Adolescents Need Constraints, Not Indulgence
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“Letting adolescents have their way.” That’s one way to describe two public policies, advocated vociferously by woke liberals, opposed surely by most. One primarily affects young men, the other primarily young women.
The policy primarily affecting young men can be summed up as “de-policing.” It’s a direct response to — one might say a total surrender to — the Black Lives Matter … t has many versions. “Defunding the police” was an initial Black Lives Matter demand. Democrats running city governments from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to New York acquiesced to it.
One of the great successes of public policy in the last half-century was the policing reform initiated by Rudy Giuliani in New York and adopted by many other mayors and police commissioners starting in the 1990s. They include constant maintenance of public order, intense and respectful patrolling of high-crime sites and friendly interaction with law-abiding neighbors.
That means frequent interactions with Black adolescents. It is well known that an enormous proportion of crimes are committed by men age 15 to 25, and it is an unhappy fact of life, often avoided in polite conversation, that Black people are about seven to eight times more likely to commit crimes than others.
One effective technique of post-Giuliani policing, inevitably affecting young Black men more than others, is stop and frisk. But stop and frisk, for understandable reasons, rankled a lot of young Black men, including the son of successful 2013 New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio.
The policy primarily affecting young women is the move, in the name of observing transgender rights, of enabling teenage girls to undergo irreversible surgery to become transgender men.
The numbers once again tell the story. The number of young women insisting they’re really men has skyrocketed in recent years, leading some to wonder whether there has been some vast change in human behavior. Wiser folk have reflected that adolescent girls are enormously susceptible to trends, the more shocking to their elders, the better. Once upon a time, the trend was anorexia; now, it is sexual dysphoria.
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