The Culture of Fear (12 page)

Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive “is notoriously low” for a job that is “difficult and often unpleasant.” Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing
homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.)
⁷⁰

No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, “This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it’s about bad people who end up working there.” It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows.

Faulty Diagnoses and Callous Cures

A
merica’s children face far graver dangers than parents realize.
Journalists, politicians, and advocacy organizations reiterate that conclusion incessantly. One way they reiterate it, as we have seen, is through stories about sexual predators in churches, schools, and cyberspace. Another is by asserting that children face huge hazards that the public and policy makers have failed to appreciate.

A front-page article in the sports section of the
New York Times
told the story of young Scott Croteau of Lewiston, Maine, cocaptain of the football team and reportedly the most popular student at his high school. Possessed of good looks and straight-As, Scott was being recruited by Harvard and Princeton at the time he hanged himself from a tree and then shot himself in the head with a revolver. “Suicide,” the
Times
reported, “has become one of the major causes of death among American teen-agers, following automobile accidents and homicides.” What is particularly disturbing, said a public health expert quoted in the piece, suicide by young people “is a virtually unrecognized national public health problem.”
¹

Or consider a page-one headline in the the
Washington Post:
“Prescription Error Claims Dad’s ‘Angel’–Mistakes on Rise, Pharmacists Say.” The story told of little Megan McClave of Hampton, Virginia, who was given medication by her father upon her return home from having her tonsils removed, went to bed for the night, and never woke up. “Pharmacists say their jobs are becoming tougher, and mistakes more common,” reports the
Post,
“because of the rapidly increasing number of medications hitting the market every year and the new generic equivalents for older drugs.” At some large-chain stores and bulk prescription services pharmacists who fill hundreds of prescriptions a day may be overworked, and as in Megan’s case, dispense the wrong pills.
²

Reading this stuff, most parents undoubtedly think
my child could be next.
But need they? On closer reading, the evidence journalists amass in support of the supposed trends seldom turns out to be overwhelming. “Medical experts say that although a mistake as serious as the one that killed Megan is extremely rare, prescription errors are not as infrequent as commonly believed,” was the best the
Post
could muster. The
Times
at least gave some scary-sounding statistics in its story about suicide : the incidence of teen and young adult suicides nearly tripled between 1952 and 1992, to 1,847 in 1992.
³

Those numbers can be read, however, in a considerably less alarmist way. At the conclusion of a forty-year period during which increases in the divorce and poverty rates, decreases in investment in education and counseling services, and the advent of AIDS put more stress than ever on American adolescents, about 1 in 10,000 saw fit to end his or her life. I do not want to minimize their tragic loss, but the numbers pale beside statistics for other threats faced by teens. One in nine goes hungry for some part of each month, for instance, and the number of hungry young Americans increased by half between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
⁴

That suicide is the third leading cause of death for teens—a startling fact that the media repeat early and often in stories about kids who take their own lives—also warrants a moment’s reflection. Adolescents are unlikely to die of cancer, heart disease, or HIV Those leading killers of adults generally take years to progress. Fortunately, we live in a period and place where, unlike most cultures throughout history, the vast majority of people survive to adulthood. It is far from surprising that those young people who do lose their lives fall victim to immediate causes, which is to say, accidents, homicide, and suicide.
⁵

The trend in youth suicide actually has been moderately encouraging in recent years. Nationwide, an all-time high was recorded in 1988, and since then the rate has stabilized, even decreasing slightly in some years. In the 1990s some locales experienced substantial increases that were widely reported in their local media, while others enjoyed spectacular declines that went almost unacknowledged. In Los Angeles the news media barely took note when the teen suicide rate fell to its lowest
level in three decades during the mid-1990s. They focused instead on three adolescents who leapt to their deaths from a cliff in 1996. The deaths, reporters told us, were “a reminder of how astonishingly fraught with danger the teenage years have become in America”
(Time).
⁶

Even more illuminating than speculation about the perilousness of American society or the fluctuations in the numbers of teens who commit suicide is a well-documented change in
how
they end their lives. More kids succeed in suicide attempts these days than in the past because more of them—about 60 percent—use guns. As we have seen, the ready availability of guns also accounts for most teen homicides and many fatal accidents, the other two leading causes of death for this age group. Perhaps politicians, social scientists, journalists, and anyone else who reports on dangers to kids should install on their computers a screen saver that shows a revolver, and beneath it, in big letters: IT’S THE GUNS, STUPID.
⁷

As much as the media and politicians would have us believe otherwise, most American children are not in imminent danger from the overhyped hazards of our age. Researchers have a good idea of what truly puts kids at greater risk. In the case of suicide, for instance, nine out of ten teens who kill themselves are clinically depressed, abusing drugs or alcohol, or coping with severe family traumas.
⁸

Scott Croteau, as it turns out, was a case in point. Outwardly he may have appeared to be doing well, but at home Scott was subject to extraordinary levels of stress. The gun he used to kill himself had been purchased by his father, who said he bought it to protect himself from his ex-wife, Scott’s mother, a recovering alcoholic who had been arrested several times for theft. The mother, fearful in turn for her own safety, had sought a protective order against Scott’s father.
⁹

Or consider a less life-threatening but much publicized risk to our youth. To judge by the abundant coverage the press has devoted to it throughout the 1990s, every parent ought to worry about whether her
son or daughter has become addicted to gambling.
USA Today
ran a headline—“Teen Gambling: An Epidemic”—and two full pages of stories plus an editorial about what it dubbed “the invisible addiction.” According to a story in the
Indianapolis Star,
fully nine out of ten students in Indiana’s middle schools and high schools have gambled. Deemed “the latest peril for America’s troubled teenagers”
(U.S. News & World Report),
gambling holds “such a fascination for the young a child can get very addicted to it and it becomes his whole life” (ABC News).
¹⁰

