In Columbus, two 13-year-olds were charged with a shooting death at the Easton Mall. In Cleveland, a 17-year-old turned himself in following what authorities called an unusually violent crime spree.
You get the picture.
Juvenile crime in this region and across the country continues to rise. That’s not a surprise. COVID kept people indoors and now we’re back out. Crime ebbs and flows, just like most other things.
But this crime wave feels different. The crimes — at least those that get attention — seem callous and depraved. These kids under the age of 18 act like predators instead of children.
Look closely at their mug shots. The blank, hardened faces show no signs of a soul.
Everyone has theories about why children commit crimes. It’s the fault of deadbeat dads who leave single mothers overwhelmed. Let’s blame COVID. Video games glorify violence, so that must be it.
While it’s fashionable to blame one thing for this disturbing trend, it seems, to me anyway, that a confluence of factors has collided and born a new generation of lost children.
One in four children receives a cell phone before the age of 11. An 8-year-old child spends an average of 5 hours and 33 minutes daily on social media. That’s more time than they spend on their schoolwork, with meaningful interactions with a parent, or in after-school activities.
In the United States, nearly one in four children live in a single-parent household. That’s the highest rate in the world.
In. The. World.
Women lead the vast majority of single-parent families (80%), and one in four lives in poverty. That’s a lot of hungry children.
Some 22% of children aged 12 to 18 report being bullied, according to the National Association of Education Statistics. Bullied children often suffer from depression and anxiety, but they also tend to lash out aggressively. One eye-popping study showed that bullies and those who were bullied accounted for one-third of all juvenile crimes over a four-year period. Numerous studies show bullied children — 14% or so — spend time in prison as an adult.
But I notice something that drives home the plight of young children. I sometimes drive through Dayton neighborhoods to get a feel for how they’ve changed. In almost every case, I see children walking aimlessly, some alone, some in small groups. It appears to me that they have nothing constructive to do and nowhere to go.
They have no guidance or structure, a dangerous combination for those so young.
As with any complex problem, juvenile crime has no easy fix. Those who yearn for the good old days of Ozzie and Harriet can just stop it because that version of America died long ago. That sort of neighborhood rearing I had growing up — when my friend’s mom would tell me if I didn’t behave, she’d give me a whippin’ and then hand me off to my mother to finish the job — doesn’t exist anymore.
Simply blaming the parents ignores all of the other societal factors that influence children, and there are far too many to chronicle here.
Yes, there is a growing teen crime issue with what seems to be a new level of cruelty. Instead of blaming one factor, we need to look at them all to determine how to save some of these children.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday. He can be reached at raymarcanoddn@gmail.com
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