For nearly two decades, the majority of schoolchildren in the United States have been required to memorize three little words: “Just say no.” They have been taught that dabbling with drugs even once can harm you, that peer pressure to use drugs is a lurking menace to be dodged and rejected at all costs. They have written thousands of essays decrying drug use, and worn T-shirts, hats, ribbons and badges to ward off the encroaching threat of narcotics.
But the days of “Just say no” may just be over. Leaders of the nation’s largest drug prevention program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, announced on Thursday that they were changing DARE’s approach, admitting that the vastly expensive program appears to be ineffective. Indeed, research has indicated that DARE may actually have contributed to greater drug use by high school students.
DARE administrators announced that the program will adopt a new strategy for school-based drug prevention, and begin testing it in 80 high schools and 176 middle schools in the fall. Around 50,000 students will be involved.
“The new curriculum gives students the skills to make positive, quality-of-life decisions,” reads DARE’s press release. “It also discusses the conditions leading up to violent behavior, how to identify potentially violent situations, and some basic ways to avoid or defuse such situations.”
Critics of DARE say the time is long overdue to dismantle the program and make sure, before exposing children to it, that it is not only effective but, most important, not harmful. They also worry that these changes, like much-heralded changes in the past, will not be significant enough to completely revamp the failing program.
Joan McCord, co-chairwoman of the National Academy of Sciences panel that issued a stinging report on DARE this week, is one of the people who is concerned about the program hurting the children who participate.
“It’s a mistake to assume that you can simply design a program and know in advance whether it will be harmful,” says McCord. “I think of those who created thalidomide. They had good intentions, and look what happened. The harm comes from the failure of programs and programs must be evaluated for safety.”
She and others assert that politics is what has kept the much-criticized program around for so many years, despite a mountain of evidence contesting its efficacy.
Don Lynam, who issued a report two years ago questioning the effectiveness of DARE, feels vindicated after Thursday’s announcement. But he fears that the new DARE program won’t depart enough from its old curriculum.
Over a decade, Lynam and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky compared children who had participated in DARE with those who had not. They followed more than 1,000 students from sixth grade, when they initially heard DARE’s message, to age 20. Salon spoke with Lynam about the nature of drug abuse, the failure of the DARE program and why so many parents, politicians and police officers blindly believed the program was working.
What was the major finding of your study?
In the end, we found that DARE did not affect individuals’ drug use behavior or attitude about drugs. It also didn’t affect things that DARE purports to influence, like peer pressure resistance or self-esteem.
Was there any benefit of being in the DARE program?
Initially, we found DARE had influenced kids’ attitudes toward drugs. So if you asked them questions about what they thought about drugs and what they expected from drugs a couple of months after they received DARE, the kids were more negative about drugs. But [the effect] was really short-lived, and disappeared after about a year.
It seems your study came to the same conclusion as many other studies — that DARE simply wasn’t working.
I think pretty much any well-controlled study that involved randomization of DARE [programs in schools] found the same thing. And none of them came out with evidence in support of DARE’s efficacy.
So why has this program continued for so long?
I think the police like it a lot, not just for its potential influence on preventing drug abuse but also because they get a chance to go out and talk to kids (while they’re not busting them) and build a good relationship with the community they police.
The other reason is that people are not good scientists about this stuff. The parents look around and don’t think their kids are using drugs — and the kids probably aren’t using drugs — but they say, “Oh, my kid went through DARE. See, DARE works.”
Did you find other examples of this blind-faith approach?
You get it a lot from the editorial writers in our local paper or even from some of the police who go through these programs. They say, “You know the studies may not show it, but I can see it in the kids’ faces that I’m making a difference and this is important.”
And the bottom line is that you can’t see it in their faces because you’re only seeing kids who went through DARE, and you may think that they don’t use drugs, but you don’t know that because they won’t use them in front of you. And you don’t know what these kids would be doing if they didn’t do DARE. The only way to find out is through the controlled-study approach.
Has drug war politics kept this program going?
Yes. I do think it would be a politically unpopular thing for a politician to say, “I think we’re going to defund DARE.” I imagine that it would not sit well with the majority of the voters. You also sound like you are in favor of drug use if you do that.
Do you feel vindicated with Thursday’s announcement?
I think it’s a good step, but I’m waiting to see what the details look like. DARE has supposedly gone through changes before. The big difference between what’s happening now and what has happened in the past is there’s an evaluation component tagged onto this curriculum change — to see whether or not it is effective. Because one of the things that DARE people say in response to my study is, “Well, that was the old version of DARE. We’re using a new and improved version of DARE.”
