jr008c@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Sgt. Pepper) writes:
  >dianem@boi.hp.com (Diane Mathews) writes:
  >> Stupendous Man (bkottman@afit.af.mil) writes:
  >> >    Maybe.  Part of the reason wages have been decreasing is the
  >> >    entry of women into the workplace.
  >> 
  >> I just can't get over the fact that this is becoming a wider
  >> spread belief. But, i will give the man the benefit of the
  >> doubt, here, because he did say "part" of the reason.  A very
  >> small part, perhaps, but a part.  Your bias is showing here,
  >> Stupe, better keep that thing covered up.
  
     [ Nimble nonsense by nameless non-entity nixed. -- dks ]
  
  > Maybe all the men in the workforce have artificially created
  > a larger supply of labor; both men and women have an equal
  > right to any job.


Ah, yes, *you* might think so and *I* might think so, but
read the following article and you'll see who might disagree.


Cheers,
Dhanesh


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  |  
  |  Copyright 1993 Newspaper Publishing PLC                      
  |  
  |  The Independent                                 
  |  November 14, 1993, Sunday                           
  |  
  |  Section:  Comment Page; p. 23
  |  
  |  Headline: Boys who can't grow up; Men use crime to
  |            prove their masculinity because they have lost
  |            their role as breadwinners, says Anna Coote
  |  
  |  Byline:   Anna Coote
  |  
  |  
  |  CRACKING down on criminals and lone mothers - twin themes of the
  |  Cabinet's "back to basics" campaign - reveals a Government
  |  struggling to understand the links between family and  crime. 
  |  Ministers propose to cut benefit for single mothers. They want to
  |  take more suspects to court, lock up more offenders, build more
  |  prisons and more secure units for delinquent teenagers. 
  |  
  |  They may be reaching in the right direction: there is evidence of
  |  links between family and  crime.  But ministers seem not to see
  |  what is staring them in the face. 
  |  
  |  Crime  is, overwhelmingly, a male occupation. Men account for
  |  eight out of every ten people cautioned by police and nearly nine
  |  out of every ten found guilty of indictable offences. Men are
  |  responsible for 81 per cent of convicted cases of theft and
  |  handling stolen goods, 92 per cent of violence against the person
  |  and 97 per cent of burglary. 
  |  
  |  Why do they do it? Why don't the women? Most research in this
  |  area has been strangely uncurious about the links between men and
  |  crime.  Many people have taken it for granted. Albert Cohen, the
  |  criminologist, in a study published in 1955, observed that "the
  |  delinquent subculture" was created largely by young men who had
  |  problems adjusting to the male role. Men and women, he said, had
  |  different problems and preoccupations because they were judged by
  |  themselves and others according to different standards. But he
  |  did not go further than that. 
  |  
  |  Since then, a host of (mainly male) criminologists have argued
  |  over the causes of  crime.  Should we blame it all on "bad
  |  apples"? Or moral degeneracy? Or cultural alienation? Or 
  |  poverty?  Or dysfunctional families? Several weighty surveys,
  |  undertaken at considerable cost in Britain and the United States,
  |  have been analysed and re-analysed in search of an answer. Yet
  |  none has paused to question traditional assumptions about
  |  masculine identity or male roles. 
  |  
  |  Some have observed differences between male and female behaviour,
  |  but have not troubled to investigate them. Others have reported
  |  their findings about "youths" without specifying whether they
  |  were male or female. Most have investigated the parenting
  |  practices of women, but not of men; they have been interested in
  |  fathers only as breadwinners or as bearers of a criminal record.
  |  In short, these studies have conformed to the well-worn academic
  |  practice of treating the male as the real human being whose
  |  maleness does not require investigation. The female, by contrast,
  |  is treated as an aberrant sub-species and worthy of passing
  |  curiosity. 
  |  
  |  Feminists first drew attention to women as victims of male
  |  violence and to patterns of female deviance - both neglected
  |  areas. They argued that relations between men and women, and the
  |  way in which masculine and feminine identities developed, were
  |  vital to an understanding of deviant and criminal behaviour. But
  |  it took some time before their insights made a wider impact on
  |  the study of crime  and family. 
  |  
  |  There is now a small but growing interest in studying precisely
  |  what masculinity means and how men learn to be masculine. With it
  |  comes a new, critical interest in the role of fathers in
  |  families, the experience of boys growing up to be men and the
  |  reasons why men, rather than women, get into trouble with the
  |  law. 
  |  
  |  In September, more than 150 people took part in a conference on
  |  masculinity and  crime  at Brunel University, the first of its
  |  kind in Britain. This was not a convention of feminists out to
  |  blame men. It was a group of academics, probation officers and
  |  community workers, with a handful representing the police and
  |  prison service, who shared a sense that here was a rich source of
  |  intelligence on the nature and causes of  crime. 
  |  
  |  They note that the old routes by which boys learnt to be men have
  |  been severed and new trails have yet to be blazed. Not only are
  |  more women going out to work, but eight out of ten jobs created
  |  between now and the turn of the century are expected to be
  |  "women's jobs". Roles and expectations of daughters, wives and
  |  mothers have changed profoundly. So have the prospects for sons,
  |  husbands and fathers. But while women have added the role of
  |  wage-earner to their traditional one of homemaker and carer, men
  |  have simply lost their breadwinning role. Young men grow up
  |  fearing there will be no jobs for them, and lacking (in Albert
  |  Cohen's words) the means of "realising their aspirations" to
  |  become men. 
  |  
  |  In communities where there are no jobs for men or women, the
