Soapbox With Tom Cottle: Teen Violence

For years, the fine series Soapbox With Tom Cottle has been delivering straight up talk between kids and clinical psychologist Tom Cottle on real issues. Teen Violence is a powerful discussion of the subject which opens with Cottle citing the fact that 150,000 kids bring handguns to school everyday, and then asking his young panelists what the heck is going on. The answers the kids give--protection and respect--are immediately questioned by Cottle, and over the ensuing half-hour of give and take a lot of honest talk comes out. When Simon discusses how he and his friends jumped someone at a party who was beating up on a girl, he says that the guy "deserved to get stabbed." In fact, the standard we-should-try-to-resolve-our differences-through-discussion line that kids like to say to put a smile on the face of a social worker doesn't come up here, instead there's an almost-Old Testament sense of retribution. Justice, as these kids see it, is swift and very simple; there's no talk of shades of grey and extenuating circumstances. When one kid's mother was beaten by her boyfriend, he went out, gathered a couple dozen friends, came back and beat the boyfriend silly...and given the same circumstances, he says, he would do the exact same thing. These kids aren't posturing, many of them feel they are "stuck where you live," and the Gandhi non-violent approach just doesn't cut it. Although Cottle knows that there's no magic wand here, he closes by asking what we all are: "the old bleeding heart liberal question: what can we do?" The answers: more family structure and more programs at school, for example, strongly suggest--as do these kids' expressions--that they're not particularly happy about the increasingly glamorized subject of teen violence, but they also harbor no illusions about easy fixes. Teen Violence is highly recommended. Other titles in the series include: Abortion: Yes, No, Maybe; Coming to America; Heavy Metal; The Rights of Teenagers; Gay and Lesbian Teens; and Teenagers and Racism. (R. Pitman)