Discourses on youth: Youth in crisis?

by Kathleen Knight Abowitz

How do different cultural discourses frame the ways that institutions, legislators, and social leaders view contemporary youth? In this essay, the term discourse is defined, and the significance of institutionalized discourses that frame American youth in our own time is discussed. The final section of the essay challenges the reader to think about how we ourselves interpret and analyze these discourses as students of youth cultures and cultural studies. References, texts for further reading, and assignments follow the essay.

"The theory of discourse proposes that individuality itself is the site, as it were, on which socially produced and historically established discourses are reproduced and regulated" (O'Sullivan et al., 1994, p. 94). As we have seen, discourses concerning teens in Western industrialized nations like the United States are social constructions, emerging from a number of historical occurrences, trends, and ideas that have largely developed over the last century (see "What is a teenager?"). Individual teens are affected by these discourses; that is, individual teens construct their own adolescent lives upon the historical and social backdrop of what cultural meanings we have made and continue to make concerning the cultural category of teenager.

Discourse can be understood "as the language, themes, myths, grammars, texts, performances, etc., of any particular long term 'conversation.'" (Quantz, 1999, p. 12). Teenagers, as a large demographic and cultural influence, represent the focus of many different "cultural conversations" in our nation's past and present. Discourses on youth, in the United States and other Westernized nations, range from "youth as trouble" to "youth as fun" to the "moral crisis of youth," but whatever the particular slant of the discourse, these discourses on youth have been pervasive and powerful:

Once the general theoretical notion of discourse has been achieved, attention turns to specific discourses in which socially established sense is encountered and contested. These range from media discourses like television and news, to institutionalized discourses like medicine, literature, and science. Discourses are structured and interrelated; some are more prestigious, legitimated and hence 'more obvious' than others, while there are discourses that have an uphill struggle to win any recognition at all. Thus discourses are power relations. It follows that much of the social sense-making we're subjected to - in the media, at school, in conversation - is the working through of ideological struggle between discourses. (O'Sullivan et. al., 1994, p. 94)

Youth form the center of a number of specific discourses in American society. In part, these discourses are media discourses, since what they see, hear, or read in the media feeds many of the typical American's common sense impressions of youth. In part, discourses about youth are institutionalized discourses, since several important social institutions in America - the school system and the legal system among others - regulate and monitor the activities of many teens. The media and institutions such as schools and the juvenile justice system shape, therefore, the dominant discourses about youth today. These discourses, at present, are helping shape the common-sense view that American youth are in moral crisis. How can we understand these discourses, and the ideological views at work in such dominant cultural conversations? (Image: Time magazine, 3 May 1999, http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/archive/0,2647,1999,00.html).

The discourses of crisis

A prevalent discourse concerning American youth is centered on the belief that youth are being raised in an overly permissive society. Many American opinion-leaders, law-makers, and institutional officials share this belief that youth are increasingly amoral or immoral, and must be more tightly controlled in order to be properly socialized for responsible adulthood. Take a look at some samples from the mainstream media:

Inside a nightclub, where a party known as a "rave" was under way, 16-year-old Sarah Jenkins could feel the beat of the music pulsating through the dance floor. Tall, with sandy hair, she moved with the dancers and felt her senses heighten. Her eyes took in the psychedelic light show flashing bright colors across the ceiling and walls. Raves like this one in Orlando, Fla., are the place to be for suburban teens like Sarah. And while they may appear safe, many have a sinister edge: trolling the periphery of the dance floor are dealers looking to sell marijuana, cocaine, heroin and psychedelics such as Ecstasy.
That night in 1995, Sarah ended up in a motel room rented by a dealer she knew. There she saw thin white lines of a powder that she thought was cocaine laid out on a table. Only after snorting several lines was she told it was heroin.
While Sarah had never tried heroin before, plenty of kids at the raves snorted it. The high it gave the user was more powerful than almost anything, they said. Sarah already smoked pot and took cocaine and Ecstasy; in her quest for a high, she was willing to try almost anything. But after snorting the drug, Sarah felt nauseated. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. She began to throw up. With her head spinning, she feared she was dying. Then she passed out.
Heroin is back, and it's hooking a new generation of users. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of eighth-, tenth- and 12th-graders who have tried the drug doubled. (Curtis, 1998)