In other words, curriculum changes are a nice way of getting around the fact that your old program didn’t work. You just promise that the new one will.
You seem a little skeptical about how big of a change it will be.
I think the curriculum changes that have taken place previously have been more cosmetic than real. DARE continued to be administered by police officers to all kids regardless of the kids’ risk, focused on peer pressure resistance and included a zero-tolerance policy — and it’s been that way with every incarnation of DARE until now.
What was specifically wrong with the program? What made it ineffective?
The first thing is that DARE is an untargeted program and assumes all kids are at risk for using drugs, so it aims its message at all of them. But there’s actually good evidence that not all kids are at equal risk. If you want to reach kids at the highest risk, you might need to do something different.
There are a couple of studies going on, some here at University of Kentucky, which look at public service announcements targeted at people who are at high risk for drug use. They have found that this kind of targeted campaign is much more effective than an untargeted one. One thing you might hope DARE will do is try to design its program to better influence those who are most at risk.
The other thing that has been problematic in the past is that DARE has this strong zero-tolerance policy for any drug use at all. But that gets undermined a lot by the popular culture. It might be a hard message for kids to buy into or believe because their favorite rock stars or friends are using these drugs, and their heads aren’t blowing up. They don’t see a whole lot of negative consequences accruing.
Are you advocating an approach that teaches kids that doing drugs one time isn’t that bad, but continuing use is?
That could be an alternative — or at least getting away from the whole “if you use drugs, your head is going to blow up” [approach].
DARE’s longtime target of intervention has been peer pressure resistance. But the image you get from that is that good kids use drugs because bad kids pressure them. I think kids use drugs because they’re available and kids are curious. It’s not the case that there are all these bad kids lurking around in the corners, trying to get the good kids to try drugs. DARE may be targeting the wrong mechanism.
How would one go about targeting the kids most at risk?
You might design programs that would be more appealing to that group of kids. So if you think that one of the individual risk factors for drug use is high-sensation seeking, then you might work to make your presentations or your program more appealing to that group of kids.
But do you think that the targeting of specific kids — calling them aside — could have negative effects?
I don’t know that I would advocate identifying those kids and bringing them in and only treating them. But you could get at them in a universally delivered message that was just more appealing to them. Public service announcements are a good example. They don’t select certain kids to see them, but they try to make the announcements more appealing to those at risk of using drugs.
Did you ask the kids what they thought of DARE?
No, the DARE program was only a small part of what we did. We wanted to see if there was any effect of DARE after a decade. We thought about not even publishing [the results] because everybody already knows that DARE doesn’t work; people in the prevention community already know that.
Why do you think DARE has been kept alive for so long?
I think DARE America had a lot strong advocates in a lot of different places, and we as prevention scientists haven’t done a particularly good job of getting the message out to the people on the street, where the decisions are really made. If I could convince my neighborhood that DARE doesn’t work, it would have a lot of impact, probably more than me publishing another paper on it.
After your report came out, were you criticized?
Actually, I was. Glenn Levant, the head of DARE America, called it “voodoo science.”
What do you say to him and the other critics now?
Just that they’re simply wrong, and that none of their criticisms held any water.
When Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison told readers what she was going to do for George W. Bush on Presidents Day — give a gift in his name to Planned Parenthood — she could not have foreseen what would happen next. An e-mail detailing her idea was unleashed upon e-mail in boxes everywhere and then forwarded a zillion times, bringing Planned Parenthood its largest surge in contributions in recent history: more than $300,000 for far. And the special day is still 10 days away.
“I am very gratified,” says Morrison by phone from L.A. “I think it’s better than a diet, the way it is swirling around. I must say my pro-choice Republican mother is very proud of me.”
Ever since the e-mail started circulating, phone lines at Planned Parenthood chapters around the country have been ringing off the hook; mail has been coming in by the boxload, and interest has been so high that the organization has set up a Web site to make it easier to donate.
“For every action you take to dismantle women’s reproductive rights in this country, I and millions like me will take action — like this contribution to Planned Parenthood — to support those rights,” writes a woman from Greenbrae, Calif., in an e-mail posted on the Planned Parenthood site. This, and countless other testimonials, point to recent actions by President Bush to limit funding and support for reproductive rights as the reason for their increased activism in the long-stalled abortion debate. “I believe in LIFE, but equally I believe in a woman’s CHOICE regarding her reproductive rights,” writes yet another person. “I voted for you, but have been disappointed with the public positions you have taken so far.”
