Juvenile crime on rise in Israel

Barely a decade ago, Israel was considered a country with a relatively low rate of social deviance and crime among its youth. However, the average Israeli has finally realised that youth crime is now a serious problem: murders, rapes, sexual abuse and knife attacks - all perpetrated by adolescents - occupy Israeli media headlines much more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Gaza pullout issue.

There has been a 34 per cent increase in the number of youth violent crimes reported to the Israeli police in the January-May 2005 period. In just two months - April-May 2005 - 8,700 new cases of knife attacks, murders and sexual abuse were reported to the police, all perpetrated by youth 11-18 years of age.

On May 27, a 16-year-old boy brutally raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl near the mall in Rehovot (a village close to Tel Aviv). Two days later, a group of 17-year-old youths staged an unprovoked attack on a 13-year-old boy in a Tel-Aviv pub. The victim was severely injured and one of his kidneys had to be removed. Upon interrogation, the attackers said they beat up the boy "just to have fun". Such violence is not confined only to males. A group of 14-year-old girls in the southern Israeli village of Beer-Sheba attacked a 13-year-old female classmate, imprisoned her at school for an entire weekend, undressed her, set fire to her clothes and forced her to drink their urine.

In response to this dramatic rise in youth violence, public opinion calls for an increase in the severity of punishments, including castration in cases of rape crimes. The average Israeli holds the justice system responsible for this law and order catastrophe. Judges are severely criticised for giving alleged criminals mild sentences and giving undue consideration to mitigating circumstances such as a defendant's personal history of deprivation and hardship.

The police do not regard recent youth crimes as isolated incidents. Criminologists and educationists also believe that Israeli youth violence is an epidemic that will escalate in the years to come. The factors held responsible for this surge in crime include a loss in parental authority, the immigration wave of the 1990s, the violence of the last Intifada and, intriguingly, recent changes in the Israeli economy.

Daniel Gutwein, Professor at Haifa University, argues that the drastic escalation in Israeli youth crime is a direct consequence of the privatisation of the Israeli economy and the new economic policy led by Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Three years ago," explains Gutwein, "Israel was a real welfare country. The weak groups in our society, such as single mothers, the unemployed, disabled and elderly, enjoyed governmental living allowances. When Netanyahu became the Minister of Finance in 2003, he decided to adopt the aggressive capitalistic approach typical of the US, so he cut these allowances and benefits brutally, condemning large sectors of Israeli society to extreme poverty."

Gutwein believes that teenagers perceive such socio-economic changes in a more simplistic way than do adults. The new economic regime preaches individualism and a crude I-versus-society creed. The state of Israel has been unrepentantly aggressive to the weak sectors of its own society. The road from economic to physical violence is short. Over the past few years, as state-owned companies have been privatised, wages and benefits have fallen and work conditions worsened.

Youth, who witness their parents' financial security crumble before their own eyes, rapidly reassess their relationship to the state and society. Such children no longer regard the state as a protector, but rather as a threat. According to Gutwein, "[Such children] understand that they have to take care of themselves, to protect themselves because no one else will: so they take a knife. The knife gives an illusion of a safety that was denied to them by society".

As a reaction to surging youth violence, the Israeli government decided in June 2005 to adopt the strategy of New York City's ex-Mayor Rudolph Guiliani - flooding the streets with police and enforcing severe punishments. Gutwein does not believe that these methods will be effective. He says, "Increased presence of policemen is a cosmetic solution which will lower violent incidents here and there, but will not be able to ward off the huge wave of youth crime. The only way is to re-establish the sense of belonging to the community and to society. You can regain the youth's faith by [giving him/her] a social safety network. Kids will have no motivation to sabotage something they belong to."

Some experts attribute youth violence to the increase in violent and pornographic programming on television and the internet. Tamar Horovitz, Professor at Ben-Gurion University's Department of Education, points out that until the early 1990s, Israel had only one television channel, operated and controlled by the government. In contrast, today 90 per cent of Israeli households have multiple TV channels and, says Horovitz, "Our kids mistakenly perceive the deviant behaviour [seen on TV] as normal."

Gutwein disagrees. He reminds us that Israeli children were exposed to violence even earlier, in the form of Holocaust stories related by Jewish survivors. A strong sense of social safety and solidarity prevented youth from reproducing that violence. "What we have to ask ourselves," says Gutwein, "is when did the Israeli child stop understanding that the murder in the movie is only in the realm of imagination? When did he start taking it to be his own reality? I believe that the violence from TV and the internet could penetrate his life only because there was nothing else to stand tall against it: only when social alienation let him perceive the violence on TV as a reality, not as a legend. "

Anat Cohen
19 Feb 2006

http://nation.ittefaq.com/artman/publish/article_25721.shtml

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