Mike A. Males
homepage
Teenage Sex and
Pregnancy, Praeger, 2010 
(sorry, page erratically updated...)_____________________________________________________________________________
"Kids and Guns:" How Politicians,
Experts, and the Press Fabricate
UPDATED VERSION (September 2004), html
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/mal
es_guns.html
Framing
Youth: Ten Myths
About the Next Generation
(Common Courage Press, 1998)
The Scapegoat Generation:
(Common Courage Press, 1996)
Smoked:
Why Joe Camel Is Still Smiling
(Common Courage Press, 1999)
Book contact: 800/497-3207
orders-info@commoncouragepress.com
Current positions:
Senior researcher, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco, CA www.cjcj.org
Content director, YouthFacts, at http://www.YouthFacts.org
Personal contact:
333 N.W. Fifth, #2006
Oklahoma City, OK 73102 USA
Tel: 405/219-8539
Email: mmales@earthlink.net
NEW: Complete tables of arrest numbers, populations and arrest
rates of Americans by detailed ages for a variety of major offenses,
by year, 1960-2008, compiled from FBI Uniform Crime Reports. See for
yourself how interest groups have exploited selective years and crimes—or just
made things up—to manufacture a “teenage crime wave”
Great LA
Times Magazine article by Shawn Hubler excoriating Baby Boomers, but who is
that disheveled old guy cluttering up the pictures? Boomer
Buster
“American adults are more fearful of their kids than adults in
other societies, more hostile toward younger people, and more willing to
abandon them and punish them for social problems than adults in other Western
countries.” Why?
–Interview
with Paul Kiel, c UnionDocs radio,
Information on California Youth in Transition, description
My study of Monitoring the Future surveys of drug
use from 1975 through 2002 shows than in years in which high school seniors
report using more illicit drugs, students have significantly LOWER rates
misbehaviors in school, violent and property crime, violent and property
victimizations, fights with parents and employers, school dropout, suicide,
homicide, firearms deaths, pregnancy, and other bad effects. Do the surveys of
teenage drug use preoccupying policy makers, drug-war interests, and the news
media really mean anything?
See Males, Mike. “What do student drug use surveys
really mean?” Journal of School Health, January 2005
Article text Data Tables
And now for something completely different on “today’s teenagers:”
Columns, articles, research papers, and data tables
General and recent
Outright lying to fabricate a crisis of “rising youth violence” defines
Latino youth lead the new youth activism. Who are the immigrants?
The hysteria against teenage drivers has become so crazed it menaces
rational safety policy. Let’s remember: American “experts” have brought us the
most ineffective policies on earth. Drive-by journalism.
See the full study of how experts have ignored the crucial factor of youth
poverty and instead blamed teen traffic accidents solely on discredited “risk
taking” myths. Teen
Drivers: What Are the Real Risks?
Anyone who thinks adult brains engage rational and complex thinking,
take a glance at the mindless “MySpace.com” hysteria sweeping the press. In
blunt fact, kids are safer online, alone and unsupervised, than they are in
church. Grownups, get
a grip
To understand the violent destruction
Getting lots of emails and appeals to support progressives and
Democrats? Don’t give them a dime or your money or minute of your time until
they pledge to cease their self-destructive ways—chiefly, bashing the young,
who hold the only realistic hope for a leftist revival. Young voters vs Old
Voters--the real 2004 story
And, for a perfect example of how America’s once-noble Left is
self-destructing by spreading false, inflammatory lies about the young, check
out the Media Education Foundation’s terrible “culture-war” videos . How smug progressives
insanely degrade youth
After huge declines over the last 35 years, San
Francisco Bay Area youth now have among the world's lowest suicide rates –
yet self-serving hysterics continue to misrepresent them as self-destructive
for financial and psychological profit (San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, 2
December 2005).
WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT: Look, older
California over age 45 is 60% white,
You can’t stop it, you can’t gate yourselves in
highrise or exurban enclaves, even moving to
You’ve forgotten that those Latino kids bussing your
upscale restaurant table, Asian youth waving us to parking places or typing in
our internet exchange, black and white youngsters snaring our chai or fries,
are ponying up a whopping 15% of their meager incomes for our social security
and Medicare—way more than we richer-than-ever white enclavists pay after
loopholes. So vote yes on more tax money for schools and universities, abolish
curfews, smile at the next kid you see, and TAKE PRIDE in the fact that California
is history’s first rich multicultural state!
Stop running away! Multicolor
Along with drugs and crime, the rampant myths about “teenage pregnancy”
circulated by the Teen Pregnancy Industry (centered in the National Campaign to
Prevent Teen Pregnancy) include the false image that “teen pregnancy” means an
overheated, ignorant, or immoral junior/senior high school boy and girl ( in
fact, that pairing accounts for just one-fifth of “teen” pregnancies); that
dubious claim that abstinence and contraception brought down the “teenage”
birth rate over the last decade (in fact, 77% of the teen birth decline
consisted of a huge drop in births to MARRIED teens, 41% of whom gave birth in
1990 compared to just 17% in 2002, not the unwed teens programs and welfare
reforms targeted); and glaring omissions top authorities seem completely
ignorant of (what caused the married teen birth decline? Why did the number of
teen boys (but not girls) getting married double during the 1990s, led by black
teen males? Who are they marrying? Why
have the traditional motivators of teen marriage, having or legitimating children
and establishing independent households, declined so rapidly?) For the latest
in national and
“Mean Girls”? The vicious attack by authors, fillmakers, experts, and
the media on society’s latest scapegoat, adolescent girls, looks a lot like
mean-spirited bullying itself (Los Angeles Times Op-ed). Bullying Girls.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy’s school drug-testing
“summits” are the latest salvo in drug czar John Walter’s fanatic zeal to
punish youths who DON’T have drug problems while letting grownups who do
continue to wreak addicted havoc. With a drug czar like John
Walters, who needs Osama?
