Welcome to YouthFacts

We Are Debunkers

YouthFacts is dedicated to providing factual information on youth issues –- crime, violence, sex, drugs, drinking, social behaviors, education, civic engagement, attitudes, media, whatever teen terror du jour arises. Since we emphasize demonstrable fact over teen-bashing emotionalism and interest-driven propaganda, the information you find here will be dramatically different than in the major media and political forums.

An aging society confronted with rapid change can be a dangerous one, fearful and hostile toward bewildering new demographics, technologies, and social orders. Unfortunately, leaders and their compliant media too often have chosen to exploit these fears. Coinciding with increasing racial diversity of American youth, interests of every stripe have buttressed their politics, agendas, fame, and fortunes by manufacturing ever-wilder fears of young people. As “youth” have become handier scapegoats and profit-generating commodities in America’s privatized social policy, fear, lying, and raw self-promotion prevail.

The startlingly new and different information provided here is ORIGINAL. It is not derived secondhand from special interests, media reports, or anointed “experts.” Rather, the reader will be able to link to the primary sources cited and see firsthand how youth issues are routinely distorted in public forums.

Sure, we have opinions, but we don’t tie information here to political or social agendas. As so many interests and media across the political spectrum manufacture grossly inaccurate nonsense about youth, we promise a site that is offensive to ideologues. And, unlike entrenched interests, we’ll respond seriously to challenges and corrections.

New Youth Developments

Dramatic, promising youth trends demand attention

Mike Males, October 1, 2015 Modern American youth are acting very differently from what experts predicted – and certainly different from what agenda-driven politics frozen in decades-old dogmas can handle. YouthFacts posts new 1960-2014 crime tables, showing continuing, dramatic declines in all types of crime by youth to levels below those of 50 years ago (even as crime by older ages continues to rise). Clearly, the best, most recent FBI and CDC information shows it’s time to abolish the hostile, prejudicial term “youth violence,” and to stop branding teenagers a “risky, crime-prone population.” The charts on gun deaths (above), crime trends (below), and shown in the posted crime tables only a few of many examples. Against every theory of youth behavior and political need, however, young people show enormous reductions in gun fatalities over the last two decades in states with stronger gun controls and fewer guns (New York and California) — and also in states with weaker, “open carry” laws and more guns (Texas)…(read more) “Lawless dystopia” averted!

Change in California felony rates by age group, 1978 (first year available) – 2014 (latest year)



California Criminal Justice Statistics Center, Statistics, Arrests, 2015. Arrest rates per 100,000 population by age group are compared for 2014 versus 1978.

Mike Males, August 6, 2015 California’s young people became dramatically more racially and ethnically diverse over the last 35 years. From 1980 to 2014, the population age 10-24 increased by 1.8 million, and the percent that is White (not Latino) fell from 63% then to 29% today. During that period — defying “expert” predictions and a lot of fear-mongering about the “coming youth crime wave” — crime among children under age 12 plunged by a staggering 94%, and fell among adolescents age 12-17 by 76%. Meanwhile, Californians age 30 and older (for whom the largest racial group remains Whites) show sharply increased crime over the period, new Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice studies show. See three incredible charts on youth and crime

LIBRARY NOTES “Members” Now: Citizens Later?

Anthony Bernier, October 2017 America does not appear in the mood to broaden its notion of “citizenship” for the next while. This fight doesn’t end here, of course, but the current environment is a minefield of political kryptonite and recrimination. For several years, however, I have been urging librarians to define YA users (within the context of the particular work librarians do) broadly and locally as citizens–not as psychologists (who define youth as “patients” or research subjects) or the different ways in which police officers, school counselors, or social workers variously define young adults for their own institutions. I previously argued that libraries adopt and redefine the notion of “citizen” to include young people in local environments, outside and beyond the reach of formal or legal definitions, as citizens of their cities, towns, and neighborhoods. I advanced this argument to help libraries (as local institutions) become more mindful about youth in the here and now, instead of how Youth Development’s Grand Agenda does, fixated upon distant futures mired exclusively in privileged middle-class aesthetics and aspirations. A recent study of African American youth demonstrates that a broader citizenship vision of youth may be asking too much of this adult culture. The study documents young people in public space peacefully observing a live performance. Immediately they became characterized by police, journalists, and judges as a flash mob, as terrorists. These American citizens, exercising their right to a non-violent public gathering, their rights to their city, facilitated by the very digital tools we want them using, attract ire and punishment for simply raising anxiety. (read more)

Beyond the Celebrations

The disturbing things LIS students find out about real YA programming and professionals’ ethical obligation to improve YA experience

Anthony Bernier, August 2017 It becomes more difficult each year to convince LIS students that they need to demonstrate service impact on YAs. It is especially difficult when they see so little professional commitment to it coming from practitioners in the field. Why is it that so few YA librarians exhibit curiosity about the outcomes their users derive from their professional interventions? It certainly is a rare instance in which librarians demonstrate this curiosity to their future colleagues. Before you get too angry at this revelation, however, let’s establish a few basic definitions. First and foremost, let’s differentiate library inputs and outputs from outcomes. (read more)

BOOKS/MEDIA Why are popular books on “teens today” so atrocious? With few exceptions, today’s “expert” books on adolescents by psychologists, angry parents, and journalists are really the same book. All uniformly depict teenagers as more troubled today than ever due to peer and cultural influences, extreme vexations to their healthy-minded parents and a challenge for ever-wise professionals. Their authors’ universal message can be summed up in two words: “I’m superior!” Authors flatter themselves and their readers by creating a community of the morally, intellectually, and responsibly superior, with the grownup burden to rescue and redirect today’s apocalyptically messed-up kids. As popular youth-trasher James Garbarino declares to his disciples, “You are not the problem, you are the solution!” What’s amazing is that amid this barrage of crude anti-youth stereotyping and dismality, entertainment media presents a wonderfully diverse array of young people that both caricatures and mirrors the individuality of teens the supposedly nonfiction authors deny. Examination reveals just how terrible most books on teenagers today are.

The good: Bibliography and new covers

The bad and the ugly: Book/media reviews