Crime and divorce rates in the 80s

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It is strange… I was born in the late 1950’s, saw but was too young to participate in the hippie movement, etc.

My take is that the revolt of the 60s generation caused people to think that anything goes, and they tried that for a while until they decided that no, anything doesn’t go.

CEven the worst of us come to a point where we have had enough. I think enough people saw the damage done by the anything-goes philosophy that they just wanted something better. It’s like a kid after Halloween eating nothing but candy for a few days: he begins to yearn for real food.
 
I look at it this way. In the late 60’s the sexual revolution occurred. At first it was mostly affecting younger people. They did drugs and had casual sex. A lot of adults didn’t though (this was the quiet majority that President Nixon talked about in the 60’s). Yet because of the culture and such the values that were countercultural in the late 60’s in some senses became extreme. People had more sex outside of marriage (don’t get me wrong a lot occurred before the 60’s and 70’s i’m sure) and drug use was tolerated in some senses. So by the 80’s things like the divorce rate rose pretty high. Sadly, I think this has contined somewhat, though I think the divorce rate is dropping somewhat. Granted its because many are simply not getting married
 
The sixties was the beginning as stated and it progressed to the swingers of the 70’s and just kept going as if there were consequences or so it seemed to all this behavior. Then came HIV/Aids in the 1980’s and people started to question, was this terrible STD with no cure a result of this behavior?

Having read " Adam and Eve After the Pill", she equates the same thing with the priest scandals of 1990’s. Prior to this, pedophilia was being discuss more broadly as an OK kind of thing in news articles. When a behavior has no bad effects or society sees no bad effects, society often gives it a go.

One hope for stability is the generation X whose marriages are holding. Brought up in divorce households, they really abhor divorce and don’t take it effects so lightly.

These bumps have only slowed the decay.
 
As somebody also born in the late 1950s who saw but wasn’t ‘part’, consider simple population statistics.

The baby boom embraces those born from 1946-1966.

Think about it --you have a huge wave of people who are in their teens to about 40 in the 1980s. . .so you are going to see a larger amount of crime because of sheer numbers.

The ‘boomlet’ of babies from the 1980s on were too young to be part of crime statistics in the 1980s and indeed the 1990s; by the 1990s, the population had shifted and many of those caught in crime in the 1980s were incarcerated, or had ‘aged’ out of certain of the typical crime behaviors.
 
There’s less divorce because less people get married. More co-habitate and/or never marry.
 
Tantum_ergo said:
As somebody also born in the late 1950s who saw but wasn’t ‘part’, consider simple population statistics.

The baby boom embraces those born from 1946-1966.

Think about it --you have a huge wave of people who are in their teens to about 40 in the 1980s. . .so you are going to see a larger amount of crime because of sheer numbers.

The ‘boomlet’ of babies from the 1980s on were too young to be part of crime statistics in the 1980s and indeed the 1990s; by the 1990s, the population had shifted and many of those caught in crime in the 1980s were incarcerated, or had ‘aged’ out of certain of the typical crime behaviors.
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That is true. But you’d think the statistics would be based per capita.
 
WildCatholic said:
That is true. But you’d think the statistics would be based per capita.
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They aren’t and they certainly aren’t reported on a per capita basis within demographic cohorts. The simple fact is that people under 40 are far more likely to commit crimes or get divorced than those over 40, same goes for the ages of 30 and 25. By 1980, the bulk of the Baby Boomers were over the peak ages for socially destructive behaviors, so the rate of these behaviors started to decline in reasonable proportion to the decline of numbers in those age ranges. They had far fewer kids, so there are simply fewer people IN the prime ages for these behaviors than there used to be. I was there, and I lived through that era of school closings left and right. I was a Roe v. Wade survivor.

If you actually looked at per capita rates within each demographic cohort, I don’t think you’d see reductions in the rates. We’re just halfway through the waiting period between initiation of below replacement fertility rates and time when actual population begins to decline, so this is just an early manifestation of the coming depopulation when the Boomers start dying off in big numbers.
 
I would say if my memory is correct the 1980’s and late 70’s is when people started to choose not to attend church - the rise of secularism and the rest is history.I always remember it before that as different times - people didn’t act like they do today - an example : you could leave something on your lawn and no one would steal it or leave the door unlocked over night without worrying someone would come in.I remember it changing in 1978/80 right when lots of people dropped religion from there lives.
 
I’m not a criminologist, but I do know a little bit about it.

First, crime statistics can be notoriously unreliable. It’s hard to get a perfectly accurate depiction of what’s going on in the streets, so to speak, because of jurisdictional differences in regard to the definitions of certain crimes, emphasis in enforcement, etc.

For instance, the rise in crime in the 80s could be related to an enormous increase in the population band that generally commits crimes (males, 18-25, maybe 30). As the Boomers began to hit that age bracket, there were more people in the band that commits crimes, and so, more criminals.

Or it might be that police were enforcing crimes more routinely than they did previously. Or it might be a change in the way we used statistics. It could be a number of things, and there are academics who spend their entire lives trying to put the pieces together.

As far as cultural arguments go (secularization, &c.), I’m not sure there is much of causal relationship. Crime rates have decreased significantly from the 80s. Aside from a cities (like Chicago), violent crime rates continue to decrease. But if I’m not mistaken, “secularization” has increased even more rapidly. If secularization WERE the cause of increased crime rates, we’d expect to see MORE crimes committed now than even in the 80s. But we don’t see that. So I’m not sure it makes sense to theorize that non-church-going leads to a higher crime rate.

In other words, no one can really be 100% sure what is going on. I think any person who studies this stuff carefully can only come to the conclusion that the answer to, “Why does crime increase or decrease at any given time?” is simply, “I don’t know.”

ETA: I’m not sure about divorce rates, though.
 
originally posted by manuelman
They had far fewer kids, so there are simply fewer people IN the prime ages for these behaviors than there used to be. I was there, and I lived through that era of school closings left and right. I was a Roe v. Wade survivor.
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There are fewer children. Children have been coming in from other countries whose values may be more aligned to Christian teaching.yet these children are probably younger.
originally posted by PeterGStanley
I would say if my memory is correct the 1980’s and late 70’s is when people started to choose not to attend church - the rise of secularism and the rest is history.I always remember it before that as different times - people didn’t act like they do today - an example : you could leave something on your lawn and no one would steal it or leave the door unlocked over night without worrying someone would come in.I remember it changing in 1978/80 right when lots of people dropped religion from there lives.
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I think the doors unlocked in all homes happened much earlier. In the early 1960’s few locked doors but that was changing. Maybe some better neighborhood still held, but many people started to lock doors in the later part of 1960’s and it continued until no one leaves doors even on cars unlocked. Cars may still be left unlocked in the most rural areas.
originally posted ** by Jon Savage**
There’s less divorce because less people get married. More co-habitate and/or never marry.
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The rise in cohabitation started around 1980 or maybe a bit earlier and has continued to increase. Yet the generation X group was probably one of the first generations to have most of their grandparents still be alive and an influence.

Many generation X’ers don’t attend church and really shy away from many things Christian, yet they try to influence their children by selecting good books. I often hear they are tired of witches, vampires and zombies and want real literature, the same for movies.

I don’t know if class is a factor with the more educated seeking better material.
 
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