In Bush’s first month in office he has appointed outspoken anti-abortion proponent John Ashcroft as attorney general, has banned federal funds for international family planning clinics if they mention abortion as an option and has directed Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services (another outspoken anti-abortion advocate), to review the safety of RU-486, also known as the abortion pill, which was approved for use in this country last fall. In addition, two Republican lawmakers introduced a bill this week requiring doctors to be trained in performing abortions before they are allowed to administer the pill.
“I think it says that for years people thought their [abortion] rights were secure,” says Molly Smith Watson, who is overseeing the donations for Planned Parenthood. “In the last eight years under Clinton, almost an entire generation of women has come of age without knowing about direct attacks on their right to choose. And frankly it has been over 30 years since Roe vs. Wade was enacted, so people can’t remember a time when it has been repealed. They couldn’t until George Bush showed his intention was to repeal it.”
Indeed, says Watson, this current campaign is remarkable because it is a completely grass-roots protest of recent policies. Also, many of the donors have never given to Planned Parenthood before; and a large number of the online contributions have addresses with .edu at the end, leading Watson to believe that a lot of college students are getting involved after a long period of complacency.
A spokesman for Bush says he did not know about the campaign, but that it will not deter him from continuing with his pro-life policies. At this point, spokesman Jimmy Orr says, Bush does not believe there’s enough support in the nation to overturn Roe vs. Wade. But, adds Orr, “the president will continue his efforts to promote a culture of life, and that includes steps to make abortion more rare, such as parental notification, promoting adoptions and a ban on partial-birth abortion.”
Rachel Vagts was at work when she received the Presidents Day e-mail from a friend. She then forwarded it to about 10 more people and told countless others; they, she believes, sent it on to even more. After several days of thinking about it, she logged on to the Planned Parenthood site and donated $15. “I have always supported their cause philosophically, but I never gave them money before,” says the 29-year-old college archivist from Decorah, Iowa, a small town in the northeast part of the state. “Where I live, you have to travel a long way to get services, but they exist … I’m worried that we could get to a point that there will be no one in Iowa providing services.”
The concept of donating money in someone else’s name is not new. Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, used the tactic in 1990 to fend off the Christian Action Council, which had threatened a boycott of Patagonia stores if the company followed through on its plans to donate a portion of its profits to Planned Parenthood. Patagonia wrote a letter informing the CAC that if it chose to picket, Patagonia would pay a certain amount of money to Planned Parenthood for every person who picketed its stores. The group backed down instantly. Patagonia also deployed the same tactic several years later when it was threatened by logging activists, who were calling the outfit’s 800 number in droves. The company ended up donating $1,600 to a forest protection group before the calls stopped coming in.
Planned Parenthood’s Watson says the organization is receiving so many donations — about 1,000 a day — that she has had to call on extra volunteers to help handle the onslaught. She says it has not yet been decided how the money will be spent, but she believes it will go to the group’s general fund, which is for education, advocacy and litigation on reproductive rights.
What also hasn’t been decided is how the group is going to deliver all of the messages to the president. “It has become overwhelming, and we will probably laser-print everything and send it in bulk to the White House,” she says. “But if we get many more thousands, we may hand-deliver them. But I don’t believe George Bush will allow us to walk up to his desk, so we will probably just send them.”
Will the president actually read them? Orr says he doesn’t know.
Tuesday was Al Gore’s first day as a professor, and according to some of his students, it seemed like it. The graduate journalism students at Columbia University say he seemed nervous and not quite sure what to do with himself, and repeatedly asked them to bear with him since he was new to teaching. “It took him a long time to relax,” said Marguerite Reardon, a 27-year-old grad student. “I used to be a teacher so I could feel for him.” Gore’s daughter Karenna reportedly sat in the back of class to offer moral support.
Columbia is one of four teaching stints Gore will do over the next year, along with the University of California at Los Angeles, Middle Tennessee State University and Fisk University.
Exactly what the former vice president said during his 90-minute class, called “Covering National Affairs in the Information Age,” is unknown, since the media were not allowed into his seminar and students were forbidden to divulge the content of his lecture. When some reporters loudly complained to Gore about the lack of access as he entered and exited the class, he responded, “It’s the school’s policy,” before walking past the secret service agents guarding the entrance to the J-school.
Once inside the classroom, students say, Gore came across as the wonkish, somewhat abstract figure they were familiar with from television interviews and press reports. Writing on a white board with a red marker, he used baffling terms like “news derivative” and “technology co-efficient” that even former aides said they had never heard before. When the few students who would talk on background tried to explain what his lecture was about, they were at a loss. “I couldn’t tell you what it was about,” said one student. “The thing was long on theory and a lot of it was lofty. He never rolled up his sleeves and gave hard examples of what he meant.”
