WASHINGTON, March 28: America has traditionally treated juvenile crimes with kid gloves. The basic ground rule for the US media in reporting crimes involving teenagers is to withhold their names. But now, even as a shocked nation agonises over the Jonesboro incident in which two boys, aged 11 and 13, massacred five of their classmates in a shooting spree, the media has taken its gloves off.Nothing illustrated it better than New York's pugnacious -- some would say repugnant -- tabloids. "Natural Born Killers," screamed the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, famous for its immortal headline, "Headless Body in Topless Bar".
The rival New York Daily News blared "Born to Kill." Both papers carried identical pictures of the younger suspect, wearing a baseball cap, taking aim with a gun. The older boy was identified as Mitchell Johnson.
The tabloids weren't the only ones -- in fact not even the very first. In a stunning departure from norm and tradition, even the mainline American media printedthe names with the venerable and usually cautious The New York Times first of the block. Times Managing Editor Bill Keller said the paper printed the names because so many people had seen the crime, most people in Jonesboro knew the suspects' identities, and "exploring the suspects' backgrounds was an important part of understanding the story."
The Washington Post followed a day later, noting that the paper ordinarily does not name juveniles accused of crimes unless they have been charged as adults and arguing that the "paper decided to identify the Jonesboro boys because their names and photographs were published in their hometown paper and in many other newspapers around the country, and were broadcast by the major television networks."
Meanwhile, talk radio and television is awash with hand wringing and soul searching over school violence in America. Although, figures for 1995 showed over 700 murderers aged 15 and below, there is little to suggest that school violence isincreasing. In fact, one report released by a Washington-based non-profit organisation Justice Policy Institute on Wednesday showed juvenile homicide arrests decreased 30 percent between 1994 and 1996, although some say the problem is becoming acute in rural areas. Overall, crime in America is also dropping and a general sense of well-being pervaded the nation's big cities before the latest outrage.
But that's the spiel offered by city fathers and law-and-order experts. Sociologists and psychologists on the other hand are zeroing in on children and the environment they are growing up in to explain the bizarre outbreak of violence which has seen two other Jonesboro-like incidents in the past five months. Lack of parental bonding and too much trash television are being identified as the principle causes of such dysfunctional behaviour.
The gun culture in the American South is also being fleshed out. Despite the media's tendency to show that juvenile crime and violence is largely urban, inner-city, blackphenomena, the latest incidents show that the problem exists in the restless rural south, where carrying guns is a part of the local culture and folklore.
Says New Jersey criminologist Brian Levin: "In the past, rural areas were somewhat insulated from the bombardment of negative stimuli such as violence, drugs and gangs. Now you have movies and cable and the Internet in rural areas. Evil has a nice direct marketing pipeline to rural areas that it didn't have in decades past."
The Jonesboro massacre has also rekindled the simmering debate about the gun culture in a country in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally enshrined. About half of all Americans are said to live in households with guns and the National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country. But increasing access to guns by young kids is helping liberal democrats drum up support against the NRA.
In a 1993 national survey of sixth-to 12th-graders, 15 percent said they had carried a gun in thelast month, and four percent said they had taken a gun to school the previous year. Consigned to the backburner in recent days, the NRA vs Other debate will boom again.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
