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JOANN CONRAD 

The Janus-faced angelic/monstrous child is deeply etched onto the popular 
imagination. Adult attitudes towards children can be typified as ambivalent-
swinging between the dual images of the threatened child and the threatening 
child which mirror a fear/fantasy complex and which manifest in a confused 
and contradictory array of imagery, ideology, and policy. Literally 
emblematic poster children for the Missing Children's movement allow for a 
public show of concern and elicit calls for child protection which bolster 
America's self-image as caring and child-friendly, while the public voting 
record shows a steady tendency to gut the very social programs that would 
ensure the well being of millions of (faceless) children. Positive images of 
childhood and youth today appear stable, in fact, only in the imaginary past. 
There, good kids, nostalgic simulacra of now-aging Baby Boomers, live 
relatively uncomplicated and safe lives in the good old days that never were; 
the promise of the future insured by the uncontested adult-controlled social 
order. 

The conceptual category of "adolescence" or "youth" as a differentiated 
age group, one which is governed by special rules, restrictions, and 
protection, only fully emerged in the U.S. public imagination in the post-
WWII period, when the economic and ideological requirements of peace 
time demanded a longer period of "immaturity," fostering more dependency, 
leisure, and consumerism—an about-face reversal of the practice of 
determining young males to be psychologically mature to satisfy the 
demands of war time conscription (Enright 541-59). Adolescence thus 
constituted the third leg of the triangulated American nuclear family—
"purified of toxins [and] fully adapted to the requirements of discipline 
within an advanced capitalist system" (Ivy 97). Adolescence, however was 
an inherently volatile, fertile, and ambiguous site-the source of adult 
fascination and emulation as well as fear. The boundaries of adolescence 
were also flexible and permeable, difficult to fix and maintain. 

If, in this period, we can say that adolescence represented an extension 
of the privileged space of childhood, with a few additional freedoms, the 
concept a "juvenile criminal justice system" also provided for a legal and 
vernacular space for "wayward" youth that sought to protect them from the 
adult judicial and penal systems. But the very articulation of the category of 
"juvenile delinquent" provided the basis for an official discourse on youth as 
potentially falling into the category of deviant which was threatening to the 
institution of the American family. Public imagery reflected a dual 
epistemology in which youths within the normative sphere were extended the 
same privilege as their younger siblings, while both children and youth 
outside this racially and class-segregated sphere were 



 

consistently denied access to the protected space of childhood. Policy 
responses to this dual system hinged on the concept of "containment"—the 
increased control, management, observation, and restriction of movement of 
all youth—in the maintenance of the separate normative and pathological 
spheres. 

Real-life children and youth today don't "conform to the imperatives of 
adults and mainstream culture," and have become "alien and sometimes 
hazardous in the public eye" (Giroux 13), embodiments of a racial, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural future which appears threatening and foreign to 
many adults. In the past two decades, significant demographic shifts and 
economic restructuring have signalled a crisis in our collective under-
standing of youth—the "face" of the future is increasingly multicultural, and 
children, once thought of as economic assets are now seen more as liabilities 
or as competitors for an ever-shrinking resource pool. This paper is about the 
ideological response to this crisis—those mediated and narrated 
reconfigurations of the adult-youth relationship which can be seen as 
recuperative strategies which encompass all youth into the potential 
pathological sphere. In addition, this paper seeks to investigate the 
convergence of public perception, ideology, media, and politics which has 
emerged as a generalized and naturalized discourse on youth, and which is 
manifest in the educational and criminal justice systems. The paper is based 
on the premise that contemporary popular representations of youth are a 
dominant form of cultural politics which reinforce the normalization of 
certain adult-based violent behavior as they demonize and commoditize 
youth, validating the claim that those relegated to childhood and adolescence 
–disenfranchised minors—are consistently denied voice and power in 
contemporary American culture. 