Former staffers said that during his bid for the presidency, Gore was angered by a media he believed held him to a higher standard than his contender, President George W. Bush. (By way of example, aides pointed to the flap over Gore’s statement in the first debate that he was in Texas surveying fire damage with FEMA head James Lee Witt, when in fact he was with Witt’s deputy. Gore believed that the media blew up this misstatement as a damning example of his tendency to exaggerate, yet forgave Bush for much more serious misstatements, such as his incorrect claim that all of the men responsible for the murder of James Byrd had been sentenced to death.) And one of his main themes, according to students, was the media’s increasing tendency to simply repeat stories that appear in other publications, without checking to make sure that the stories were accurate or doing any original reporting. “That happened a number of times during the campaign — the press picking up a story and running with it — so it’s understandable that he’s sensitive to it,” said a former aide. “The whole press pack fed off each other; nobody wanted to miss some issue that somebody else had glommed on to…The media exaggerated [Gore's] exaggeration.”
But aides also acknowledged that Gore, a former newspaper reporter himself, used that same system to get out stories that were politically damaging to his opponent and helpful to his own case. “He understood that dynamic and played it,” the aide said. “Thus we would leak stories to somebody at the New York Times and then everybody else would have to follow. We did that with ‘Rats.’” (He was referring to the infamous Bush ad assailing Gore, in which the word “RATS” appeared when the tape was slowed down.).
Gore also reportedly discussed new technologies that are changing the way news is reported.
At one point, Gore walked “town hall” style through the room, calling on students to answer questions. Most students said that as he loosened up, he was really quite funny, even making self-deprecating remarks about losing the election.
“There wasn’t anything juicy to warrant it being off the record,” says Andy Pergam, a 22-year-old student from Bethesda, Md. “It was a lot like the first day of school — you figure out who the professor is; they get to know you. I think he was trying to gain our trust in him as a professor by showing us how much he knows about the media. He was a smart guy.” Pergam said he wished that Gore had offered more inside information about how politicians deal with the media, rather than simply a theory he could have read in a textbook. Maybe, he said hopefully, Gore was reserving that for future classes.
In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a 13-year-old boy is convicted of murdering a 6-year-old; he says he was imitating his heroes in professional wrestling when he body-slammed and kicked the 48-pound girl to death. The next day in Torrington, Conn., a 14-year-old reportedly poured gasoline on his friend and set him on fire. The kids say they were re-creating a stunt featured on a popular MTV show called “Jackass.” The unscathed teen, who inflicted second- and third-degree burns on his friend’s hands and legs, was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment.
The Florida boy’s attorney believes the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) is responsible for the girl’s death; the father of burn victim Jason Lind blames MTV. And while Lind was in the hospital, his dad appealed for support to Washington’s most vociferous critic of Hollywood, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and the war on violence in the media was declared once again.
“There are some things that are so potentially dangerous and inciting, particularly to vulnerable children, that they simply should not be put on TV, and this is clearly one that crosses that line,” said Lieberman in a press release that placed blame on purveyors of rough-and-tumble programming.
But, under the current justice system, the chain of finger-pointing ultimately ends with the children who commit the crimes. For the moment, there is no law against portrayals of grisly violence, only laws against those who attempt to reenact them. They are the ones arrested, interrogated, read their Miranda rights; they are the ones who frequently decide whether to waive their rights while they are alone without a parent or attorney, they are the ones charged, cross-examined and ultimately found guilty, or “delinquent” as it is said in juvenile parlance. And they are ones who do the time for the crime.
“If there is a product on the market that results in the death of even a couple of children, what happens?” asks Dr. Howard Spivak, chief of general pediatric and adolescent medicine at the New England Medical Center in Boston and chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics task force on violence. “It gets taken off the market; there’s major investigation.
“Here we have a product [violent programming] that has at the very least a clear relationship with the death of half a dozen children in this country and what has happened? Nothing. What’s happened is that we have blamed what one might argue is a victim of the product. It’s very, very bizarre. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The intention of a person committing an act — even an act of violence — is crucial in determining whether the act is a crime. But there’s growing concern among child psychologists and attorneys that many adolescents aren’t competent to stand trial for the crimes with which they are charged. Kids are often ill-equipped developmentally to understand the consequences of their actions. For 13- and 14-year-olds, death doesn’t always seem to have permanence — a stunt on TV looks easy to replicate at home without consequences; and role models are often the biggest, the strongest; the ones who can snap another person’s neck in two seconds, the ones who inspire the favorite WWF action dolls.