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LITTLETON, Colo.: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold embarked on their black-clad suicide mission with a mighty arsenal. Bomb squad officers picking through the lockers and hastily discarded backpacks in Columbine High School's hallways found close to 30 bombs. Some were on timers; one blew up late Tuesday, more than 11 hours after the shootings, but no one was injured. The final toll: 15 dead and no trial, because Harris and Klebold made sure they would never have to face a judge or their victims' parents or their friends, never have to apologize, never have to explain.
So the violence is over. Innocents are dead. The perpetrators are dead. The survivors are scarred. The rest of us wonder why. (Pellegrini, 1999)

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Each year an estimated 500,000 to 1 million prescriptions for antidepressants are written for children and teens. Experts estimate that as many as 1 in 20 American preteens and adolescents suffer from clinical depression. (Chuaeoan, 1999)

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Now approaching epidemic proportions, suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among teenagers in the United States. It is estimated that 300 to 400 teen suicides occur per year in Los Angeles County; this is equivalent to one teenager lost every day. Evidence indicates that for every suicide, they are 50 to 100 attempts at suicide. Due to the stigma associated with suicide, available statistics may well underestimate the problem. Nevertheless, these figures do underscore the urgent need to seek a solution to the suicide epidemic among our young people. (Youth Suicide Prevention Information, 1999)

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Such is the pattern across the country: Lawmakers are getting tougher in their treatment of juveniles. In fact, many see a rapid dismantling of a system set up on the premise that juveniles deserve
different handling from adults. (Van Slambrouck, 1999)

Drug use, violence, depression, suicide - these ills represent only a few of the categories of crisis with which we associate youth in contemporary America. The discourse of "youth in crisis" represents a powerful way of making sense of contemporary adolescence in our society, and thus influences policies, laws, media portrayals, and institutional practices towards youth. As the juvenile justice system, among others, takes a "tough love" approach on juvenile crime, we can see that, embedded in this discourse is the solution that social institutions and leaders must emphasize strict codes of morality, discipline, and "family values." The "youth in crisis" discourse also lends to certain readings of the problems of youth as problems of individual youth rather than systemic, structural, or cultural problems at large. Note the excerpt above on depression and prescriptions for anti-depressants among young people today. Depression is an individual's problem; antidepressants are for an individual to use in coping with depression. Similarly, notice how individual youth are being viewed in the juvenile justice system as more and more individually responsible for their own criminal actions, in much the same way as adults are viewed in society. A conservative ideology drives much of the sense-making in the "youth in crisis" discourse that has been present and often pervasive in the popular media, government, and institutions such as schools, religious organizations, and the legal system throughout this century. The focus on individual responsibility, family values, and moral order all point to a conservative ideological influence in the "youth in crisis" discourses in American life today. (Image:Time magazine, 31 May 1999, http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/archive/0,2647,1999,00.html).

Counter-discourses on youth

Even very influential discourses do not operate as monolithic or omnipotent influences of public opinion and policy. Cultural conversations are struggles over meaning and interpretation rather than blue-prints which define how we think and live. Therefore, we can find counter-discourses about youth that challenge dominant meanings of the "youth in crisis" discourse that we've been discussing.

Mike Males (1996) provides one good example of this type of counter-discourse in his book The Scapegoat Generation, in which he argues that contemporary youth serve as scapegoats for a variety of adult-generated social ills. While youth are blamed for our social problems, U.S. adults grow more affluent:

Like eating peanuts, preaching the Adolescent Apocalypse has proven hard to stop. Increasingly, Clinton's health and welfare policy has consisted of blaming teenagers for nearly all major social ills: Poverty, welfare dependence, crime, gun violence, suicide, sexual promiscuity, unwed motherhood, AIDS, school failure, broken families, child abuse, drug abuse, drunken driving, smoking, and the breakdown of 'family values," the latest count as of this writing. In the last quarter century [however], American elders ('elders' signifying senior citizens and middle-agers generally over age 40) have made monumental progress if feathering our own aging nests. (Males, 1996, p. 7)

