 100 today, around half of whom are murdered. With 50 million children in the United States, that works out to an annual homicide rate of one in a million (0.001 per hundred thousand, to use our usual metric). That’s about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211
One might reply that the safety of a child is so precious that even if these precautions saved a few lives a year, they would be worth the anxiety and expense. But the reasoning is spurious. People inescapably trade off safety for other good things in life, as when they set aside money for their children’s college education rather than installing a sprinkler system in their homes, or drive with their children to a vacation destination rather than letting them play video games in the safety of their bedrooms all summer. The campaign for perfect safety from abductions ignores costs like constricting childhood experience, increasing childhood obesity, instilling chronic anxiety in working women, and scaring young adults away from having children.
And even if minimizing risk were the only good in life, the innumerate safety advisories would not accomplish it. Many measures, like the milk-carton wanted posters, are examples of what criminologists call crime-control theater: they advertise that something is being done without actually doing anything.212 When 300 million people change their lives to reduce a risk to 50 people, they will probably do more harm than good, because of the unforeseen consequences of their adjustments on the vastly more than 50 people who are affected by them. To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.213 And one form of crime-control theater, electronic highway signs that display the names of missing children to drivers on freeways, may cause slowdowns, distracted drivers, and the inevitable accidents.214
The movement over the past two centuries to increase the valuation of children’s lives is one of the great moral advances in history. But the movement over the past two decades to increase the valuation to infinity can lead only to absurdities.
GAY RIGHTS, THE DECLINE OF GAY-BASHING, AND THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY
It would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilization. But it would not be much of an exaggeration.215
In a landmark 1936 paper, Turing laid out a set of simple mechanical operations that was sufficient to compute any mathematical or logical formula that was computable at all.216 These operations could easily be implemented in a machine—a digital computer—and a decade later Turing designed a practicable version that served as a prototype for the computers we use today. In the interim, he worked for the British decryption unit during World War II and helped to crack the cipher used by the Nazis to communicate with their U-boats, which was instrumental in defeating the German naval blockade and turning around the war. When the war was over, Turing wrote a paper (still widely read today) that equated thinking with computation, thereby offering an explanation of how intelligence could be carried out by a physical system.217 For good measure, he then tackled one of the hardest problems in science—how the structure of an organism could emerge from a pool of chemicals during embryonic development—and proposed an ingenious solution.
How did Western civilization thank one of the greatest geniuses it ever produced? In 1952 the British government arrested him, withdrew his security clearance, threatened him with prison, and chemically castrated him, driving him to suicide at the age of forty-two.
What did Turing do to earn this stunning display of ingratitude? He had sex with a man. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain at the time, and he was charged with gross indecency, under the same statute that in the preceding century had broken another genius, Oscar Wilde. Turing’s persecution was motivated by a fear that homosexuals were vulnerable to being entrapped by Soviet agents. The fear became risible eight years later when the British war secretary John Profumo was forced to resign because he had had an affair with the mistress of a Soviet spy.
At least since Leviticus 20:13 prescribed the death penalty for a man lying with mankind as he lieth with a woman, many governments have used their monopoly on violence to imprison, torture, mutilate, and kill homosexuals.218 A gay person who escaped government violence in the form of laws against indecency, sodomy, buggery, unnatural acts, or crimes against nature was vulnerable to violence from his fellow citizens in the form of gay-bashing, homophobic violence, and antigay hate crimes.
Homophobic violence, whether state-sponsored or grassroots, is a mysterious entry in the catalog of human violence, because there is nothing in it for the aggressor. No contested resource is at stake, and since homosexuality is a victimless crime, no peace is gained by deterring it. If anything, one might expect straight men to react to their gay fellows by thinking: “Great! More women for me!” By the same logic, lesbianism should be the most heinous crime imaginable, because it takes women out of the mating pool two at a time.
But homophobia has been more prominent in history than lesbophobia.219 While many legal systems single out male homosexuality for criminalization, no legal system singles out l
esbianism, and hate crimes against gay men outnumber hate crimes against gay women by a ratio of almost five to one.220
Homophobia is an evolutionary puzzle, as is homosexuality itself.221 It’s not that there’s anything mysterious about homosexual behavior. Humans are a polymorphously perverse species, and now and again seek sexual gratification from all manner of living and nonliving things that don’t contribute to their reproductive output. Men in all-male settings such as ships, prisons, and boarding schools often make do with the available object that resembles a female body more closely than anything else in the vicinity. Pederasty, which offers a softer, smoother, and more docile object, has been institutionalized in a number of societies, including, famously, the elite of ancient Greece. When homosexual behavior is institutionalized, not surprisingly, there is little homophobia as we know it. Women, for their part, are less ardent but more flexible in their sexuality, and many go through phases in life when they are happily celibate, promiscuous, monogamous, or homosexual; hence the phenomenon in American women’s colleges of the LUG (lesbian until graduation).222
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 66