On April 20, 1999, two students from Columbine High School in 
Littleton, Colorado, opened fire on their school mates, killing 15 people 
(including themselves) and wounding 23 others. This, the deadliest school 
massacre in U.S. history, coming at the end of a series of similar-appearing 
school shootings beginning in October 1997, has been portrayed as the 
watershed mark for American youth. Events and policy implementation are 
conceptualized as being "pre-" or "post-Columbine." We are now in the post-
Columbine age-a new era of "killer kids" and "zero tolerance" where a 
generalized "Columbine Effect" determines school policy.l But this kind of 
rhetoric suggests a causality inherent in the event itself. Rather, I would like 
to suggest that the event makes the story but the story conceptualizes the 
event (Oring). In other words, the meaning that accrues around the event is 
dependent on the particular representation of it. Representations of 
Columbine, thus, constitute the event, and the ways in which we make this 
event meaningful, the ways in which it is narrativized and represented, 

CONRAD 

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THE WAR ON YOUTH 

are dependent on an already in-place communicative system, a set of cul-
turally agreed-upon signifying practices. Additionally, the consumers of such 
images are implicated in the production of meaning, and this shared cultural 
map pre-exists in an ideological and discursive field which is hospitable to a 
particular representation of these school shootings. 

In this ideological field, contemporary youth have been collectively 
demonized, with individual instances of violent behavior generalized and 
presented as trends or epidemics. This growing "epidemic" of juvenile 
lawlessness, addiction to violence, drug abuse, and general monstrousness 
has been presented by politicians, lawmakers, and news media, and has 
sedimented into public consciousness—into the stories we tell and the ways 
in which we order reality. These stories have helped to construct a generation 
of deviants through what Foucault has called a "literature of criminality," 
affirming that an "ever-present [juvenile] criminality is a constant menace to 
the social body as a whole" (Foucault 142). 

- More and more teenagers, acting individually or in gangs, are 
running amuck. 
-. . . juvenile crime appears to be more widespread and vicious than 
ever before. 
- Adolescents have always been violence prone, but there are 
horrendous crimes being committed by even younger adults.  
- The teen crime wave flows across all races, class and lifestyles 
(Toufexis 52), 
-Crime may be down, but juvenile crime is way up (Alter 30).  
- Juvenile offenses have soared since the mid-1980s, while adult 
violent crime rates have remained fairly steady (US News and 
World Report 29). 
- In the last three and one-half years, the crime rate is down, but the 
violence among young people under eighteen is up (Males 82). 

This public belief in the growing problem of violent youth, which is dis-
proportionate to current statistical information,2 and which is, furthermore, in 
contrast to most adults' actual experiences, should be seen as what Lawrence 
Grossberg calls an "affective epidemic;" a fetishized site, disconnected and 
disproportionate to its actual worth, ideological in intent, and fed by the 
"daily economy of saturated panics" (Acland 284). 

Since 1997, the highly-exposed and repetitively-aired school shootings 
in more suburban, or rural, middle-class white schools have been conflated 
with the already-existing category of the inner-city gang in a perverse 
affirmative action which criminalizes all youth. The serialized, repetitive 

35 



 

CONRAD 

presentations of this violence in the news imply that it is "routine," ubiqui-
tous, and is occurring at younger and younger ages. Pathologizing and 
marginalizing such youth by means of psychological analyses and after-the-
fact profiling and typologizing transforms individuals into "types," their 
behavior into "patterns," obscuring the common social and cultural milieu in 
which these events not only arise, but in which they become newsworthy, and 
denying the fact that violence is "jointly constructed through the interaction 
of agent and institution, individual and society" (Devine 3). 