What I have referred to as the "youth in crisis" discourse, Males calls "the Adolescent Apocalypse." Whatever name you use, Males' point is the same: different discourses frame the "problem of youth" in different ways. Males argues that the "youth in crisis" discourse obscures or hides the fact that it is in American adults' interests to blame youth for cultural ills, especially if adults are getting richer while youth, as a generation, are getting fewer and fewer of society's resources:

U.S. adults over age 40 are richer than adults in any nation on earth, other than enclaves such as Switzerland and Kuwait. We enjoy the highest real incomes and lowest poverty rates of any in U.S. history. In the last 20 years, U.S. child and youth poverty rose by 60 percent. In contrast, poverty among over-40 adults declined. Youth are by far our poorest age group; one in four is impoverished, twice the rate among grownups. (Ibid.)

Giroux (1996) expresses a similar opinion: "American society at present exudes both a deep rooted hostility and chilling indifference toward youth, reinforcing the dismal conditions under which young people are increasingly living" (p. 31).

Males further points out the distortions that many representations of youth help to reinforce. In examining the condition of youth as told through media-hyped statistics and representations of the "crisis of youth," many opinion-leaders and policy-makers ignore the important contextual factors involved in the problems facing or involving youth. For example, many adults in the last decade have been troubled by the high rates of teenage pregnancy in America. In the discourse of "youth in crisis," the influence of the ideology of individualism causes much of the blame to be placed on the either immoral or ignorant sexual practices of teenage girls. Portrayals of teen pregnancy as a problem of teenage girls ignores several important contextual factors involved in the issue. One of these problems is the clear link between teen pregnancy and poverty. "A recent two-year Alan Guttmacher Institute study found six out of seven teenage mothers of all races were poor before they became pregnant" (Ibid., p. 11). Another contextual factor hidden by many portrayals of teenage pregnancy involves the issue of rape. In a 1994 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, 40 percent of sexually active girls under 15 reported that rape had been their only "sex." Further, "the Guttmacher Institute reported that the male involved in these experiences was often 'substantially older' than the female" (Ibid, p. 56). In many discussions of teenage pregnancy, neither poverty nor rape is topics that are raised, but according to these and other studies, there are clear links at work here. We can see how what gets reported and what does not get reported has a tremendous influence on how we define and address a problem as a society. That is the power of discourse - in any discourse, ideology shapes how a problem gets defined and addressed.

Take, as another example of how discourse shapes problem-posing and problem-solving, the issue of school shootings that has been so prevalent in our media coverage in the late 1990s. While approximately 75% of youths between 12-17 who are homicide victims are killed by adults, media coverage has focused national attention, public debate, and policy initiatives on school (youth-on-youth) violence (Donohue et. al., 1999). Less that 1% of all homicides among school-aged children (5-19 years of age) occurs in or around school grounds or on the way to and from school (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1999). As the problem of school violence points out to us, discourses have a strong influence over how we understand a problem.

The counter-discourses we have discussed here are frequently liberal in their ideological perspective, to counter the prevalent conservative ideologies at play in the dominant "youth in crisis" discourses. According to cultural studies theory, we cannot avoid discourse as a way of making cultural meaning, so therefore we as readers of culture cannot get beyond discourses in order to see the "true" picture of youth. How, then, are we to gain a more informed, clearer understanding of the state of American youth?

Reading discourses, reading youth

In reading any cultural text, it is important to examine the ideological influences that may shape its form and message. In the "Links" section under this topic of "Youth trends," you will find a variety of Web sites that provide statistical data, research reports, and polling data. Some of this data and analysis will provide contradictory information, often due to ideological reasons. So how do we make sense of all these varied and sometimes contradictory texts?

Like any reading, we want to see how the authors' or researchers' ideology and interests shape the text you are analyzing. To take an obvious example, we would find radically different ideologies shaping a report on teen pregnancy authored by a researcher funded by the Christian Coalition and a report on the same topic authored by a staff member at Planned Parenthood. In whose interests does the research or data work? Where are the conflicts or discrepancies in data and analysis, and what do these discrepancies mean?