Surprisingly, in many cases where a child’s developmental status is key to understanding his actions, public defenders don’t have the resources to order a legal test to determine the accused child’s competency. In the past, juveniles were presumed incompetent at the age of 12 or younger. The practice now is that anyone who is arrested is presumed competent until someone challenges his or her competency. This is a crucial component in many children’s cases, say juvenile advocates, since once the issue of competency is raised, a trial or “adjudicatory hearing” is postponed if the accused is found to be incompetent.
“I’m sure there are people who believe that kids are so savvy about courts or crime, they know what’s going on,” says Marie Osborne, the chief of the juvenile division at the Miami public defender’s office. “My position is that children have cognitive limitations and I don’t believe they see options and ramifications the way adults do. I don’t think they understand that what’s happening in this [court] process over a couple of days affects the rest of their lives. I don’t think kids are future-oriented; most don’t think past their next birthday or Christmas.”
Lionel Tate seemed to embody the child that Osborne describes, a kid oblivious to the gravity of his situation. During his trial for first-degree murder, Tate, with his chubby cheeks and closely cropped hair, often sat in the defendant’s chair drawing pictures. He was just 12 when he lifted Tiffany Eunick up and slammed her onto a table, lacerating her liver, fracturing her skull and breaking her bones. Tate’s case was determined to be heinous enough to be tried in adult court, where his first-degree murder charge was predicated on the felony murder doctrine — which says you can be held responsible for murder if it happens during the course of a felony. The felony in Tate’s case was aggravated child abuse.
Juvenile court was created as an alternative to adult court for children who were believed at the time — 100 years ago — not to have the capacity to fully understand their actions. Osborne and others recall the good old days of the juvenile justice system, as recently as a decade ago, when juvenile court still served this purpose. It was a given at that time that kids are different developmentally and that, unlike adults, they don’t always understand that if the gun goes off, someone can, and will, die; that there is no taking back an action no matter how much you wish it didn’t happen.
With the increase of juvenile crime in the early ’90s came a tendency to attribute adult motivation and sophistication to children and more kids were tried as adults. “Do the crime. Do the time. Victims don’t care how young you are,” went the slogans.
“It used to be that you would look at the kid, his history, background and think about how to teach the kid to be responsible and find the level of intervention to accomplish that,” says Robert Schwartz, coauthor of “Youth on Trial: A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice” and executive director of the Juvenile Law Center. “Now you have to remind the get-tough-on-crime [contingent] that adolescent development makes a difference.”
As the public has demanded more accountability from kids accused of heinous crimes, prosecutors have been under pressure to seek harsher sentences for the youngest offenders. And the trend continues even though the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes dropped 23 percent between 1995 and 1999, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
“I think the system needs a huge overhaul in terms of how we treat juveniles and how we determine their competence,” says Dr. Carl Bell, a professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s a big problem which, unfortunately, the public doesn’t understand because the public sees a 13-year-old as being able to tell the difference between right and wrong.
“The fact is that a kid can tell the difference between right and wrong but not have the long-term appreciation for the effect of their actions. That’s incompetency.”
An evaluation of a child’s developmental maturity is key to understanding his or her competency, but very often such an evaluation is not part of the legal process. For instance, studies consistently show that kids under 15 don’t always understand their Miranda rights. They will know the meaning of the words, will have heard them on TV, but not be “competent” to understand what they mean to them in their current circumstances. In the same way, children and adolescents may know that the things they see on TV are violent, but not be able to understand their catastrophic consequences in real life.
“A young child may believe you can smash people over the back with a chair and it doesn’t matter,” says Jeff Haugaard, associate professor of human development at Cornell University. “It’s the extent that we show things that are unreal on TV that we are likely to be influencing these children.
“It’s not that we’re creating evil children or that watching these programs is making them bad, it’s just that we are creating this false sense that you can do these things and it can work out … My sense is that we are now holding kids responsible for having an adult-like knowledge about the world.”
MTV broadcasts a disclaimer during “Jackass” that warns viewers not to replicate anything they see on the show at home. During each episode of the show, which runs on Sundays at 9 p.m., a statement reads, “The following show features stunts performed by professionals and/or total idiots under strict control and supervision. MTV and the producers insist that neither you or anyone else attempt to recreate or perform anything you have seen on this show.”
“Jackass” prides itself on being stupid, featuring “Candid Camera”-style sketches and stunts like the “human barbecue” trick, which Lind and his friend supposedly imitated.
To adults, there is no gray area: Set yourself on fire, and chances are you’ll get burned; pick up a little girl and smash her down on the table, and she will sustain serious injures. But adults also know what goes on behind the scenes; they are familiar with acting and artifice. Kids watch WWF thugs get stomped on by 300-pound “enemies” and rise again, appearing the following week fresh and ready for more happy mayhem. (Another important lesson: These guys aren’t just indestructible — they are governor material).
