On the Biology of Juvenile Delinquency: Comments on the Essay by Felton Earls, "The Social Reconstruction of Adolescence: Toward an Explanation for Increasing Rates of Violence in Youth"

ON THE BIOLOGY OFJUVENILE DELINQUENCY: COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY BY FELTON EARLS, "THE SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF ADOLESCENCE: TOWARD AN EXPLANATION FOR INCREASING RATES OF VIOLENCE IN YOUTH" HANS KREBS* In the above-titled essay in thisjournal [1], Dr. Earls, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, sets himself a problem of the utmost importance to society. But his approach is unduly narrow. He does not do justice to the great variety of factors which can contribute to the development ofjuvenile crime. True, the essay contains valuable points, but it also contains speculative assertions based on bold, unsupported assumptions , and plays down the importance of biomedical aspects. Earls decries some ofthe biomedical concepts, such as psychological deprivations during early life, as having "no vigorous [I suppose a misprint of 'rigorous '?] scientificjustification" (p. 71) although in the same paragraph, 12 lines later, he states, "As a clinician I seldom find a violent youth who has not been emotionally deprived in earlier life". Altogether he fails to apply rigorous standards to his own views. For example, the beginning of the essay runs: "Violence is a social problem, not a medical problem" (p. 65). Later he says, "Adolescence is a social phenomenon" (p. 67) and he quotes Musgrove [2] with apparent approval: "Adolescence was invented at the same time as the steam engine. The principal architect of the latter was Watt in 1765; of the former, Rousseau in 1762". Such statements may sound impressive, but on closer inspection they turn out to have little real substance. The problems of adolescence and the criminal tendencies ofjuveniles have been on record since the beginnings of civilisation. A collection of Sumerian tablets from the eighteenth century b.c. (translated by the American scholar S. N. Kramer) records the moans of a father to his teenage son. He complains of loafing ("don't stand about in the public square"), insubordination ("be humble and ?Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, Oxford , OX26HE, England.© 1980 by The University of Chicago. 003 1-5982/80/2302-01 1 7$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology andMedicine ¦ Winter 1980 | 179 show fear before your monitor"), noisy arguments ("because of your clamourings I was angry with you"), ingratitude ("I never sent you to work to dig up my field"), and lack ofenthusiasm for office work ("it is in accordance with . . . fate . . . that a son follows the work of his father"). He declares that his heart is sated with weariness of his son, who has become so "fat, big, powerful and puffed", and he ominously remarks that the rest of the family "waits expectantly for your misfortune" [3, p. 29]. Shakespeare was well aware of adolescent criminality: says the Old Shepherd in ? Winter's Tale' (act 3, sc. 3) whose sheep had been scared away by youngsters, "I would there were no age between ten and threeand -twenty; or that youth would sleep out the rest: for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.—Hark you now!—Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scar'd away two of my best sheep; which, I fear, the wolf will sooner find than the master". Indeed the problems of adolescence are not limited to Homo sapiens. They are common in many animal species. Dawkins has recently discussed the 'Battle of the Generations' [4, p. 132] and Trivers the 'Parent-Offspring Conflict' [5]. I believe that the menacing problems ofjuvenile delinquency must be tackled from a very broad standpoint. They need continuing debate and to be examined from many different angles. The origins of juvenile violence are highly complex: there are social aspects, medical aspects, biological aspects. To allocate the problem to one particular discipline is idle; it is interdisciplinary. So I feel that Felton Earls's emphasis on "social reconstruction of adolescence" or, as he also calls it, "adolescent socialisation" (i.e., the induction of young people into society's set of values, rules and ways of operating) ought to be balanced by a discussion of the science-based biomedical approach. This is what I propose to do in this paper. My treatment is based on...