WILDING

Although for many Americans the term "wilding" was introduced into the national vernacular following the events of April 1989 when a woman jogging in New York's Central Park was brutally beaten and raped by a gang of teenage boys, the expression of this group behavior has occurred in many forms throughout the history of the United States.

Wilding refers to youth violence directed at complete strangers and spurred by a hubris mentality typically shared among a group of adolescent boys or young men. Within the media, the term has been identified with crimes such as sexual violence, assault and battery, vandalism, and robbery.

Documented cases of wilding within the media and police department reports across the country characterize it as aimless and random violence motivated by a need for excitement, social pressures associated with adolescents' need for belonging and acceptance, and a desire for material wealth and respect. Others suggest that "wolf packing," as it is also known, may be motivated more by a celebration of hedonism than for any extrinsic rewards.

The emergence of wilding in the United States as a form of social rebellion and expression among youth is believed by some to have preceded the most recent occurrences such as the incident in Central Park and has its roots in the behaviors of other, similarly disaffected generations of young Americans. These previous generations of youth—from the children of seventeenth-century Puritan America who engaged in gambling and pirating as a response to their parents' strict adherence to Church doctrine, to the post–World War II baby boomers who gathered in great numbers to protest the previous generation's material self-interest and civil indifference—illustrate the cyclic pattern of violence in youth culture.

Despite the preponderance of attention the media ascribes to the significance of race and class when reporting the high-profile incidences of wilding, some researchers have argued that these menacing and unruly forms of group behavior have, to some degree, a biological or sociological basis. Biological theories on criminal behavior purport that men possess universal human traits like impulsivity and aggression that historically served adaptive functions in protecting and defending their communities from external threats but are no longer appropriate or functional within the moral constraints of modern societies. From a sociological perspective, contemporary shifts in family structure, particularly the significant rise in single-parent families, are related to increases in violent crime among youth.

As a symbol of the violence and excess of contemporary youth culture, wilding resonates in the public imagination in much the same way as other illicit youth activities such as raving and the drug Ecstasy; the public's moral outrage and indictment of such youth movements, rather than functioning to identify and highlight the social antecedents of such behavior, may serve only to lend credibility to such actions in the eyes of today's youth.

See also: Raves/Raving, Teenage Leisure Trends

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Katz, Jack. Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Welch, Michael, Eric Price, and Nana Yankey. "Moral Panic over Youth Violence: Wilding and the Manufacture of Menace in the Media." Youth & Society 34, no. 1 (2002): 3–29.

John R. Persing