Ageism affects more then just Older individuals, It hurts the youth.

Ageism on Trial

Modern-day America is a bad place to be young. We have an increasing multitude of insulting age-laws confining youth to second-class citizenship: curfew laws, graduated driver's licenses, age-limits on buying nicotine gum?! We also have courts enforcing a double-standard of justice. In the Summer of 1998, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that if an employee is sexually harassed by a co-worker or manager, the employer is legally responsible even if the employer didn't know about it — that same week, the Supreme Court ruled that if a student is sexually harassed by a teacher, the school is not responsible unless the victim can prove school authorities knew about it and took no action.

But more than that, ageism is ingrained in our culture, influencing the minds of nearly everyone, and causing youth to face hostility and unfairness at every turn. This was something my public defender did not understand, at least not at the beginning of our trial. But the prosecutor sure got it, and she used it to full advantage.

At the age of 21, I was on trial for "obstruction of justice" after I interfered with police trying to club a defenseless (and as it turned out, innocent) man.

The jury was not a jury of my peers. Most of the jurors were well over 40. Those younger than 18, of course, were prohibited from even being considered to sit on the jury, tilting the age-balance against me.

During jury selection, some potential jurors admitted that, because of my youth, they could not presume me innocent. "I'm a high school principal," one man announced, "so I know what kids that age are like. If police say he did something wrong, he probably did." (At 21, I was older than high-school-age, but not enough older.) Those who admitted this prejudice were politely excused from the jury. Those who kept quiet about their prejudices were allowed to stay.

In this trial, the prosecutor did not have the facts on her side, nor did she have the law. But she had ageism, and she played it like a pro. For her closing remarks to the jury, she pointed at me and started with the words "This young man...", emphasizing my age, reminding the jury I was not one of them, I was not entitled to the same consideration and fairness they would demand for themselves. Later she told the jurors, "What we have here is a young man who has just been watching too much TV." My TV-viewing habits had never come up in the trial. They had nothing to do with the facts. She threw this in because it is an ageist stereotype, another reminder to the middle-aged jurors that I wasn't one of them. Were she trying someone black before a jury of twelve whites, she might have said, "What we have here is a black man who has just been eating too many watermelons."

Ironically, the prosecutor was counting on the jury's TV-viewing to deliver the verdict that would help her conviction-rating.

The jurors had heard two stories in this trial and had to choose one to believe. From the prosecutor, the story was of police engaged in a routine arrest when they found a youth standing too close for safety. They politely asked him to move back a few steps, and — for no reason — the kid stubbornly refused to get out of their way, leaving the officers no choice but to arrest him.

This story would make little sense in real life. But on TV and in movies and in novels, this scenario is acted out all the time: evil, unreasonable kids refuse to cooperate, just to make life difficult for blameless adults.

From the defense, jurors heard another story. White cops were threatening to club a defenseless black man. When they saw a bystander several feet away, they ordered him to move several feet further (to the other side of a view-obstructing bus shelter) so they wouldn't have to worry about heroes or even good witnesses. The conscientious youth swallowed his fear and politely said no, hence his arrest.

The jurors never saw anything like that on TV. Pop-culture portrays youths as predators, not good Samaritans.

I should point out the key element of this story was never contradicted by evidence or testimony. The police who testified never denied they had brandished a weapon and threatened a defenseless man. They simply glossed over it. My public defender did not ask them about it because he assumed they would lie, and he did not want their denial on record. The prosecutor, also, chose not to ask them about it.

While my story was not contradicted by evidence, it was contradicted by popular stereotypes. On sit-coms and dramas, young people are base and self-centered. In movies and in mystery novels, we routinely see young people raping women, beating the elderly, and terrorizing innocent adults everywhere.

The news media bolster that stereotype. They give wider coverage to crimes committed by youth, and they emphasize the ages of young criminals while they bury the ages of older criminals. The effect of this has been documented. A 1994 Gallup Poll asked respondents to estimate the percentage of violent crime that is committed by teenagers. The real number was 13%. Yet two-thirds of respondents mistakenly guessed the number would be more than twice that. And one-fourth of respondents believed teenagers alone commit more than half of all violent crimes! As Gallup Poll Monthly concluded, "because of recent news coverage of violent crimes committed by juveniles, the public has a greatly inflated view of the amount of violent crime committed by persons under the age of 18."

Politicians pander to the misguided and reinforce their stereotypes. President Clinton has been known to rant about "13-year-olds with automatic weapons" without ever mentioning that the average American is twice as likely to be murdered by someone born the same year as Bill Clinton as to be killed by a 13-year-old. Clinton has never said a word about 20-year-olds conscientiously defying punk-cops.

So the jurors took all they had heard from the media, from our political leaders, and from the entertainment industry, and weighed that against what little they had heard in court. They returned a verdict of "guilty."

Afterward, the prosecutor asked for off-the-record feedback from jurors. One juror complained the prosecutor had not made her case clear enough and had left the jury unsure of how my alleged actions violated the law. This juror did not seem to worry that she had just convicted an innocent person; she was simply upset the prosecutor had given her too little ammunition to use in the jury room against that one pesky black juror who spent several hours arguing for "not guilty" before caving in to the crowd.