We need to read these moves to fix the meaning of youth as ideological, 
but we also need to understand the processes by which these cultural 
constructs have become so natural, so commonsensical in popular perception. 
The narratives which organize our everyday experiences are increasingly 
being guided by the visual logic of mass media. That is, visual pop culture 
regulates "conventional" meanings and social practices. Thus visual imagery, 
and the visual logic of commercial media which relies on shallow but 
repetitive impact which is "cognitively diminished but emotionally charged," 
provides the basis for our cognitive and narrative categories. We need to 
interrogate the repetitive, serialized images of school shootings, particularly 
of Columbine—how do these images, embedded in periodic news stories that 
revisit the sites, tend to attenuate affective response while they build 
consensus through volume, through constant repetition? The naturalization of 
such ideological and cultural constructions of youth tend to carry over into 
policy when the organization of reality that is increasingly structured 
according to a mediated logic carries over into other areas of public life, 
notably the educational and criminal justice systems. 

The representation and popular perception of children and youth as "out 
of control" and antagonistic toward, if not dangerous to, adults and adult 
privilege is politically potent, and has spawned a host of mean-spirited, 
ideologically conservative, racist and ageist policies and pedagogies that are 
far ranging in scope, but singular in purpose—the repression and restriction 
of youth. The public perception that youth generally constitute a threat to 
society has resulted in predictable "solutions" that are increasingly punitive,3 
and which call for greater restrictions and surveillance of all kids, such as the 
imposition of curfews and the use of metal detectors and surveillance cameras 
in schools, the early identification of "problem kids," and their subsequent 
institutionalized removal from the social sphere, either through the use of 
psychotropic drugs or through incarceration—"zero tolerance no nonsense 
tough love." The latest of these "solutions" is California's Proposition 21. 

36 



 

THE WAR ON YOUTH 

On March 7, 2000, Californians voted 62% to 38% in favor of Proposi-
tion 21, known as the "Youth Crime Initiative," or "Gang Violence and 
Juvenile Crime Prevention Act," but perceptively dubbed the "War On 
Youth" by its opponents, most of whom were under-age teens of color. 
Riding the crest of the public panic about "killer kids" that was spectacularly 
brought to prominence by school shootings such as Columbine, this 
redundant, punitive initiative targets youth—particularly loosely-defined 
"gangs" lowering the age at which youths accused of serious offenses would 
automatically be tried and sentenced as adults to 14,4 and the age at which 
they could be incarcerated in adult prisons to 16, while it stiffens many of the 
penalties for crimes committed by gang members, although the definition of 
"gang" is nefariously vague and racist in implementation. Prop 21 effectively 
rolls back a 100-year-old juvenile criminal justice code that sought to protect 
and rehabilitate children and youths more than it sought punishment or 
retribution, and more generally follows a growing California tendency of 
building prisons while gutting the educational system, so that today there are 
more youths in the penal system than there are attending the University of 
California. The rhetoric surrounding the initiative is generally presented in 
terms of "us versus them," those with power versus those without, and adults 
against youth. Former California Governor, Pete Wilson, who sponsored 
Prop 21, spoke to voters' visceral fears of "kids gone bad," and framed the 
initiative in clearly generational (and false) terms, saying: "While adult crime 
has been falling dramatically, the same cannot be said for youth violence and 
gang violence" (Ellis B4). 

Prop 21, and its run-away support by voters, is the latest in a series of 
measures that are fed by special interests and by fear mongering, but that also 
gain strength and credibility, in part, by tapping into a pre-existing cultural 
landscape of sedimented folklore, belief, and popularized psychology which 
aggregate around the intergenerational strife narrative—Oedipus. The 
Oedipal complex was primary to Freud and his "family romance," and Freud, 
and a vernacularized Freudian psychology, has been thoroughly imbricated 
into popular American consciousness in the second half of the 20th century. 
Accordingly, Oedipus has become, according to Marina Warner, a "dominant 
tale in our time" (Warner 68). The privileging of this tale, and the subsequent 
silencing of others that place more emphasis on murderous, cannibalistic, and 
rapacious fathers, and the dominance of the Freudian reading of the Oedipal 
tale itself, which obscures the original crime of Oedipus's father Laius, is a 
master plot of the late 19th and 20th century, and is echoed in contemporary 
"get tough" policies toward youth. 