Another important element in reading cultural texts about youth is to see what isn't in the text at all. As we discussed earlier, there are many contextual factors that relate to teen pregnancy - poverty, rape - that should be considered in addressing the problem. In a research report on teen pregnancy that you are analyzing, are all these factors accounted for in the research? In a text about high school drop out rates, are the influences of poverty, school tracking, and school funding examined or ignored? In a story about the Littleton shootings, how are such factors as race and gender examined or ignored? When we read texts, it is as important to see what is excluded as it is to see what the author includes.

Finally, as a reader, you must examine your own ideological influences and perspectives that shape how you understand "youth" as a cultural category. Each of us has a set of experiences, beliefs, and assumptions that shape how we read statistics about youth (or anything else, for that matter). Our own ideological positions shape how we see and analyze cultural texts, and how we act upon these texts and the discourses of which they are a part. Knowing who we are, and how we make meaning, is a crucial part of analyzing cultural texts.

"Reading youth" as a cultural category requires, then, a careful analysis of the cultural texts about youth by adults. Just as important, however, is the reading of cultural texts about youth by youth themselves. As you explore this site further, you will see that the way youth express themselves culturally is a significant component of understanding contemporary youth in American society.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (1999). Facts About violence among youth and violence in schools. Retrieved June 29, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/fact/violence.htm

Chuaeoan, Howard. (1999, 31 May). Escaping from Darkness. Time,153 (21). Retrieved June 30, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,25407,00.html

Curtis, H. P. (1998). A Deadly drug, A New generation. Reader's Digest, 9 June. Retrieved June 29, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.readersdigest.com/rdmagazine/specfeat/archives/deadlydrug.htm

Donahue, E., Schiraldi, V. & J. Ziedenberg. (1999). School house hype: School shootings and the real risks kids face in America. Justice Policy Institute. Retrieved June 28,1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/schoolhouse.html

Giroux, H. A. (1996). Hollywood, race, and the demonization of youth: The "Kids" are not "alright" (Movie review). Educational Researcher, 25(2), 31-35.

Males, M. (1996). The Scapegoat generation: America's War on adolescents. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

O'Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., & Fiske, J. (1994). Key concepts in communication and cultural studies. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Pellegrini, F. (1999, 21 April). Colorado Shootings: Now, the Aftermath," Time Daily. Retrieved June 29, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/daily/0,2960,23427,00.html

Quantz, R. (1999-2000). Lectures: Cultural Studies, power, and education. Unpublished Course Reader for EDL 282, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

San Pedro Youth Coalition. (1999). Youth suicide prevention information. Retrieved June 18, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.sanpedro.com/spyc/suicide.htm)

Van Slambrouck, P. (1999, 29 June). A Century of lessons. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved on June 18, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.csmonitor.com/infoarchive/infoarchive.shtml

For further reading

Bronski, M. (1999). Littleton, Movies, and Gay Kids. Z Magazine (July/August), 12-16.

Devlin, R. (1998). Female Juvenile Delinquency and the problem of sexual authority in America, 1945-1965. In S. A. Inness (Ed.), Delinquents and debutantes: Twentieth-century American Girls' Cultures, (pp. 83-106). New York: New York University.

Assignments

1. Textual analysis of a report

Read "School House Hype," (http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/schoolhouse.html) a report issued by a private foundation called Justice Policy Institute. What is the authors' claim, and what evidence do they use to convince you as reader? What are the authors' ideological position on youth, and how do you know? How does this article relate to the essay's point regarding discourses?

2. Comparative reading of several sites on youth

Select any one issue facing our society that directly relates to American youth (either youth in general, or one particular culture or subculture within American society). Find at least 3 different Web sites that address this issue (see a vareity of research reports, government documents, newspaper or periodical articles on-line, editorials, etc. under "Links"). Do a comparative reading on the three texts, emphasizing their ideological similarities and distinctions.