For a century prior to 1970,
Even as the best information shows today’s youth are a vast improvement
over their Baby Boom parents, American’s fear and hostility toward youth has
become increasingly intense and irrational. Maybe Margaret Mead has the answer.
Coming of age in
America.
Both sides in “war on drugs” are distorting teenage drug issues: Interview with
DRCNet
Are those
“experts” condemning teenage and college “binge drinking” ignorant of the fact
that their 30- and 40-age peers drink just as heavily? binge thinking
Adults got fat
faster, then their kids got fat slower. Why do all the experts condemning
“childhood obesity” miss the obvious? gutless about gut issues
After
Should youths be
tried as children or adults? Both the “get tough” prosecutors and juvenile
court advocates are more interested in defending their pet institutions than
the “best interests of the youth”—and both sides lie shamelessly juvenile injustice
A modest proposal
for an “intergenerational equity tax” to solve California’s massive budget
woes—by taking back from lavishly subsidized, cut-my-taxes older generations
the education funding younger Californians rightly deserve ripoff
The liberal myth
of brainless, reckless, trigger-happy adolescents used to defend the juvenile
court ignores solid research findings and jeopardizes youth rights Bio-illogical
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Let’s all help
design a California Commemorative Quarter that truly reflects the Golden State
as we know it today! Below are seven of my modest design proposals:
EMERGENCY
EDITION: THE
Collect them all!
See full details at Exciting Millennial Realities!
1.
The
Prison Series Quarter (collect all 33! No, wait, 34! 35!)
2.
Modern
3.
Special
Budget Deficit Quarter (only 140 billion needed!)
4.
5.
Gated
Community Quarter (localized
6.
Gridlock
Quarter (a still-life gem! Collect full freeway series)
7.
Gold
Rush to Tech Bust (Sutter’s Mill to Silicon Shill!)
As Gary Gilmore said, “Let’s
Do It!” Yes, it’s that time for the First (of many many) “Remmy” Awards for
best 2003 Recall Campaign Statement by the 135 candidates for governor of the
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Murder’s up in
the big cities in 2002. Police, the press, politicians, and liberal groups in Los Angeles and Oakland immediately
blamed the rise on “youth violence” and teenagers. Turned out the police
departments’ own figures showed murderers are considerably OLDER in 2002—in
fact, murders by teenagers and young adults are down considerably. Click on the
city names above to read an analysis of the new face of violent crime—why it
isn’t kids, how our current crime policy led to it, and how crime lobbies left
to right haven’t had a new idea in decades.
Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine):
the P.J. O’Rourke of the Left. In a manifestly anti-progressive time,
Naderite
Drug czar John Walters, the Partnership
for a Drug Free America, other drug warriors, and-- too often-- drug policy reformers
and legalizers lie shamelessly about teens and drugs. Exploitation by both
sides defines America’s dismal drug-policy non-debate.
Robert Sharpe of
Lindesmith-Center/Drug Policy Alliance responds to my criticisms in Youth
Today
Z Magazine online presents the
most revolutionary views of modern youth to date. Interviews, edited by Tim
Allen, buttress the oppression of American adolescents in stark theoretical and
statistical form.
THE “HARPER’S INDEX” OF MYTHS ABOUT AMERICAN TEENS!
(guaranteed
to unsettle interest groups Left to Right)
Atlantic Monthly and 60
Minutes declare the Ordinary Teen the new, apocalyptic threat. Alleged
grownups, get a grip. (Los Angeles Times, Sunday Opinion, April 21,
2002)
Now it’s dysfunctional teenage brains--just as it was
for blacks, women, Latinos. Will medical-social sycophants ever give up and
admit biological determinism is bunk? (Los Angeles Times, February 17,
2002, Sunday Opinion)
The New
Drug-Thugs No One Talks About: Old White Guys (Bad Subjects)
Are the liberals and conservatives endlessly squabbling over
sex vs abstinence education using kids to blast each other? Both sides leave
out the big issues: poverty and adult sexual behavior (Youth Today)
Gen X is the latest “greatest generation,” reversing bad
Baby Boomer trends despite selfish, negative elders (Los Angeles Times,
Sunday Opinion, 26 August 2001)
Is Joseph Califano a Gateway Drug? America’s disgraceful
institutional-media crusade to convince youths wanton drunkenness, drugging,
and sex are perfectly normal adolescent behaviors (Youth Today)
New studies show the 21 drinking age and other
“adolescent means abstain-from-everything” laws are bad ideas (Youth Today)
America’s War on
Drugs gets dopier as respected reformers, led by the Lindesmith Center, jump on
the “protect our children” soapbox (Alternet)
The black teen
suicide “epidemic”--how experts lie with statistics (Alternet)
AIDS increasingly
afflicts more older, more female, more impoverished victims... so why is the
epidemic now being blamed on young black men? (Alternet)
Yeah, right... video
games, Joe Camel, and beer frogs are American kids’ big problems (Alternet)
Moral Poverty, Body
Counts: Bush Drug Czar Nominee a Veteran of Policy Shambles (Alternet)
Santee Happens (Bad
Subjects)
Ecstasy: Rave Drug or Pharmaceutical?
We live in strange times.
We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with
whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting
with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of
infinite recursion... involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all
conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect
themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and
tumble.
So give your kid a break, okay?
- Douglas Adams, RIP 1952-2001, Mostly Harmless
We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion... involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble.
So give your kid a break, okay?
- Douglas Adams, RIP 1952-2001, Mostly Harmless