  |  girls still have their rites of passage: they can claim adult
  |  status by becoming mothers. This may well be undesirable because
  |  poorly educated teenagers, themselves trapped in dependency, are
  |  not best placed to give their children a start in life. But these
  |  young mothers have to grow up fast - in a way they would not if
  |  they spent their time stealing cars and videos or selling drugs.
  |  Most make a good job of parenting, considering the odds stacked
  |  against them - odds which the Government seems determined to
  |  lengthen. When such girls fail to marry the fathers of their
  |  children, they are not being feckless, but making a realistic
  |  assessment of the available options. The boys who get them
  |  pregnant appear to have little else to offer. 
  |  
  |  So the young men are left adrift. Often they hang out in groups,
  |  where they can gain some security from being with their peers. To
  |  prove themselves as "real" men, they resort to the traditional
  |  masculine virtues. They try to be tough, brave and strong, they
  |  try not to show their feelings or to form strong personal
  |  attachments. They can demonstrate their potency by siring
  |  children and "earning" by foul means or fair. Many will regard
  |  their unemployed fathers (if they see them at all) as impotent
  |  failures. Not a few will observe their fathers using violence to
  |  defend their fragile authority at home. Where can they look for
  |  alternative role models? There seems to be nothing between the
  |  "hard man" and the "wimp", where they might forge a new
  |  identity. 
  |  
  |  It is the unequal struggle to be masculine in modern times that
  |  gets so many boys into trouble. Delinquent and criminal behaviour
  |  offers the best opportunity to prove their manhood. Doing time in
  |  jail confirms their virility. One in four men is convicted of an
  |  offence by the age of 25. And two-thirds of all male offenders
  |  are under 30. 
  |  
  |  This is the missing piece of the jigsaw that might help
  |  government ministers understand and tackle the rising  crime 
  |  rate. But they are fixated on single mothers. Michael Howard has
  |  rightly declared that absentee fathers are a part of the problem.
  |  Yet his response has been to demonise and punish the women who
  |  bear and raise their children - and to build more institutions in
  |  which young male offenders can learn to be more macho than ever. 
  |  
  |  Government policy only makes worse a destructive cycle in which
  |  boys become the main perpetrators and the main victims. Boys
  |  between 11 and 15 are twice as likely as girls to fall prey to
  |  violence. Far less consideration is given to men who are victims
  |  of  crime  than to women. Men are supposed to be tougher and cope
  |  more easily with the experience. There is some evidence that
  |  males are more likely to be picked up by police than females
  |  behaving in the same way. Girls are much more likely than boys to
  |  be cautioned rather than charged. Ostensibly, girls and women are
  |  locked up for their own protection, while boys and men are locked
  |  up to protect society from them. Jewelle Gibbs, professor of
  |  social welfare  at Berkeley, California, who has studied young
  |  black men in America, observes that they "have been the primary
  |  victims of mob violence, police brutality, legal executions, and
  |  ghetto homicide". 
  |  
  |  Young men stop getting into trouble with the law when they
  |  "settle down". Getting a job and enjoying a successful marriage
  |  make them less likely to offend. Right-wing American analysts
  |  such as  Charles Murray  have argued that young men are
  |  essentially barbarians who are best civilised by the
  |  responsibility of providing for a wife and family. But how can
  |  women be persuaded to play ball? If breadwinning is all that can
  |  save men from perdition, they will have to be given priority in
  |  the job market. Women will have to go home and abandon their
  |  claims to financial independence. 
  |  
  |  As Ulrich Beck points out in his book Risk Society, modernisation
  |  "is not a carriage one can step out of at the next corner if one
  |  does not like it". To turn the clock back, women would have to
  |  be displaced not just from the labour market, but from education
  |  as well. Wage rates for women would have to be cut to render them
  |  incapable of supporting themselves or their children. Equality
  |  laws would have to be repealed. 
  |  
  |  "It would have to be checked," writes Beck, "whether the evil
  |  did not begin with universal suffrage; mobility, the market, new
  |  media and information technologies would have to be limited or
  |  forbidden." Impossibly, the great cultural and economic changes
  |  which have gathered momentum through the 20th century would have
  |  to be swung into reverse. 
  |  
  |  The point is not that we just give up and leave things as they
  |  are, but that successful policies must cut with the grain of
  |  change. Women who become single parents may be making the best of
  |  a bad job, but few would deny that children are better off in
  |  two-parent families as long as these provide a happy, secure and
  |  stable environment. Soaring divorce rates are a sign that
  |  traditional family arrangements are failing. 
  |  
  |  Michael Howard would be well advised to look for ways of helping
  |  parents, particularly men, adjust to change. He and his
  |  colleagues might consider how public policies can assist the
  |  quest for new masculine identities. Through education, benefit
  |  and employment policies, they could encourage men as well as
  |  women to be caring and attentive parents. It would take some of
  |  the strain off modern marriage, give men new ways of "proving
  |  themselves" and make life a bit easier for women. More
  |  important, it could give children a better start in life - and
  |  boys a better chance of growing up without a criminal record. 
  |  
  |  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
  |  
  |  The author is Hamlyn Fellow in Social Policy at the Institute for
  |  Public Policy Research. A conference on Families, Children and Crime,
  |  sponsored by the Institute and the 'Independent on Sunday,' will be
  |  held in London this week. 
  |