Young, tough and in trouble

Youth violence isn't a U.S. invention. A lot of kids in Europe are getting caught up in crime too.

Last week’s brutal schoolyard murder of four Arkansas girls and ateacher was front-page news not only in America but all across Europe. British papers ran pictures of the cherubic suspects, aged 13 and 11, and headlines reading: MASSACRE BOYS COULD BE FREE AT 18. Ron Taylor, the headmaster of the Dunblane, Scotland, school where 16 children and their teacher were shot two years ago last month, expressed sadness and shock. Meanwhile, Germans and French were outraged by the report that one of the purported killers had been taught to use a gun by his father at the age of 7. All in all, European reaction was one of horror at what seemed another typical American nightmare of criminal violence.

But youth violence is not typically American anymore. While overall juvenile crime, including соmmon offenses like shoplifting and vandalism has remained flat in many European countries, youth violence is on the rise (chart). In France, minors now commit nearly half of all violent robberies. In Britain, the masssoul-searching that followed the murder of toddler Jamie Bulger by two 10-year-olds in 1993 hasn't stemmed further bloodshed. Last December, teenage members of a north London gang were jailed for their part in agrisly crime spree, including a mugging, a fatal stabbing of a teacher and the gang rape of an Austrian tourist. In Germany, where neo-Nazi skinhead violence is down from its peak in the early 1990s, 80 percent of the population still believes that young people are more violent than ever.

Europe's problem has not yet reached American proportions, where yearly juvenile arrests top 2million. In many European countries, juvenile arrests are still in the tens of thousands. But more than the sheer number of incidents it is the changing nature of youth crime that disturbs Europeans. A report by Dr. Christian Pfeiffer of the Criminology Research Institute of Lower Saxonу found that violent crimes by minors increased by at least 50 percent from the mid-l980s to the mid-1990s in England and Wales, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Italy and Poland. As a result, most of these countries have begun to question the traditionally lenient punishments given young criminals. Some German officials want to lower the minimum criminal-trial age from 14 to 12. France has instituted curfews in certain neighborhoods. Europe has also begun to reflect on the larger social and economic problems that may have given rise to events like the March gunshot murder of a grocery-store owner in Normandy. The suspects, three 15-year-olds, were attempting to rob her store.

It's impossible to point to a single broad explanation for the crime problem. In Eastern Europe, the rise in youth crime coincided with the fall of communism. And though the political upheaval is largely over, itseffects are not. Young people can no longer look forward to lifetime employment; gaps between rich and poor are widening. In Spain, the crime increase has been linked to а burgeoning drug trade. Nearly 90 percent of teens picked up for offenses like burglary and bank robbery are drug users. In Italy, young immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who can't find work are the fastest-growing group of criminals. Shay Bilchek, head of the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, sums up the problem: "Kids are the most malleable part of society," he says. They do exponentially worse than adults do in bad environments."

Maybe that explains a French epidemic о f school violence. Last January a 20-year-old was stabbed to death while picking up his brother at а Тоurnan-en-Вriе high school near Paris. The 15-year-old who was accused turned himself in and is awaiting trial. A few days later, a group of four young people (including two minors) was implicated in a fire that was set in a high school in Tours. No one was injured but damages were extensive. In all, more than 1.000 acts of violence were committed in French schools in 1997.

Jacques Pain, a professor of education at the University of Paris and author of "School Violence: Germany, England and France," believes that this kind of violence is part of a larger problem. “Violenсе against school institutions marks a loss of faith in the institutions and adults, and insociety at large," Pain says. In a country with stubbornly high level of unemployment, it's not hard to understand why young people would feel hopeless about their future.

Youth violence in France isn't limited to schools. Violent acts on buses and trains, including vandalism and attacks on drivers, are up nearly 300 percent in the past four years. Residents of low-income neighborhoods live in fear of marauding teens. Youth-crime laws in France make it tough to punish offenders with jail terms. Тhе same holds true in most of Europe. Consider Jasmin O. (minors are not fully identified in German press reports), a Yugoslav refugee in Berlin who claims he is only 13. His two-and-a-half-year crime spree has filled four police binders with accounts of car theft, assault, battery, arson, burglary and prostitution. He was finally put behind bars last week, while charges are pending after doctors determined that he was at least 14.

Some European law-enforcement officials are now considering "American strategies," namely cracking down hard on all youth offenses, even petty crime. In Stains, a working-class northern suburb of Paris, the tough approach has been an important part of а соmmunity crime prevention program. A year and a half ago, drug-dealing youth gangs controlled the streets. People were afraid to go out at night, and businesses were leaving. The murder of a 15-year-old boy, reportedly by another teen, outside a supermarket finally pushed the neighborhood into action. Mayor Michel Beaumale set aside money for crime prevention. Police began a series of drug sweeps. Local courts speeded up juvenile trials and increased penalties. Community groups and schools urged families and students to report all crime. Within two years, the crime rate dropped 12 percent.

Stains's program worked not only because police and courts got tougher on crime but be­cause the entire community banded together. Tougher, longer sentences for younger offenders have been given much of the credit for Ameri­ca's recent drop in youth crime. But the fact is that at the same time the law was cracking down on kids, money for pre­vention was rising. Over the past four years, the U.S. gov­ernment has funded nearly 50,000 community crime-pre­vention programs and has giv­en S20 million to Big Broth­ers/Big Sisters, a group that sponsors sports and activities for kids after school, when youth crime tends to peak.

With this balancing act in mind, Europe is searching for new forms of crime prevention. Building more jails and locking youths up at the rates Americans have doesn't appeal to most Eu­ropeans. But German-style "vacation ther­apy," in which young offenders take taxpay­er-funded trips to places like the Canary Islands, doesn't seem right either.

Slowly, countries are tailoring solutions to fit their individual problems. In Italy, government officials are working to tighten immigration laws, even as they fund programs like the All Colors Project, which will open new vo­cational-training centers for both Italians and foreigners. In Spain, organizations like the Support Association of Moratalaz in Madrid provide after-school programs, housing and vocational training for drug-addicted youths.

In Britain, Home Secretary Jack Straw has introduced pilot programs for curfews for children under 10 and the electronic tag­ging of repeat offenders. Straw, who won public sympathy for the humility and hon­esty he showed when his own

17-year-old son was caught selling drugs in December, wants parents to take their share of respon­sibility. He is pushing for them to be held legally responsible for their children's be­havior. "There has been all this stuff about children's rights," said Straw recently. 'The most important right children have is to be children and have others take respon­sibility for them."

Signs of hope: Boys in the CIos St-Lazare projects in Stains, where community action has cut crime

Officials in Radom, a blue-collar industrial city in Poland, agree. Since October, everyone under 18 in Radom has been put on notice that they — and their parents — can be questioned by the police if they are on the streets between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. The program was launched after a series of three murders by minors, one of which involved a 16-year-old boy who smashed the head of a middle-aged man with a baseball bat. Authorities in Radom stress that this is not a curfew, which would be illegal under current laws. But the practi­cal effect is clear: very few minors roam the streets at night anymore.

The Polish Parliament is weighing whether it should endorse such initiatives. But several oth­er Polish cities are considering following Radom's lead. "The question is whether you want a police patrol to stop when they see a 12-year-old on the street at 3 a.m.," says national police spokesperson Pawel Biedziak. "Or would you prefer to have a police car that just keeps on go­ing?" In Radom, as in many other parts of Europe, there's no longer any doubt about the answer.

Rana Dogar

With Stefan Theil in Berlin, Jane Huches and Shehnaz Sutterwalla

in London, John Parry in Madrid, Judith Warner in Paris, Andrew

Nacorski in Radom, Siecpried Mortkowitz in

Prague, Theresa Acovino in Budapest and Steven Heilbronner in Rome.

/Newsweek, April 16, 1998/