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Few propositions provoke a more vehement reaction from progressive intellectuals than the assertion that in recent changes in family life-higher rates for divorce, maternal employment, illegitimacy, and non-marital cohabitation; lower rates for marriage and fertility-we are seeing family decay. Family change, these intellectuals constantly lecture us, does not mean family decay. We simply must, they explain, learn to view new social arrangements with a more tolerant and inclusive vision.
What kind of tolerance and inclusiveness countenances suicide and murder?
Such is the question forced upon readers of a study recently published in Social Forces by a team of researchers from the University of Colorado and Boston College. Analyzing data collected for 18 affluent nations (including the United States) from 1955 to 1994, the researchers detect a clear relationship between the rate of "family change" (defined in a composite index based on national rates for marriage, divorce, female labor-force participation, and fertility) on the one hand and rates for both suicide and homicide among the young on the other. "An increase," write the researchers, " . . . in what we refer to as family change tend[s] to worsen relative youth violence." Deploying several statistical models for parsing their data, the researchers find that "the combined family [change] scale consistently increases youth lethal violence in all models." The effects prove "largest for male suicide," but stand out as "the strongest determinant [in the statistical models] for other outcomes," including male homicide, female suicide, and female homicide. That is, family change predicts youth violence of all sorts more strongly than does income equality, government collectivism, and other variables scrutinized in this study.
When the researchers parceled out the components of the family-change index, they discovered that "the divorce and female labor force participation rate increase all measures of youth lethal violence." They also found that "the marriage and total fertility rate . . . have the expected negative effects," though this inverse statistical relationship is "not quite as strong" as the positive correlation for divorce and female labor force participation. In the overall statistical pattern, the researchers limn "the harmful consequences of family change for youth lethal violence."
The authors of the new study interpret their findings as evidence that family change in recent decades reflects "a decline in social capital" which has made "the transition to autonomous adult roles more complex, turbulent, and drawn out . . .[while making] the entrance into adulthood less regulated and supervised than in the past." This decline in social capital has translated into an ugly dynamic of violence among the youth. "Although mortality from most diseases has declined and nearly disappeared at younger ages," the researchers remark, "suicide and homicide rates have remained high or increased." Indeed, it worries the researchers that "young people have a disadvantage [compared to older people] in homicide rates, and that disadvantage has increased in recent decades." This means "an increasing concentration of homicide victimization among the young," a troubling development since "age patterns of homicide and suicide can say much about the growing disadvantage of youth relative to other age groups."
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