Most American children have watched TV from toddlerhood, learning to count, to read, to sing and say “Thank you” from Mister Rogers and the Muppets. At what point are they supposed to conclude that the medium is no longer something to learn from, that the things they see are not things they should try at home?
To the WWF, Tate’s defense that he was imitating TV was as phony as the choreographed stunts their wrestlers perform for their fans. “The WWF has stated consistently that the suggestion that wrestling had anything to do with Lionel Tate’s murderous acts was a contrived hoax,” said Jerry McDevitt, the WWF’s litigation counsel in a press release. “The jury easily and quickly repudiated the defense counsel’s claim that pro wrestling was somehow to blame for this intentional homicide, and individual jurors have reiterated this in public comments.
“The evidence proved, and the jury found, that this was death caused not by mimicking wrestling moves, but rather by a deliberate, prolonged and savage beating.”
Children killing other children is still a rare occurrence. On the other hand, mimicking the media is not. “How odd do you have to be as a 13- or 14-year-old to want to imitate bizarre things you see in the media?” asks Dr. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, professor of pediatrics and preventive medicine at Northwestern University Medical School. “I would say they all want to do it.
“They are still children, they have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality; they lose track of consequences, they don’t understand death. So when people put forward these images in the world, they have to recognize that’s how kids are going to see it.”
For James Backstrom, county attorney for Dakota County, Minn., deciding which cases to refer to adult court is always a tough decision. He looks at a variety of factors in determining which adolescents are not fit for juvenile court. He doesn’t have as much of a problem with the older ones who commit heinous crimes. But when it dips down to kids Tate’s age — he was 12 when the murder occurred — Backstrom finds it more troubling.
“I don’t personally believe that the prosecution of 10-, 11-, 13-year-olds as adults is an appropriate response in the vast majority of cases, regardless of the level of crime,” says Backstrom, who is also co-chair of the National District Attorney Association’s Juvenile Justice Committee. “We are dealing with kids who, in essence, do not understand the full nature of the extent of their actions. There needs to be some recognition of that through the criminal justice system while at the same time we need to ensure adequate accountability.”
But Backstrom does not believe that the kids should evade responsibility completely. He’s a big advocate of “blended sentencing” laws, which combine elements of the juvenile and adult courts. Ironically, the plea bargain Tate turned down was a blended sentence. In exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder, he would have had to only serve three years in juvenile detention, one year of house arrest and eight years’ probation. (Shortly after Tate’s conviction, the prosecutor in the case said he would seek a lenient sentence for the boy, who faces life imprisonment).
Obviously, not all kids will imitate TV and kill in the process. The majority of children can watch hours of violent programming and remain unfazed. Child-development psychologists say that only a small percentage of children are vulnerable, and that many factors influence a child’s view of the world — their peers, their teachers, their parents. In fact, the recent surgeon general’s report on youth violence could not conclude whether violent programming alters a juvenile’s behavior in the long term because of all the influences a kid is exposed to while growing up.
“I think it’s self-evident that TV influences us and I think it influences children, too,” Osborne says. “I don’t think that means that I want someone held culpable or liable. But there needs to be an acknowledgement that children ‘role-model’ their culture and if we care about their actions, we should pay attention to culture. I had a Russian roulette case — it was clearly consent and somebody blew their head off. The what-ifs of the world never penetrate a kid’s brain.” And until they are old enough to understand the potential fallout of their actions, says Osborne, their competence should be assessed before a judgment is rendered.
After this week’s release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on global warming — the strongest scientific evidence ever linking climate change to man’s activities — environmentalists and scientists say the time has come for President Bush to come up with a policy to address this slow-moving ecological crisis.
The study predicts that the Earth’s temperature could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. In fact, it says we just exited the warmest decade in the last 140 years.
While there’s been little doubt that the climate is indeed warming — glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, precipitation is changing — there have been some high-profile skeptics, Bush included. They question the science linking this general warming trend to things that humans do, such as burning fossil fuel, which releases carbon dioxide. The increase of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, is believed to enhance the “greenhouse effect” that traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere that otherwise would be released.
“I don’t think we know the solution to global warming yet and I don’t think we’ve got all the facts,” said Bush during his second presidential debate. (The president’s office did not return phone calls from Salon seeking comment on his current position.)
The new report states emphatically that “most” of the warming, especially over the last 50 years, is attributable to human activity, and not to natural occurrences such as normal climate variations from one decade to another, changes in sunlight or volcanic activity, which can cool the atmosphere.
