How Scapegoating Teenage Drivers Endangers Everyone
By guest contributor Mike Males. Long a social activist in the civil rights movements, Mike Males is now a Senior Researcher at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, and a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books about Youth and Human Rights including Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation, and The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents
Why does the United States suffer vastly excessive levels of gun violence, serious crime, imprisonment, homelessness, violent deaths, drug and alcohol abuse, AIDS, and other risks other Western nations more successfully contain? A major reason is that while more cohesive countries implement effective social and health policies directed at reducing manifest risks, American officials, institutions, and politically-attuned scientists exploit our racial diversity to blame powerless minorities for creating social problems. Our history of scapegoating feared outgroups not only brought disastrous consequences to the scapegoats, it has endangered all Americans by substituting demagoguery for sound public policies.
Traffic fatalities represent yet another large, unheralded, danger gap between Americans and citizens of similarly wealthy countries. Before the 1970s, the United States was the safest of all 18 Western nations in fatalities per mile driven. Today, due to the “the dramatic failure of U.S. safety policy,” we rank among the deadliest: “>From 1979 to 2002, over 200,000 more Americans were killed in traffic than would have been killed if the US had matched the safety progress in such better performing countries as Britain, Canada, or Australia,” writes transportation expert Leonard Evans.
As with other social problems, scapegoating hampers efforts to reduce Americans’ traffic risks. Promising past declines in drunken driving and highway fatalities have halted or reversed as officials increasingly fixate on blaming and restricting teenagers, a group that accounts for just 10% of serious accidents. In the last eight years, as California imposed the nation’s most draconian curbs on teenage driving, an alarming, 25% increase in traffic deaths among teens and adults ensued. Increasingly strident “traffic safety” advocates seek to ban teens from driving altogether.
Anti-teen campaigners argue that per mile driven, 15-19-year-olds suffer fatality rates 2.8 times higher than 45-64-year-olds, the safest adult group. However, they fail to add that serious motor vehicle accidents are very rare events. U.S. Department of Transportation reports on traffic fatalities and miles driven per age show that if an average teen and average 45-64 year-old driver each drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back 75,000 times (770 miles round trip each, taking five lifetimes), the teen would be expected to cause one additional fatality and three more serious injuries. The gap between teen and adult drivers ages 20-44, or 65 and older, would be smaller still.
Safety analyses show adult groups vary widely in fatality risks as well. Per mile driven, male drivers are 77% more likely to cause fatal crashes than women drivers; doctors and lawyers are twice as accident-prone as farmers; Washington, DC, motorists get into 140% more wrecks than Milwaukeeans; drivers over age 75 are riskier than teens. If mere statistical disparities justify legal restrictions on entire groups, all kinds of racial, gender, and other mass discriminations would be legitimated.
Indeed, a century ago, leading social and medical scientists employing now discredited “biodeterminist” models argued that higher risks in one racial group—say, homicide among African Americans compared to whites—validated “scientific” claims of the genetic superiority of whites. No responsible official or scientist would make such racist arguments today. Rather, disparities in risk are more properly explained by large differences in socioeconomic conditions between races, such as African Americans’ higher rates of poverty rooted in past discrimination.
Today, anti-youth groups have resurrected biodeterminism to argue that teenagers’ risks result from their innate risk-taking and inferior brain development compared to adults. In the press, reporters and authorities routinely demean adolescents as “reckless,” “immature,” “irrational,” “troubling,” “exasperating,” “alien,” and “crazy.” No alternative views are permitted. Biodeterminists—whether demeaning nonwhite minorities in 1906 or adolescents in 2006—quickly blame selected differences in risk on supposedly inherent biological differences while failing to examine differences in social conditions.
Major flaws in modern biodeterminist claims emerge when teenagers’ low socioeconomic status (within every racial group, teenagers are two to three times more likely to live in poverty than are middle-agers) is examined. In California’s 24 largest counties, the poverty rate among California teens ages 15-19 ranges from 8% to 30%; for middle-agers, from 4% to 13%. Our analysis of police records of all 38,000 fatal traffic crashes in these counties from 1995 through 2004 posted by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System concluded that “teen driving risks, overwhelmingly, result from greater poverty and driving inexperience, not innate risk-taking.”
Compared straight across, California teen drivers suffer risks nearly three times higher than middle-agers (42 fatal crashes per billion miles driven for age 15-19, versus 15 for ages 45-64). However, when teen and middle-aged risks are examined under equalized poverty levels, fatal accident disparities narrow dramatically (29 per billion miles traveled for teens, 21 for middle-agers).
Even this disparity vanishes when teens with the most driving experience are examined. Per mile driven, teenagers in California’s poorest counties are 750% more likely to be in fatal crashes than teens from its richest counties. Higher-income teens die less due to their access to safer vehicles and driving conditions, medical care, and other benefits—and because richer teens drive more.
Contrast San Mateo, an affluent coastal county on the San Francisco Bay where median household incomes top $60,000, to Stanislaus, an impoverished Central Valley county with household incomes averaging $23,000. San Mateo’s 18,000 teenage drivers motor an average of 15 miles per day, while Stanislaus’s 14,000 teen drivers drive just 10 miles per day. If teenage driving risk lies in innately immature thinking and risk-proneness, we would expect San Mateo’s youth to die much more than Stanislaus’s. In fact, despite driving 1,700 more miles per year, a San Mateo youth experiences less than one-third the traffic fatality odds compared to a Stanislaus youth. Stanislaus teens suffer a staggering 4.3 times more fatal accidents per mile driven.
An even more extreme risk gap divides Marin and Tulare County teens. Tulare youth, the state’s poorest, collectively suffered 121 fatal crashes in 370 million miles driven in the last decade, six times more per driver and eight times more per mile driven that wealthy Marin’s teen drivers (13 fatal crashes in 460 million miles driven). In fact, Marin and San Mateo teens are substantially less likely to be involved in fatal crashes per mile driven than are Stanislaus and Tulare middle-agers.
That American experts and officials continue to dismiss social conditions in favor of easy, 19th century-style stereotyping and scapegoating (merely substituting “teenagers” for “minorities” today) bodes ill for ameliorating America’s unconscionably high risks as our society diversifies.
Mike Males, author of four books and numerous articles on adolescents, is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. See http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales
