by Don Bishoff of The Register-Guard
She read all the we-have-to-do-something-about-teen-gangs quotes for three days, and now Sally Lowe of Eugene had a very simple question:
What?
“I have not heard specific advice on exactly what can be done,” said Lowe, a teacher at South Eugene High School and parent of two teens. “Somebody ought to talk to some of these gang experts about exactly what steps people can take, individually or together.”
Good question. After she called with it Thursday morning, I spent the better part of the day looking for an answer.
Alas, the short answer is that there is no short answer. No List of 10 Things to Do Tomorrow to Solve the Problem of Gangs and Juvenile Violence.
But among four people I talked to–a school official, a cop, a citizen member of an anti-gang task force and a psychologist–I did find some common themes. More specifics, and action, might come from a meeting today.
The most common theme from the four: Get tough and get involved. Early.
Make more, not fewer rules for kids from cradle to car. Get parents and schools together in drafting them.
Reinstate some of the old juveniles-only laws, such as curfews and anti-runaway statutes. Enforce existing laws, such as truancy and shoplifting, from first offenses on.
Almost sounds like a right-wing politician’s family-values platform. But I think even us unreconstructed liberals will concede that the permissiveness of the 60s and 70s helped get us into the impermissible mess of today.
“We got pretty lax in our standards and what we expected of people,” said David Piercy, school administrator and chairman of the Eugene-Springfield Gang Prevention and Intervention Partnership. “We gave them a lot of leeway. What we’re doing now is reacting that perhaps we let too much go.”
Piercy wants to again make it legally possible for a parent to stop a child from running away from home and to enforce truancy laws still on the books, but ignored.
“In particular, I think that we do need to take a hard line when it comes to violence,” he said. “We don’t have consequences. It’s just too easy now for somebody to think violence is OK, because we don’t come down hard enough when people are involved in violence.”
Psychologist John Reid, executive director of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, has done more than 30 years of research into aggression and violence in children. “The main risk factors are clearly inadequate discipline, violent discipline, or inconsistent discipline, and crappy supervision, where parents are not keeping track of their youngsters,” he said.
Like the others, Reid said parents of teens need to know where their kids are, what they’re doing, and who they’re doing it with. “We’re not supervising them enough,” he said.
Good luck. As a parent, I found just tracking–much less supervising–our teens to be a maddening task. But Reid said research shows that even trying makes a difference.
Sgt. Dave Poppe supervises the Eugene Police Officers in Schools Program. He also wants more parental clout and interest.
“If parents and neighbors feel that they have the authority and responsibility to help manage misbehavior and promote positive behavior, that would make a tremendous difference,” Poppe said. He recalled days when “the lady on the corner could yell out the window to knock it off and they’d quit; they knew she would call their parents.”
Today, the lady on the corner might get her window shot out for butting in.
Another modern problem is that, in a lot of homes, parents are a nonfactor or nonexistent. Which led Denis Hijmans, citizen member of the anti-gang partnership, to suggest more community parenting.
“Join a mentorship program–Committed Partners for Youth, Networking for Youth, Bib Brother and Big Sister. We have to get good-quality role models, and get them one-on-one with the kids who need it.”
A group of area public officials and involved citizens took part in federally sponsored conferences on gangs this summer and fall in San Jose, Calif., and Santa Fe, N.M. Now loosely organized as “the San Jose/Santa Fe group,” they plan to meet today at the Bethel School District to talk about action–the kind of specifics Sally Lowe is searching for.
“I expect that within the next two or three weeks we’re going to have some specific areas where we’re in real agreement about how to proceed,” Piercy said.
Can’t happen too soon.
“Everybody’s depressed. Teachers are feeling that parents are at fault and parents are blaming teachers and everybody’s blaming the cops,” Reid said. (He meant nationally, not Eugene-Springfield specifically.)
“There’s a lot of blame to go around. But the only way to handle this is to start acting as a community that truly does value children.”
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1994, The Register Guard, www.registerguard.com.