Fear of Teenagers

The categories themselves are implicated. Youth, adolescence and teenager have all been attributed to the fear of youth rather than the other way round: as the western world industrialised, young people were driven out of the workforce and into institutions where they lost personal autonomy in favour of social control. The category was made, the people in it began behaving in ways that looked distinct from adults, and the distinctness became evidence for the fear.

Where the word ephebiphobia comes from

Kirk Astroth is credited with coining ephebiphobia in a 1994 article in Phi Delta Kappan, defining it as the fear or loathing of teenagers. It is now used internationally by sociologists, government agencies and youth advocacy organisations, and the phenomenon is described today as the inaccurate, exaggerated and sensational characterisation of young people.

Sociology rather than clinical psychology is where the word differs from most in this catalogue: a social phenomenon with a phobia word attached, not a condition. Juvenoia is the twenty-first century neologism for distaste or fear of the culture associated with young people, tied prominently to technology and the exposure it enables.

Why watching teenagers did not stop Columbine

The material makes an argument about safety products and then supplies the fact that decides it.

Selling safety is named as one engine of it. Parents are sold alarms for the house, phones that report back and software that watches a screen. Schools are sold scanners, detectors and cameras, and the pitch behind every one of those purchases is that the children cannot be trusted.

Then the case that settles it. Columbine happened in a school that had cameras running and officers on the premises. Monitoring youth is described as consistently doing little to prevent violence or tragedy, and that is the single case everyone knows.

How fear of youth has shaped public policy

Machiavelli is said to have understood that a fear of youth kept Florence from maintaining a standing army. Ancient Greece and medieval Venice are described as having had public policy founder on the same fear.

France after the war was described as preoccupied with mal de jeunesse, and the aims of its youth policy are quoted plainly enough to speak for themselves: camps for some, reformatories for others, fresh air for the remainder, and playing fields to be built. After the Second World War the United States military identified the growing number of young people in the Deep South as a national security problem, and analysts have suggested the later upswing in popular fear of youth may descend from the defence policies written in response.

Two modern examples are named precisely. The Seattle Weekly attributed Seattle's now-defunct Teen Dance Ordinance directly to fear of youth. The Anti-Social Behaviour Order arrived under Tony Blair in 1998 and has been credited to the same source.

Four decades have produced curfews, bans on loitering and bans on cruising, spreading widely, while the courts have moved steadily against the rights of young people.

What made adults more afraid of teenagers

Public fear of adolescents is described as mounting in that decade, out of a specific combination:

• increased youth access to handguns
• territorial youth gangs consolidating into drug cartels
• racist stereotyping of urban youth
• academic and political pandering
• media frenzy
• a series of high-profile school shootings of students by fellow students

Five of those six are things adults did.

Who the fear of teenagers falls on

The fear is described as compounded by racism. Historically young people were portrayed as the future and the leaders of tomorrow; now they are described as a source of worry rather than potential, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, and that perspective informs urban law enforcement, public schools and social services. Sociologists trace a good deal of its current reach to adults uneasy about a changing racial composition. Gwendolyn Brooks is credited with consciousness-raising work on the subject, particularly regarding young African-Americans.

Pedro Noguera of New York University argues the fear extends past colour boundaries, noting that skateboarders, punks and straight-laced suburban teenagers can all produce adult anxiety by gathering in numbers somewhere adults have decided is off-limits.

Henry Jenkins links criticism of new media to fear of adolescents, who are its most eager adopters, arguing that teen culture appears meaningless and dangerous without an appreciation of its context.

How fear of teenagers gets sold back to them

Extreme fear of youth is described in one study as an established media panic, exploited commercially. The paperback trade of the 1950s turned it out by the yard for money. The Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 1980s warned that youth involvement in certain entertainment led to moral corruption and violence.

The neatest case is a song. My Chemical Romance's Teenagers came out of Gerard Way's own fear of teenagers and of what he took to be an implicit violence among them, and it became an anthem for the teenagers it was written about.