“I would hope that the Bush administration will read our report very carefully and look at the implications [of our findings],” says Robert Watson, chairman of the IPCC panel.
Previously, the IPCC’s 1995 report estimated that temperatures would increase only up to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Watson says that if the IPCC’s new estimate is correct, people living in low-lying areas will be displaced by the rising seas. We will also see more rainfall and hotter days, leading to heat stress and deaths.
“Remember Chicago?” Watson asks, referring to the 1995 heatwave that killed over 500 people in that city. “I’m not saying that we expect 500 people to die, but it’s that type of phenomenon.” In addition, he says it could change agriculture production in the tropics and subtropics, and lead to a greater incidence of infection-born diseases like malaria.
In 1997, more than 100 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The United States, which emits one-fourth of the world’s total, was one of the signatories. The protocol laid out the requirements — industrialized countries must reduce their emissions rate by an average of 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2010 — but not the details on how to achieve those goals. Last November, a meeting at The Hague designed to come up with methods to execute the treaty collapsed. The dispute largely centered around how much credit the U.S. should be able to get for emissions trading or using “sinks” like forests to soak up carbon dioxide.
After the talks failed, participating countries discussed getting together again in May to continue where The Hague left off. On Thursday, the Bush administration asked that the meeting be held in July.
“There are strong expectations for the U.S. to have a position,” says Nancy Kete, director of the World Resources Institute’s climate, energy and pollution program. “We are urging the Bush administration to not put it off. The science is getting clearer and consensus is stronger that climate change is happening and it’s happening right now.”
But skepticism persists in Washington. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., is one of those who is not convinced that climate changes and human activity are definitively linked. His office points to fundamental problems with the models the IPCC report used. “Senator Hagel does not reject the idea that the Earth is warming and that human activity may play a factor to it, but we don’t know that for certain yet,” says his spokeswoman Deb Fiddelke. “He strongly supports continued studying.”
Watson says that disbelievers have a choice: Either believe the majority of scientists or the lone critics. He says that the science, although not perfect, is the best evidence available, and reason enough to start taking actions to curb emissions.
Ironically, some environmentalists believe the best hope for an international treaty lies in the new Bush administration. They say a slow changing of the guard gives them hope that this administration will be able to do what the previous one could not. While environmentalists strongly oppose the nomination of Christie Whitman as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, they were pleased that Gale Norton, the nominee for interior secretary, acknowledged the science of global warming during her confirmation hearings.
“I don’t think that [Bush] having an oil industry background precludes him from doing it,” says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “I think there’s a very good chance that he will come up with a policy.” Claussen points to companies like British Petroleum and Shell, which now have specific emissions targets, as proof that more and more people are believing in the science. Also, industry, she says, is starting to make commitments to everything from solar energy and biomass to fuel cell technology.
“If I could dream, it would be like Nixon going to China,” says Patrick Mazza, researcher for Climate Solutions, an environmental advocacy group. “The U.S. needs to go back to the table with proposals to meet more of its Kyoto obligations domestically. And maybe the Bush administration could pull the Republicans.”
Indeed, Fiddelke says that Senate Republicans will be more likely to work with Bush on the issue since “there is no longer a concern that the administration is going to push the U.S. into a radical position that would damage our economy.”
But in order for there to be any international treaty reducing emissions and combating global warming, there will have to be bipartisan support for it in the Senate, where it must be ratified. It seems unlikely that that could happen without a president who believes that human activity is the cause.
As fuel from a grounded ship washes up on the shores of the Galápagos Islands — where Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution in the 19th century — environmentalists are criticizing the Ecuadorean government’s response, which they believe has been too slow.
So far, the toll has been limited: One pelican is dead and four sea lions injured, their prognosis uncertain. But environmentalists say we may never know just what species perished or became extinct because of the accident, since the archipelago is home to so many animals, many of which haven’t even been documented yet.
The accident occurred when the Ecuadorean-registered ship ran aground on Jan. 16. By late Friday, diesel and bunker fuel began to leak from the Jessica, polluting the sea with an estimated 170,000 gallons.
Already there are reports of oil washing ashore on San Cristobal Island, about 800 yards from where the boat lies tilted at 60 degrees on its side, and as far away as Santa Fe Island, 37 miles west. The islands are home to many endangered species — and many animals that are endemic to the archipelago. Ecuadorean President Gustavo Noboa declared a state of emergency Monday night. “There’s going to be a lot of damage,” says Ximena Vallejo, communications director for the president. “Right now we are asking for all of the international help that the world can give to us. We have to take care of this no matter what.” But there has been mixed government reaction to the spill. On Tuesday, Ecuadorean Environment Minister Rodolfo Rendon described the spill to reporters as a “problem, not a tragedy.”
