When Kids Run Amok, We All Pay Price
The nation was appalled last week to learn that Houston police were searching for Cindy Garcia, a runaway and pregnant 14-year-old girl whose body is so immature authorities think she may have to deliver her child by Caesarean section.
Garcia, who’s since been found, had been impregnated by a 22-year-old man with whom she’d been involved since she was 8!
Such behavior by a child so young has the power to shock us because it is such an extreme aberration.
Still, it is an undeniable fact that there is a growing number of incorrigible kids involved in all sorts of illegal and illicit activities - from drugs, to promiscuity and prostitution to armed, violent crime.
Who can forget the chilling case of Robert “Yummy” Sandifer? He was the Chicago 11-year-old on the lam for killing a teenage girl. Fellow gang members gunned him down because he knew too much about their activities and might inform on them. His nickname came from his childish fondness for cookies.
Many of the young criminals are runaways, adrift on mean streets and forced to turn to crime to survive. Others may live with an uncaring parent who allows them to run wild.
While crime among the general population is declining, it is on the rise among youths from coast to coast. Increasingly, these youthful offenders are tied to violent and vengeful acts. According to a recent Justice Department report, juveniles accounted for 23 percent of all arrests involving weapons violations in 1993. Two decades earlier, the figure for juveniles was 16 percent.
Many officials believe that the abuse of illicit drugs has played a major role in the escalation of juvenile crime. Some members of the suburban pack that attacked and murdered Eddie Polec in Fox Chase in 1994 were high on marijuana, according to testimony at the trial last week.
Their conduct answers the question posed by the public service announcement aired for the past year by the Partnership for Drug Free America: “Forty percent of marijuana users come from the inner city. Where do you suppose the other 60 percent come from?”
Cases like those of Cindy Garcia may be aberrations, and the rate of teenage pregnancy may be declining. But there are still far too many cases. I know of a case several years ago at Hahnemann Hospital of a 12-year-old who gave birth. Two years earlier, she’d undergone an abortion. As President Clinton made clear in his State of Union speech, the costs of promiscuity are staggering, not only in the dollars and cents of welfare payments, but in the undermining of family values among our youths.
Similarly, even one Robert Sandifer is too many.
These shocking cases signal just how far out of control too many youngsters are today. The painful fact is that not nearly enough is being done to rein them in.
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