STORIES OF VIOLENCE by and against youth explode from the news like gunshots from a passing car. It would seem that America is under attack by armed teenagers. During the early 1980s, about a thousand murders were committed by teens each year in the United States. By the middle of the 1990s, that had grown to over three thousand per year, or almost 10 percent of all murders. Numbers like that make it sound like teen violence is a growing epidemic, an impression that is given further validity by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, which now identify teen violence as a major public health problem.

Talking about teen violence in terms of murder is the obvious thing to do because of the dramatic finality and loss that death brings, but the epidemic—if that is actually what it is—encompasses much more...