We have to reintegrate this master plot of the symbolic imagination into 
the cultural and ideological context out of which it emerged. The 

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CONRAD 

Oedipal complex as a by-now naturalized psychoanalytic construct is his-
torically situated within the discourses of modern capitalism, and in this 
sense, the Oedipus complex is the "figurehead of imperialism" (Foucault 
xx), one of the most persuasive agents in the modern micro-physics of power. 
Seen in this light, we can begin to divest the Oedipus tale of its 
individualistic family romance status and read it as a metaphor for society. 
Freudians and folklorists alike become complicit in their unquestioned 
reaffirmation of the patriarchal privilege in their embrace of this tale and its 
normalizing interpretation which are reinscribed in the legal, social, and 
political complex that emerged in the early modern period which naturalized 
paternal authority, infantilized citizenship, and bifurcated the concept of the 
child, who could be either incorporated or incarcerated in the maintenance of 
patriarchal privilege. Today's rhetoric in support of measures such as Prop 21 
seemingly upholds such a Freudian Oedipal logic and is also putatively 
defensive: protecting us from "the most violent juvenile criminals and gang 
offenders" (California Voter 48), justifying the escalation of draconian 
measures directed against youth. 

The classic Oedipus begins with a prophecy, as do contemporary 
narratives which flow from our oracle, the media, and from our prophets, the 
"experts." According to Time's cover article on "Teen Age Time Bombs," 

They are just four, five and six years old right now, but already 
they are making criminologists nervous [. . .]. By the year 2005 they 
will be teenagers—[. . .] "temporary sociopaths—impulsive and 
immature," in the words of Northeastern U. criminologist James 
Alan Fox. (Zoglin) 

Similarly, under the headline "The Coming Mayhem," LA Times editor Ri-
chard Rodriguez echoes Oedipus's banishment in his demands to incarcerate 
contemporary youth: 

. . . a growing population of teenage boys will mean an increase in murders, 
rapes, and muggings. A new type of criminal is emerging. . . Remorseless, 
vacant-eyed, sullen-and very young. . . We are entering a Stephen King novel. 
We are entering an America where adults are afraid of children. Where children 
rule the streets. Where adults cower at the approaching tiny figure on the 
sidewalk ahead," (Rodgriguez 36) 

Vladimir Propp's observation that the Oedipal "Prophecy does not 
determine the outcome; rather the outcome determines the prophecy" (Propp 
83) perhaps illuminates a paternal animus that is occulted in the dominant 
Freudian Oedipal interpretation. The naturalized status of the Oedipal 
complex in modern discourses has, in fact, reaffirmed this animus 

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THE WAR ON YOUTH 

by only focusing on some aspects of the Oedipal plot and rejecting or 
ignoring others. This is the tyranny of Oedipus in which analysis is prior to 
data. The current focus on a generation of killer kids likewise tends to ignore 
obvious contemporary statistics to the contrary: not only are many more 
adults killed by other adults than by children each year, but more children are 
killed by adults than adults by children and youth in any given time period-
including the 2,000 to 3,000 children and youths reported murdered by their 
own parents every year (Males 99). Couple this with staggering figures of 
child poverty, neglect, and abuse, along with the systematic abandonment of 
children in both the social and educational systems, and the case for paternal 
animus becomes fairly persuasive. Clearly there is a generational tragedy, but 
its story is just as clearly topsy-turvy. 

The stories we tell and the narrative paradigms we use to construct them 
both derive and shape perceptions about our relationships as human beings, 
and "reality" is constituted and acted upon according to such conceptual and 
narrative models. Contemporary representations simultaneously project youth 
as the object of adult violence and rage, the object of adult moralistic anti-
violence campaigns (violently implemented), and the object of adult desires. 
In our contemporary narratives about collective fears of monstrous youth, and 
the affective crisis that these narratives have engendered, what we can see are 
the machinations of hegemony (Acland 19), in a recuperative narrative 
strategy. Like the Family Romance, "Family Values," that thin smokescreen 
for a conservative economic drive in which "capital has taken upon itself the 
relations of alliance and filiation (Deleuze and Guattari 263)," is more 
appropriately seen as an adult fantasy which has "exonerated the real exterior 
family of any wrongs. 
. .[by] posit[ing] autonomous repression [as] independent of social re-
pression. . ." Abandoning the child in order to "substitute the individual 
fantasy that makes the real parents into so many innocents or even victims 
(Deleuze and Guattari 270)." 

