Wilding in The Night

By NANCY GIBBS

From time to time a new word bursts into the lexicon, capturing with shocking force the latent fears of a troubled age. The latest such word is "wilding," the term used by a band of New York City teenagers to describe the mischief they set out to commit on a clear April night in Central Park. Looking, they said, for something to do, they roamed the park's northern reaches, splintering into smaller groups and allegedly assaulting one hapless victim after another. Finally, one pack came upon a 28-year-old woman jogging alone past a grove of sycamore trees. According to police, they chased her into a gully, then spent the next half an hour beating her senseless with a rock and a metal pipe, raping her and leaving her for dead. When she was found three hours later, she had lost three-quarters of her blood and had lapsed into a coma.

By last week the attack had escalated from a local tragedy into a morbid national obsession. Perhaps the story resonated across the country because the victim was a wealthy, white financier with degrees from Wellesley and Yale. Or because the scene was Central Park, the backyard of powerful news media and a symbol of everything Americans most fear about New York City. Or it may have been because of the word wilding, which seemed simultaneously to define and obscure the transformation of a group of teenage boys into a bloodthirsty mob.

Last week six youths were indicted for rape, and two others were indicted for a separate attack on a male jogger. According to investigators, these were not crimes of drugs or race or robbery. Newspapers claimed that the suspects came from stable, working families who provided baseball coaching and music lessons. The youths, some barely into their teens, may not have been altar boys, but they hardly seemed like candidates for a rampage. One was known for helping elderly neighbors at his middle-income Harlem apartment complex. Another was a born-again Christian who had persuaded his mother to join his church. Only one had ever been in trouble with the police.

If children so seemingly normal went so horribly wrong, the obvious question is Why? The youths, described by police as smug and remorseless, have offered only one motive: escape from boredom. "It was fun," detectives quoted one suspect as saying. "It was something to do."

The evidence that youthful offenders are becoming more violent is everywhere. Two Denver students have been charged with stabbing a man to death so they could steal his credit cards and use them to buy camping equipment. At a Los Angeles Greyhound station, a 15-year-old girl was kidnaped at knifepoint by two men, held captive for five days and repeatedly raped. She managed to escape and flagged down a passing car. "Get me out of here!" she begged the three teenagers inside. They did, and took her to a park in East Los Angeles, where the eldest of the boys, 18, allegedly raped her again.

New York Mayor Ed Koch, for one, does not care to hear excuses for the violence of the young. "You name one societal reason," he said, "that would cause people to engage in a wolf-pack operation, looking for victims." Throughout the week sociologists obliged, proffering familiar theories about why many delinquents of this generation do not content themselves with stealing hubcaps and breaking windows. The experts argue that too many families are broken, too many schools and communities are crumbling, too many drugs are available for children to acquire a sturdy sense of mercy or morality to guide their behavior.

Into this vacuum the circuits of popular culture transmit images of brutality without consequences. Children play video games in which they win points for killing the most people. They watch violence-packed cartoons. They listen to songs titled Be My Slave and Scumkill. Or they are baby-sat by vastly popular movie videotapes like Splatter University and I Spit on Your Grave. Says sociologist Gail Dines-Levy of Wheelock College in Boston: "What we are doing is training a whole generation of male kids to see sex and violence as inextricably linked."

But such theories, however valid, ring hollow in the face of crimes like the Central Park attack. Pornography, even the most gruesome kind, is commonplace in countries where the level of violence does not approach that in the U.S. The impulses behind the most brutal attacks are extremely complicated. "What we're seeing is a real distortion in personality development," says Michael Nelson, professor of psychology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. "It's not nice little neurotic people acting out problems."

If a culture of violence can corrupt affluent suburban adolescents, it plays special havoc when mixed with the pathology of the ghetto, where danger surrounds children every day, sometimes inside their homes, always outside. At least one of the Central Park suspects was sexually assaulted when he was a child, and the private histories of the others are still a mystery. In such brutal conditions, a youngster's peers can become his family, and wilding can be a way to prove his masculinity. "Kids who roam in groups gain a sense of power that they do not have individually," says Elijah Anderson, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Caught in a mob frenzy, each boy believes he is the only one hesitant to go ahead with a destructive act, and will not resist or show remorse out of fear that the others in the group will think him a coward.

As the explanations and indictments rolled in last week, the New York City case continued to feed a debate about freedom and fear, anarchy and obligation. "Blaming society, parents, poverty, racism, school systems and neighborhoods for teenage violence is too easy," said Dr. Edward Shaw, director of mental health for the New York State division of youth. "It does not answer the question Why do some teenagers in the same environment get into trouble and others do not?" There were those still willing to look for the hard answers last week. But others could only watch a woman in a coma, hear the noises of the city and wonder what might come next.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and Melissa Ludtke/Boston