File under "water wet, fire hot, news at eleven."
Girls who wound up in Cook County's juvenile detention system were eight times more likely to die than the typical girl in Cook County, according to a study made public today. The study also found delinquent boys' mortality rate was 4.5 times that of those in the county's general population, pointing to a need for stronger intervention in low-income neighborhoods where most of the deaths are occurring, said one of the study's authors, Linda A. Teplin of Northwestern University.
Teplin acknowledged the numbers might not shock those accustomed to news of inner-city violence. "But I think the finding about the girls is surprising, and the finding about the boys is stunning," she said. "The nation was riveted by the 52 deaths in mass school shootings between 1990 and 2000. And yet in that same period in New York City alone, there were 840 deaths by guns among 14- to 17-year-olds."
The $15 million study tracked 1,829 youngsters between the ages of 10 to 18. They were selected randomly from the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago between 1995 and 1998. The study is appearing in the June edition of the journal Pediatrics.
Each one of the youths in the study had at least one experience with the juvenile justice system. "That means there were opportunities to intervene," Teplin said.
Dr. Gary Slutkin is director of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, whose group works to hold down homicides by intervening in gang conflicts. "This is the heart disease or cancer for young people," Slutkin said, referring to the top killers for adults. "We need to figure out how to prevent it."
Teplin said the study was the first one to explore the deaths of delinquent girls. "Think about what kinds of girls wind up in juvenile detention," she said. "A lot of them were on the streets, turning to drugs and prostitution to support themselves. They live very high-risk lives. Some were shot. One was stabbed to death by her boyfriend."
The 71 Cook County study subjects who died ranged in age from 15 to 25 at the time of their deaths. Thirty-five of them were under 18. At least 47 were shot to death. Homicide rates for the survey group were more than double those of male youths between the ages of 15 and 24 in Cali, Colombia, Teplin pointed out.
You wonder how, in this day and age, anyone could possibly be surprised by this finding. It would take a spectacular amount of near-wilful ignorance. But then, that seems to be going around, doesn't it?
The problem is, of course, that when something happens more slowly, and more importantly, doesn't stop happening, you ... get used to it. Thus, given the rise in juvenile crime in the 80s and 90s, we got used to the sad fact that kids run around killing each other, for drugs, for gang territory, for any one of a myriad of terribly terribly stupid reasons. But those deaths, in general, tended to occur out in the community, one or two at a time. Oddly, by taking place in public (so to speak) and in smaller numbers, they were turned into background noise. You still hear about these murders -- we're still conditioned to think of the deaths of children as somewhat abnormal, even now -- but they don't attract attention. (There is also, of course, the fact that these murders and other deaths occur almost entirely within minority groups, which means that since they don't involve attractive young white women, the news media simply doesn't deem them worthy of our attention.) The school shootings, though ... those were newsworthy! They involved previously unsuspected kids, killing large numbers of their fellows, all at once! You get up above five at once, people take notice! (Oh, and did we mention that almost every single one of the shooters and most of their victims were not minority? That minority kids run around shooting each other isn't shocking any more, but for nice white small-town and suburban boys to do such things! Well, that's just terribly shocking, it is.)
The one actually surprising statistic is that delinquent girls are so much more vulnerable than delinquent boys. It flies in the face of current and historic crime trends:
Gender
For violent offenses, males have been victimized at higher rates than females, and the rates for females fell to 19.0 in 2003. Except for rape/sexual assault males had higher rates than females for other violent crimes.
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, most murder victims were male, 77% in 2002.[...] Men were more likely than women to be the victim of a carjacking (2 men and 1 women per 10,000 persons).
Uniform Crime Reports, 2002 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, via FindArticles.com)
[...] Victims
Based on 2002 SHR data provided (where age, sex, or race were known for the victims), 90.1 percent of murder victims were adults. Males accounted for 76.8 percent of murder victims. Just over 8 percent (8.2 percent) of male victims and 15.3 percent of female victims were under the age of 18. By race, 48.7 percent of murder victims were white, 48.5 percent were black, and 2.7 percent were other races. (Based on Table 2.5.)...
(NOTE: 2002 data cited because it's the only year not locked up into PDF and Excel file formats. More recent data in those formats available at The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports website.)
Leaving aside the fact that the researchers were, for some reason, more shocked by the differential in the male victimization rates between juveniles and adults, it would seem that the far more shocking data should be the difference in the female rates. The puzzling thing is why it isn't more surprising to the researchers.
Posted by iain at June 06, 2005 11:13 AM
