Apartheid. USA 1988

November 14, 1987:

On a chilly Saturday night last month, Wendell Heard (17) defied his parents' warnings and went to Celebrity Hall in Washington DC to attend a go-go dance. At 2 am as hun-

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dreds of youths inside the hall were dancing the ‘break down’, Mr Heard lay dying on the sidewalk. Police say he was stabbed after a fight over a girl. A 22-year-old Washington man was arrested, charged with murdering Mr Heard. Wendell Heard's death might have gone unnoticed were it not for the timing and the circumstances. They came amid an emotional debate over curfews for teenagers, a debate with national overtones. The City Council in Washington was considering even a bill that would require the late-starting of go-go clubs to bar people 17 and under after 11:30 pm on weekdays and 1 am on weekends unless they are accompanied by adults.

Washington's discussion of this matter is not isolated. Communities throughout the nation are grappling with the tendency of their young people to congregate in places law-enforcement officials say are boiler-rooms for drugs and violence. Some cities are already invoking one of the oldest of disciplines: the curfew. In Pittsfield, Maine, a town of 4 500 people, a whistle sounds at 9 p.m., warning those 15 and under that they have 15 minutes to be off the streets or face being picked up by police. In Los Angeles, a 10 pm to sunrise curfew prohibits those under 18 from being on the streets or in public facilities unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago and three New Jersey cities, Trenton, Camden and Newark, have all, in recent years, invoked restrictions on the hours teenagers can be on the streets unsupervised.

‘Curfews represent a critical development in the way we treat our adolescents,’ said Dr Francis A Ianni, a psychoanalyst at Columbia Teachers College. ‘A curfew says families have failed, schools have failed, police have failed. So government compounds the failure by saying, since families are powerless, we will make the decisions for them.’ Dr Alvin F Poussaint, a Harvard University psychiatrist spoke of society at odds with itself and its youths. ‘On the one hand, we are telling kids that they have to be more mature, to take on more responsibility,’ he said, ‘then we

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try to limit their activity and behavior by placing limitations on them that often are arbitrary in nature.’^172.

172. The New York Times, from a report by Lena Williams