but they are expected to act like adults. This irony creates many of the conflicts that we at-
tribute to the turbulence of adolescence.
I argue that adolescence is not a natural phenomenon or developmental stage, but rather
a modern social construction. The adolescent years are not problematic in cultures in which
young people are legitimately integrated into their communities and are expected to increas-
ingly contribute as workers and citizens. Adolescence is a phenomenon of the U.S. capitalist
economy that began with the Industrial Revolution. It functions to keep teenagers out of the
permanent labor force. In effect, the concept of adolescence lowers unemployment rates,
provides teenagers with low-wage occupational training, and socializes them into a hierar-
chical and authoritarian work environment.
In this system, high schools function as containment facilities where teenagers are ware-
housed until society has a place for them. We justify this containment by arguing that the
economy requires a skilled work force, but it is not clear that this training must take place in
“schools as we know them” and with teenagers forced into suspended animation. The psy-
chological cost of this system is young people disengaged from the adult community, con-
centrated into large age-segregated buildings, and living with increased surveillance and
loss of privacy.
During the 1997–1998 school year, there was a series of highly publicized shootings in
schools that contributed to growing national concern about teenage violence. However,
while pundits were busy blaming movies and music lyrics for what seemed like an increase
in violence, statistics showed there had actually been a slight decrease in school shooting
deaths since 1992. (Donohue, Schiraldi, & Ziedenberg, 1998) Teenagers are used as political
scapegoats and the corporate media perpetuate this by demonizing young people instead of
confronting the problems of overall social violence and widespread gun ownership. It is far
easier to blame youth culture than it is seek solutions through challenging powerful political
lobbies protecting the interests of, for example, weapons manufacturers. The consequence
is that teenagers are marginalized and further alienated from the adult community.
Sexuality is another area where teenagers are under attack. The problems facing adoles-
cents are not their raging hormones, but the contradictory messages and the limited informa-
tion they receive about appropriate sexual behavior. At the same time that teenagers are told
to put off sex until marriage, they are immersed in advertising that exploits sexuality to sell all
kinds of products and maintain consumer demand. Additionally, this culture drastically limits
the information that youth need to be responsible sexual beings. It is difficult to get good infor-
mation in schools about birth control and abortion, and we do not make condoms freely avail-
able in schools. Instead of encouraging teenagers to raise questions about their identities and
sexualities, we silence them by establishing narrow, rigid categories of acceptable behavior
and by defining many forms of normal human sexual activity as immoral or evil.
By politicizing and commercializing sex and by withholding information about healthy
sexuality, our society victimizes young people. The United States has the highest rate of teen
pregnancy in the northern hemisphere (American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP], 1999), twice
the rate in England or Wales and nine times higher than The Netherlands or Canada (The
Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1999). Within the United States, adolescents as a group make up a
growing percentage of new HIV infections. Almost 25% of the estimated 40,000 new HIV infec-
tions in the United States occur among 13- to 21-year-olds, and at least one teenager is in-
fected with HIV every hour (Szekeres, 1999).
Schools must provide children and adolescents with good information about human sexu-
ality, reproduction, and sexually transmitted diseases. We know that prohibition and infor-
mation control is ineffective. We also know that if you provide people with good information,
they make better choices. For example, rates of sexual activity among western European
teenagers are similar or higher than rates for teenagers in the United States; however, teens
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