NOTES 

1. See for example: "The Columbine Effect: 'Zero Tolerance' Sounds like a 
Good Way to Treat Violence in our Schools. But Does it Go too Far?" Time v154, 
n23 (Dee 6, 1999):51+. 

2. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle dated Oct. 18, 1999, entitled 
"Arrests for Juvenile Crimes Drop Across Nation," (A2), FBI "figures" are reported 
to indicate that "juvenile arrests for serious and violent crimes fell nearly 11 percent 
from 1997 to 1998." 

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CONRAD 

3. For example the "Juvenile Superpredator Incapacitation Act," which passed in 
the House of Representatives on May 8, 1997. by a vote of 286 to 132 and which was 
supported by President Clinton. Rep. Bill McCollum (R) Florida sponsored the 
punitive bill by stating, ". . . there's so many new and increasing and alarming 
numbers on violent crime among teenagers. . . We need to provide a change, a repair 
in a broken juvenile justice system in this nation we have one out of every five 
violent crimes in America being committed by those under 18 years of age..." [not 
mentioning that 4 out of 5 are therefore over 18, but are not also a superpredator age 
group]. 

4. In California, prior to Prop 21, it was legally possible to try a 14-year-old as 
an adult, but on a judge's recommendation, whereas after Prop. 21 this is at the 
recommendation of prosecutors. 

WORKS CITED 

Acland, Charles R. Youth, Murder, Spectacle. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1995. 
Alter, Jonathan. Newsweek (28 April 1997): 30. 
"Argument in Favor of Proposition 21." California Voter Information Guide for 

Primary (7 March 2000):48. 
Clinton, Bill. Speech. 11 June 1996. Albuquerque, NM. 
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 
 Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 
Devine, John. "Violence; The Latest Curricular Speciality." HFG Review 2.1 (1997). 
 From «www.hfg.orglhtml/pages/devine.htm» 
Enright, Robert D., Victor M. Levy, Jr., Deborah Harris, and Daniel K. Lapsley. 
 "Do Economic Conditions Influence How Theorists View Adolescents?" 
 Journal of Youth and Adolescence 16.6 (1987): 541-59. 
Ellis, John. "Wilson Seeks Stiffer Juvenile Terms." The Fresno Bee: Metro (4 
 February 2000): B4. 
Foucault, Michel. "The Dangerous Individual." In Michel Foucault: Politics, Phi- 

losophy, Culture. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1988. 121-51.  
______. "Introduction." Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. xx.  
Giroux, Henry. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. New York: Routledge, 
 1996. 
Ivy, Marilyn. "Have You Seen Me?" In Children and the Politics of Culture. Ed 

Sharon Stephens. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. 79-104. 
Oring, Elliott. "Legend, Truth, News." Southern Folklore (1998): 163-77.  
Males, Mike. Framing Youth. Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1999. 
Propp, Valdimir. "Oedipus in the Light of Folklore." In Oedipus: A Folklore 

Casebook. Eds. Alan Dundes and Lowell Edmunds. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 
1995.76-121. 

Rodriguez, Richard. "The Coming Mayhem." Los Angeles Times (21 Janu- 
 ary 1996). Quoted in Mike Males, Framing Youth, 36. 
Toufexis, Anastasia. "Our Violent Kids." Time (12 June 1989): 52ff. US News & 
World Report (25 March 1996): 29. 

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Warner, Marina. No Go the Bogeyman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. 
Zoglin, Richard. "Now for the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb." Time (15 
 January 1996). From: «www.time.com/time/magazine/...e/1996/dom/ 
 960115/cover.teens.html» 

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