TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050889/05088900.050

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.4 KB | 127 lines

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Wilding in the Night


A brutal gang rape in New York City triggers fears that the
U.S. is breeding a generation of merciless children

By Nancy Gibbs


    From time to time a new word bursts into the lexicon,
capturing with shocking force the latent fears of a troubled
age. The latest such word is "wilding," the term used by a band
of New York City teenagers to describe the mischief they set out
to commit on a clear April night in Central Park. Looking, they
said, for something to do, they roamed the park's northern
reaches, splintering into smaller groups and allegedly
assaulting one hapless victim after another. Finally, one pack
came upon a 28-year-old woman jogging alone past a grove of
sycamore trees. According to police, they chased her into a
gully, then spent the next half an hour beating her senseless
with a rock and a metal pipe, raping her and leaving her for
dead. When she was found three hours later, she had lost
three-quarters of her blood and had lapsed into a coma.

    By last week the attack had escalated from a local tragedy
into a morbid national obsession. Perhaps the story resonated
across the country because the victim was a wealthy, white
financier with degrees from Wellesley and Yale. Or because the
scene was Central Park, the backyard of powerful news media and
a symbol of everything Americans most fear about New York City.
Or it may have been because of the word wilding, which seemed
simultaneously to define and obscure the transformation of a
group of teenage boys into a bloodthirsty mob.

    Last week six youths were indicted for rape, and two others
were indicted for a separate attack on a male jogger. According
to investigators, these were not crimes of drugs or race or
robbery. Newspapers claimed that the suspects came from stable,
working families who provided baseball coaching and music
lessons. The youths, some barely into their teens, may not have
been altar boys, but they hardly seemed like candidates for a
rampage. One was known for helping elderly neighbors at his
middle-income Harlem apartment complex. Another was a born-again
Christian who had persuaded his mother to join his church. Only
one had ever been in trouble with the police.

    If children so seemingly normal went so horribly wrong, the
obvious question is Why? The youths, described by police as
smug and remorseless, have offered only one motive: escape from
boredom. "It was fun," detectives quoted one suspect as saying.
"It was something to do."

    The evidence that youthful offenders are becoming more
violent is everywhere. Two Denver students have been charged
with stabbing a man to death so they could steal his credit
cards and use them to buy camping equipment. At a Los Angeles
Greyhound station, a 15-year-old girl was kidnaped at knifepoint
by two men, held captive for five days and repeatedly raped. She
managed to escape and flagged down a passing car. "Get me out
of here!" she begged the three teenagers inside. They did, and
took her to a park in East Los Angeles, where the eldest of the
boys, 18, allegedly raped her again.

    New York Mayor Ed Koch, for one, does not care to hear
excuses for the violence of the young. "You name one societal
reason," he said, "that would cause people to engage in a
wolf-pack operation, looking for victims." Throughout the week
sociologists obliged, proffering familiar theories about why
many delinquents of this generation do not content themselves
with stealing hubcaps and breaking windows. The experts argue
that too many families are broken, too many schools and
communities are crumbling, too many drugs are available for
children to acquire a sturdy sense of mercy or morality to guide
their behavior.

    Into this vacuum the circuits of popular culture transmit
images of brutality without consequences. Children play video
games in which they win points for killing the most people. They
watch violence-packed cartoons. They listen to songs titled Be
My Slave and Scumkill. Or they are baby-sat by vastly popular
movie videotapes like Splatter University and I Spit on Your
Grave. Says sociologist Gail Dines-Levy of Wheelock College in
Boston: "What we are doing is training a whole generation of
male kids to see sex and violence as inextricably linked."

    But such theories, however valid, ring hollow in the face
of crimes like the Central Park attack. Pornography, even the
most gruesome kind, is commonplace in countries where the level
of violence does not approach that in the U.S. The impulses
behind the most brutal attacks are extremely complicated. "What
we're seeing is a real distortion in personality development,"
says Michael Nelson, professor of psychology at Xavier
University in Cincinnati. "It's not nice little neurotic people
acting out problems."

    If a culture of violence can corrupt affluent suburban
adolescents, it plays special havoc when mixed with the
pathology of the ghetto, where danger surrounds children every
day, sometimes inside their homes, always outside. At least one
of the Central Park suspects was sexually assaulted when he was
a child, and the private histories of the others are still a
mystery. In such brutal conditions, a youngster's peers can
become his family, and wilding can be a way to prove his
masculinity. "Kids who roam in groups gain a sense of power that
they do not have individually," says Elijah Anderson, professor
of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Caught in a mob
frenzy, each boy believes he is the only one hesitant to go
ahead with a destructive act, and will not resist or show
remorse out of fear that the others in the group will think him
a coward.

    As the explanations and indictments rolled in last week,
the New York City case continued to feed a debate about freedom
and fear, anarchy and obligation. "Blaming society, parents,
poverty, racism, school systems and neighborhoods for teenage
violence is too easy," said Dr. Edward Shaw, director of mental
health for the New York State division of youth. "It does not
answer the question Why do some teenagers in the same
environment get into trouble and others do not?" There were
those still willing to look for the hard answers last week. But
others could only watch a woman in a coma, hear the noises of
the city and wonder what might come next.


-- Mary Cronin/New York and Melissa Ludtke/Boston