“Sociologists are alarmed by studies saying teenagers are four times as likely to gamble as adults,” the
Christian Science Monitor
reported. A sociologist myself, I have to confess that I have never experienced that sense of alarm nor heard it expressed by colleagues. The statistic rings untrue, conjuring up as it does images of clandestine casinos in the basements of high schools, with boys whose voices have yet to change serving as croupiers. Actual studies show that the vast majority of kids who gamble engage in nothing more serious than buying Lotto tickets or betting on the Super Bowl with their pals. Kids who do become problem gamblers almost always have other problems, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, depression, and relationship troubles being the most common. Among the best predictors is having parents who gamble heavily.
¹¹

Sue Fisher, a British sociologist, studied teens who gamble obsessively and learned that their compulsion was a response to other problems such as unwanted pregnancy or abusive parents. Often when their troubles eased, so did their gambling. Other heavy-gambling teens, Fisher discovered, are merely going through a routine stage in the transition to adulthood. They may appear “addicted” to gambling, but actually they are rebelling or mimicking their parents, and once their rebellious period ends, they give up or greatly reduce their gambling.
¹²

You wouldn’t know any of this from stories in the media. Front-page articles in 1998 went on about a nineteen-year-old from Long Island named Moshe Pergament, “a teenager who saw no way out of his gambling debt”
(Seattle
Times) and “decided to end his gambling and his life”
(New York Times)
after going $6,000 in the hole. Reporters told us almost nothing about Pergament’s pathway to either gambling or suicide,
nor why this young man from an affluent family felt he could not get financial help or counseling. Nor did they question the tall tales of other kids they wrote about—kids such as “Greg from Philadelphia,” who told
Time
that a bookie “said he would cut off my mother’s legs if I didn’t pay.”
¹³

Reporters do manage to find reputed experts who lend credence to their stories about teen gambling, but the same people get quoted time and again, sometimes saying precisely the same thing. “Public understanding of gambling is where our understanding of alcoholism was some 40 or 50 years ago,” said psychologist Durand Jacobs of Loma Linda University in both
Time
and the
Los Angeles Times.
He has been a favorite as well with the
Christian Science Monitor,
which has run a story almost every year since 1989 proclaiming that teen gambling is “growing.”
¹⁴

Read apart from the fear mongering coverage in which they are embedded, studies of gambling by teens suggest little cause for rampant parental panic. Psychologist Howard Shaffer of Harvard made headlines with his assertion that the rate of problem gambling among adolescents is more than twice that of adults. Depending on which report of Shaffer’s you read and which level of severity he is describing, the number of teens with gambling problems is between 4 percent and 22 percent. But Shaffer concedes that, as with other risky behaviors young people try, most will lose interest in gambling as they get older and settle into work and family roles.
¹⁵

No one knows whether teen gambling is more extensive or injurious today than in previous eras. Many of us adults recall losing our lunch money in betting pools for sports events, poker games with our buddies, and “Casino Nights” the high school threw to raise money for the marching band. Some of us also remember our uncles’ or grandfathers’ stories about sneaking into racetracks and pool halls and wagering everything they made as newspaper delivery boys. Look beyond the scary headlines about today’s teen bettors and you discover they are probably no worse. Although they are coming of age in an era of explosive growth for the casino industry, most have resisted temptation and stuck to rather benign wagering. A survey of sixth- through twelfth-graders
in Louisiana, conducted after riverboat and Indian casinos opened there, provoked alarmist reactions from politicians and journalists for its finding that about nine out of ten of the state’s adolescents had gambled. Yet unpack that shocking statistic and you discover that two thirds of the students had bought scratch-off lottery tickets, about half had wagered on cards and sports teams, and just 3 percent had been to a riverboat casino and 4 percent to a land-based casino.
¹⁶

About the only researcher willing to paint a picture of teens as casino aficionados was a young man whose studies made headlines in the early 1980s. He captured journalists’ attention with a survey he claimed showed that 64 percent of students at Atlantic City High School bet in local casinos. The researcher, Marty Rimm, also conducted an experiment in which, clad as an Arab sheik, he entered the Playboy Hotel and Casino and was offered instant credit and given royal treatment even though he was only sixteen years of age.

Vigorously criticized by the gaming industry as inaccurate, Rimm’s studies nonetheless garnered tremendous attention and motivated the New Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from eighteen to twenty-one. It took another fourteen years, however, before Marty Rimm established himself as what he really is: a media manipulator
par excellence.
He secured this distinction upon the appearance of Time magazine’s July 3, 1995, issue, the cover of which was filled from border to border with the face of a little boy sitting in front a computer keyboard, illuminated in an ominous blue-gray glow from a monitor, his mouth open and eyes aghast at what he saw. “CYBERPORN,” read the huge headline below the child’s chin, and below that, “EXCLUSIVE : A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?”
¹⁷

The story’s main point—that cyberspace so overflows with smut, some is sure to leak out of your child’s computer screen—was anchored to seemingly solid scientific evidence. “A research team at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has conducted an exhaustive study of online porn,”
Time
reported. They found “917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories and film clips.” The
Time
article identified Marty Rimm as “the study’s principal investigator,” a rather reverential way of referring to him, considering that Rimm conducted the research as an undergraduate student and some of the people he listed as members of his research “team” renounced the study. Rimm’s resume didn’t exactly qualify him as a research scientist, either. He had spent much of his time in the years since his previous research project working in Atlantic City casinos (where he was the subject of investigations by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement) and writing and self-publishing a lewd novel and a nonfiction work entitled
The Pornographer’s Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men & Make Lots of Money.
¹⁸