In Lublin, a student was beaten to death by ten drunken thugs. They attacked him and his two friends, beating them with wooden poles torn from benches, stones, and paving blocks. The murderers are between sixteen and their early twenties.
That same night in Rzeszów, several dozen aggressive, masked football supporters started a street brawl. They destroyed two police cars. As they did so, they shouted: "Make Łódź pay."
Meanwhile, at dawn in Łódź, police detained five people suspected of brutally beating a sixty-year-old man who had dared to point out that they were making too much noise while partying. The elderly man, on the brink of death, was taken to hospital. The perpetrators are in their early twenties; two of those detained are women. All of this happened during a single night, from June 5 to 6.
The Myth of Innocence
The fact that more and more criminals are being found among young people, often even minors, is worrying in itself. Far more dangerous, however, is the increase in crimes they commit that are considered particularly threatening to life and health. These include murder, assault, rape, and robbery. Young thugs are ruthless, highly aggressive, and cruel.
And yet childhood and adolescence would seem to be a gentle and joyful period. Children are held up as a model of innocence worthy of emulation. In adults’ imagination, a child is incapable of hating, killing, or committing any other immoral act.
Reality seems to contradict this, at least with regard to teenagers. How is it possible that, soon after entering adolescence, such a dramatic change takes place in a person’s psyche that an innocent child becomes a ruthless murderer? It is impossible to place all the blame on the demoralizing influence of adult society.
It is known, after all, that young criminals corrupt themselves, so they must carry within them the seed of their own depravity. Watered with alcohol, this seed grows to monstrous proportions. According to the police, alcohol is what most strongly intensifies brutality and aggression, but there is another factor that unleashes the worst instincts: the presence of a group. In the company of their peers, drunken thugs have no scruples.
But where does aggression come from in the personalities of young people? The simplest explanation is to say that it was there from the beginning, before they became teenagers. Inborn, and perhaps also instilled by parents, school, and their surroundings, it grew along with the child until, after several years, it finally gained control over them. Many adults, convinced of their own nobility and that of their children, cannot accept such an explanation. There must be other causes.
An Endless Chain
In the mid-1990s, CBOS asked Poles what they believed influenced the rising crime rate. Most people pointed to unemployment and poverty, problems affecting many Poles. A disastrous living situation really can push someone toward crime, especially since a person who has lost their job and what they owned has nothing left to lose. But is poverty and unemployment really the source of juvenile crime?
Unemployment affects every fifth, or perhaps every fourth, Pole, but certainly not a sixteen-year-old delinquent. Surely we should not assume that difficulty finding employment causes such intense frustration in a secondary-school or technical-school student that it drives them to attack or even kill the first passer-by they encounter.
Poverty itself does not seem to be a good explanation either. Young criminals rarely have to support their own families, pay rent, or buy medicine. Yet they have money for alcohol, cigarettes, a ticket to a match, or a new tracksuit. Moreover, while poverty may prompt someone to break in or steal, it is difficult to imagine how mauling another young person could improve the circumstances of a delinquent suffering from poverty.
One can search for other, more abstract causes of growing aggression and crime among young people. For example, a lack of prospects. Young people see no future ahead of them and therefore vent their growing anger at a world organized this way on themselves and others. Or perhaps a lack of interests and aspirations. Young people do not care about achieving anything, so they focus on what is simplest: beating people.
Yet every time a more or less popular cause is mentioned, another question arises: why does it trigger aggression specifically, rather than, say, apathy or discouragement? The chain of causes can be extended indefinitely, pointing to increasingly general factors, until we conclude that the world around us as such provokes anger. Searching for the reasons behind juvenile thuggery may be fruitless. If only because the causes we find cannot be removed—how could we fix the whole world?
Fear versus Aggression
Instead of struggling with a burning forest, it is easier to control a small fire. Perhaps, then, it would be better to accept that aggression and wickedness are part of human nature from birth. They simply need to be controlled so that they do not ruin the lives of growing children and other people.
The myth of childhood innocence lulls adults’ vigilance until it is too late. A child is assumed incapable of experiencing bad emotions, so no one teaches young people how to cope with frustration, anger, or envy. Yet families, schools, and peers provide children and teenagers with plenty of opportunities to encounter these emotions. And this is certainly unavoidable.
Should we talk to preschoolers about aggression and crime? The answer is less troublesome than one might expect. Humanity has addressed this subject for centuries, though perhaps not in a literal or direct way, enclosing it within the metaphor of fairy tales. For what are fairy tales if not stories about cruel crimes committed out of envy or greed, often by members of the closest family.
Modern parents and educators, however, are afraid to speak openly to children about crime. Fairy tales are becoming increasingly mild and delicate. Educational books and films for children are positively dripping with sweetness and naivety, as if adults themselves feared suffering, violence, and the sight of blood. And indeed they do fear them, because society is growing increasingly apprehensive about young thugs.
The scale of these fears is demonstrated by hysterical reactions such as the Bolesławiec march against racism and violence. The death of a teenager with darker skin triggered a wave of rumors about a racist murder committed by skinheads. This was enough to awaken fear among young people, who walked through the city in a silent protest against vaguely defined violence.
Silence, however loud, remains silence. Instead of protesting, perhaps it would be better to talk to a young person about aggression before aggression speaks first.
Krzysztof Gwizdała