Word: parkes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...word bursts into the lexicon, capturing with shocking force the latent fears of a troubled age. The latest such word is "wilding," the term used by a band of New York City teenagers to describe the mischief they set out to commit on a clear April night in Central Park. Looking, they said, for something to do, they roamed the park's northern reaches, splintering into smaller groups and allegedly assaulting one hapless victim after another. Finally, one pack came upon a 28-year-old woman jogging alone past a grove of sycamore trees. According to police, they chased...
...last week the attack had escalated from a local tragedy into a morbid national obsession. Perhaps the story resonated across the country because the victim was a wealthy, white financier with degrees from Wellesley and Yale. Or because the scene was Central Park, the backyard of powerful news media and a symbol of everything Americans most fear about New York City. Or it may have been because of the word wilding, which seemed simultaneously to define and obscure the transformation of a group of teenage boys into a bloodthirsty...
...station, a 15-year-old girl was kidnaped at knifepoint by two men, held captive for five days and repeatedly raped. She managed to escape and flagged down a passing car. "Get me out of here!" she begged the three teenagers inside. They did, and took her to a park in East Los Angeles, where the eldest of the boys, 18, allegedly raped her again...
...such theories, however valid, ring hollow in the face of crimes like the Central Park attack. Pornography, even the most gruesome kind, is commonplace in countries where the level of violence does not approach that in the U.S. The impulses behind the most brutal attacks are extremely complicated. "What we're seeing is a real distortion in personality development," says Michael Nelson, professor of psychology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. "It's not nice little neurotic people acting out problems...
...culture of violence can corrupt affluent suburban adolescents, it plays special havoc when mixed with the pathology of the ghetto, where danger surrounds children every day, sometimes inside their homes, always outside. At least one of the Central Park suspects was sexually assaulted when he was a child, and the private histories of the others are still a mystery. In such brutal conditions, a youngster's peers can become his family, and wilding can be a way to prove his masculinity. "Kids who roam in groups gain a sense of power that they do not have individually," says Elijah Anderson...