This is an important book, coming as it does on the heels of so many recent youth murders in Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto. After enjoying 30 years of a precipitously declining homicide rate in Canada, the rate has begun slightly to rise again. Swaggering young Nasty Boys and Girls fire at will into crowds and kill innocent passersby or their rivals in love and commerce; young men join together to violate and murder a teenaged girl behind an all-night shop counter. It hints at the re-emergence of a cancer in the body social: as a nation, perhaps, we are no longer in remission. Something must be done, but what? Should we yield to temptation and invoke the ancient code of vengeance? Should we wrap them in a bag of poisonous snakes and boot them off a mountain-top? Or do we struggle to build a system that will produce fewer of these brutal recreational killers? If so, how? Do we sit at the feet of the gaggle of American “experts”—clergy, mayors and chiefs of...
Elliott Leyton is past president of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Myth of Delinquency: An Anatomy of Juvenile Nihilism, published in 1979 by McClelland and Stewart and later by Oxford University Press.
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