Even psychotic children did not act like this fifteen years ago. Wertham blamed gory, sadistic comic books. Such acts of apparently random violence often have a strong impact on public opinion, touching off, as they did in the 1950s, panic over juvenile crime. N FACT, THE POST- W ORLD W AR II era was a time of declining youth crime. The same is true of the 1990s, another period in which teenage violence has been an important public issue.
Statistics never galvanize attention as powerfully as do two or three horrible incidents.
There are, unfortunately, always plenty of these. What seems to vary is the amount of attention Americans choose to pay. So one must track two separate histories. While the first of these seems to rest on a solid factual ground, different definitions of crime and of youth and changing standards of enforcement make long-term comparisons difficult. For example, most nineteenth-century records deal with urban crime.