Bad Influences on Youth

Report Outline
Exposure of Youth to Harmful Influences
Bad Influences and Youthful Delinquency
Measures to Deal with Debasing Influences

Exposure of Youth to Harmful Influences

Efforts to comprehend an apparently widespread breakdown in disciplinary controls over young people point to a number of influences in the national life which seem to be damaging the moral fiber of American youth and which may be responsible for the particularly vicious nature of some juvenile offenses. In its search of more than a year and a half for an explanation of this disturbing situation, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to Study Juvenile Delinquency has drawn extensively on the experience of policemen, judges, social workers, parents, teachers, clergymen, and others who deal directly with children and adolescents. Their testimony pieces together an unsavory picture which shows commercial interests deliberately fostering a taste for vice and violence among young people, some not yet in their teens.

The evidence by no means indicates widespread corruption of children, but dissemination of depraved literature among minors, and the availability to them of morale-sapping stimulants, suggest that every child may be a potential victim. Although some youngsters may be able to withstand such influences, others may be deeply hurt in ways not immediately apparent. The few whose outlook on life is already seriously disturbed may be pushed into serious, even revolting crime.

The impact of demoralizing influences is heightened today, because children live in a troubled society in which the traditional disciplines of home, school, and church appear to have weakened. With the lifting of old taboos, murder, brutality, violence, lewdness and various kinds of psychopathic criminality have become subjects of free and open discussion in the press and among individuals. Comic books, television shows, and movies, moreover, give youngsters a heavy diet of sex, sin, and crime in a vivid form such as was not available to any previous generation of children.