For their part, environmentalists paint the accident as something that could have been prevented; irreparable damage has occurred because, they say, the Ecuadorean government took too long to act. “Since Jan. 16, we understand that the thing went aground but [the Ecuadorean government] have done absolutely nothing,” says Natalia Arias, president of Accion Ecologica, a local ecological group. “The problem is they waited until it all leaked out and say let’s put [up] barriers. But it would have been more efficient to suck the oil out of the tanks to another tanker because they had days and days of notice.”
But according to President Noboa’s spokeswoman, Vallejo, Ecuador requested international help on Wednesday, the day after the accident. Due to bureaucratic delays, Vallejo says, it took the U.S. State Department until Saturday to authorize the U.S. Coast Guard to provide assistance. Vallejo says Ecuador requested help because the country does not have the resources to handle a large-scale oil spill. “We were trying to remove it, but we have don’t have the equipment,” she says. “We wanted to avoid this.” Meanwhile, the Ecuadorean government places the blame on the helmsman of Jessica, and has launched an investigation into the matter since the helmsman reportedly was not properly licensed. (The ship’s captain was reportedly out sick that day, Vallejo says.)
The United States Coast Guard National Strike Force, a response team that handles oil spills, arrived on Sunday and has been siphoning fuel off the boat. But that work has been complicated by the condition of the ship. “Essentially, it’s easier to walk on the walls than on the floor so it’s difficult for measurements,” Rick Wester, spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, says of the listing ship. “Also, it now looks like there’s significantly less oil remaining on board, and that implies that more fuel has been spilled than what we initially estimated,” he says. It’s difficult to say how much fuel has seeped out, but authorities believe that only 10,000 gallons remain onboard a ship that carried 240,000 gallons of fuel.
“Once the fuel is out, it’s very hard to do anything about it,” says Peter Kramer, Ph.D., a zoologist with the World Wildlife Fund, and former president of the islands’ Charles Darwin Foundation. “You can protect a few animals, and wash them, but once this has happened, one must not delude oneself. This is a catastrophe that has terrible consequences.” Kramer says that while diesel spreads quickly and is a problem for days or even months, bunker fuel, which the ship was also carrying, is heavier, sinking down into the water and persisting for years. Oil can be deadly to animals that ingest it, either directly or by consuming other animals that were poisoned by the spill. In addition, Kramer says, if oil gets into the feathers or fur of an animal, it can lose its natural insulation and then die from the cold.
But even taken at its largest estimates, the total spill would be much smaller than the notorious Exxon Valdez spill. On March 24, 1989, the tanker ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into the waters, killing an approximate 300 harbor seals, 2,650 sea otters, and hundreds of thousands of birds, most of which were never found. But it’s not so much the amount of oil that is spilled that accounts for how big a disaster an oil spill is; environmentalists say it’s where the accident occurs. “The Exxon Valdez is on record as causing the greatest kill of wildlife because the time of the year and the area in which it occurred, which had a great abundance of wildlife,” says Paul Horsman, oil campaigner for Greenpeace International. “At this stage, it’s difficult to put it on a rank of order. For sure we can say the potential impact is great because the Galápagos contain such a wide range of marine life and a lot of species, which only occur on the Galápagos Islands.”
Dan Lawn was one of the first to arrive on the scene after the Exxon Valdez spill. At first, he says, it was difficult to ascertain how many animals had died because it was during migration season. The sound was still full with birds after the accident occurred; it was only much later, when migration ended, that they noticed the real degree of carnage. “If you have a population that has found a niche in the area and you oil them, they all die,” Lawn says. “It’s hard to see that they’re all dead as you have new influx of animals during migration. But after migration is over you have the sound of silence.”
But Kramer says that most of the wildlife in the Galápagos lives there year around, so he believes at least some of the damage will appear soon. The marine iguana, for example, lives within a space of 100 feet its whole life, feeding off algae in the water. But still, there are birds, like the phalarope, which migrate to the area every winter; and dolphins could also be affected because they could ingest contaminated fish. Of course, an oil spill can affect everything in the food chain from the microorganisms, like algae, to crabs to tortoises.
On Tuesday, Ecuadorean authorities reported that strong winds have been pushing the fuel out toward the open ocean, away from the fragile ecosystems of the Galápagos. Now environmentalists hope that rescue efforts to protect the wildlife will be successful. The problem, with diesel, they say, is that since it’s clear, it’s almost impossible to tell if an animal has been oiled yet — even though it burns on the skin like gasoline.
