![]() ![]() There is a clear indication of increased gun availability during the epidemic: every category of homicide, as well as other violent crimes, exhibited an increase in gun use. The claim that the explosion in youth violence can be attributed to "superpredators," with each cohort having greater prevalence of such fiends than the last, does not accord well with available data. Youths kill more often than they are killed, and there is a great deal of crossover killing (in both directions) between adolescents and older people. A decline in the adolescent population has been balanced by an increase in rates of arrest. ![]() for violent crimes, however, that involved juveniles (20 percent) was about the same in 1994 as in 1965. ![]() A number of patterns stand out: one of every four or five serious crimes of violence, and one of ten homicides, are committed by juveniles who are less than age eighteen the proportion of arrests. ![]() The epidemic of youth violence that began in the mid-1980s has been demographically concentrated among black male youths: the homicide-commission rate for this group increased by a factor of about 4.5. Although Woodcock killed before the rise of the serial killer claims-making industry in the 1980s, the article concludes by reflecting on the curious absence of a retroactively reconstructed modern melodramatic storyline in light of the surreal characteristics of the investigation leading up to his arrest and the circumstances that enabled him to gruesomely kill again in 1991. It does so by gleaning insights into the ways in which Woodcock was simultaneously framed as a sadistic sex maniac responsible for killing three young children in the 1950s and a victim of social circumstance owing to his troubled upbringing. Examining coverage in the local and national press, the article builds on the sparse literature concerned with absences in conventional explanations for how news media participate in the cultural construction of serial murderers. obscurity of otherwise “made for primetime” serial murder events. The case of Woodcock aligns with a different theoretical trajectory geared toward explaining the relative. There is a tacit scholarly consensus that news media routinely sensationalize modern serial killers as celebrity monsters. This article contributes to criminological research on cultural constructions of serial murderers by investigating the little-known Canadian case of Peter Woodcock. ![]()
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