This experience wounded whatever faith I had left in "the system". Frankly, I was surprised I had any faith left. Events like this are all too common. That high school principal who assumed I was guilty before the trial even started was typical of every principal I ever faced at every school I ever attended, and of principals and other adults throughout our nation. In her book Schoolgirls, Peggy Orinstien got one high school principal to admit on the record that, in dealing with a dispute between a student and a teacher, he would never take the student's side no matter what the situation.

Our whole society seethes with hatred for the young. I can count a hundred movies I've seen where an adult hits a child or teenager and the youth simply accepts it rather than hitting back or pressing charges. I haven't seen one movie showing the reverse. Rapists who prey on children are cheered-on by porno mags (Barely Legal), rock stars (Queen, George Michael, Sonic Youth, The Cherry-Popping Daddies), and novelists (Joseph Hanson, Vladimir Nabokov). In supposedly Christian churches, preachers impress upon their followers that children are to be viewed as property of their parents who deserve physical punishment if they disobey. (Ironically, the Bible quotes Jesus many times suggesting it is a sin to subjugate yourself to your parents (1), so clergymen are putting bigotry above their own Bible.)

My public defender juggled a few other cases at the same time as mine. One was a child-abuse case. They had caught the man when his daughter wound up in a hospital after being thrown down a flight of stairs. The same District Attorney's Office that prosecuted me dropped the charges against this man. They claimed the stitches in the little girl's face didn't constitute enough evidence for a trial. Like other politicians, D.A.'s are tough on crime when the perpetrators are young, soft on crime when the victims are.


"Ageism on Trial | children and teenagers facing prejudice | Pro-Youth Pages." The Pro-Youth Pages | challenging prejudice against youth. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2010. .

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Bias on the job

To me, it seems as if the older generation like our grandparents are loosing their jobs that they have had for a long time just to be replaced with a younger person, fresh out of college. I think employers value college degrees over long time work experience. I think it is too bad that it is this way for many jobs.


For thousands of American workers, it’s the same message they claim to hear on the job. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has received more than 19,000 age discrimination complaints in each of the past two years, and has helped win tens of millions of dollars in settlements.

However, attorneys say age discrimination often is hard to prove. Only about one-seventh of the EEOC age cases were settled to the complainant’s benefit.

Aging in America
Older Americans are finding innovatives ways to live and get care in their later years.

New Yorker Bill DeLong, 84, was fired three years ago from his longtime job as a waiter at a Shea Stadium restaurant, but he continues to seek out charitable volunteer assignments and still works as a waiter occasionally at special events.

“I didn’t give up,” he said. “A lot of my contemporaries give up too soon.”

Seventy-eight-year-old Catherine Roberts stays active with New York City’s Joint Public Affairs Committee for Older Adults, a coalition that encourages seniors to advocate on their own behalf on legislative and community issues.

“I don’t have time to get old,” said Roberts, who came to New York from Maine in 1955. “I’m too busy.”

Yet despite her upbeat outlook, she resents how some of her peers are treated. “We’re a culture that worships youth,” she said. “Seniors are getting pushed aside. I see people in my building whose families ignore them — they fall through the cracks.”

Source: MSNBC

Ageism Intro

Ageism: An Introduction


American society has been described as maintaining a stereotypic and often negative perception of older adults (Busse, 1968). This negative and/or stereotypic perception of aging and aged individuals is readily apparent in such areas as language, media, and humor. For example, such commonly used phrases as "over the hill" and "don't be an old fuddy-duddy" denote old age as a period of impotency and incompetency (Nuessel, 1982). The term used to describe this stereotypic and often negative bias against older adults is "ageism" (Butler, 1969).

Ageism can be defined as "any attitude, action, or institutional structure which subordinates a person or group because of age or any assignment of roles in society purely on the basis of age" (Traxler, 1980, p. 4). As an "ism", ageism reflects a prejudice in society against older adults.

Ageism, however, is different from other "isms" (sexism, racism etc.), for primarily two reasons. First, age classification is not static. An individual's age classification changes as one progresses through the life cycle. Thus, age classification is characterized by continual change, while the other classification systems traditionally used by society such as race and gender remain constant. Second, no one is exempt from at some point achieving the status of old, and therefore, unless they die at an early age, experiencing ageism. The later is an important distinction as ageism can thus affect the individual on two levels. First, the individual may be ageist with respect to others. That is s/he may stereotype other people on the basis of age. Second, the individual may be ageist with respect to self. Thus, ageist attitudes may affect the self concept.

Much research has been conducted concerning ageism. However, the empirical evidence is inconclusive. Some research demonstrates the existence of ageist attitudes (Golde & Kogan, 1959; Kastenbaum & Durkee, 1964a, 1964b; Tuckman & Lorge, 1953) and other research does not (Brubaker & Powers, 1976; Schonfield, 1985). This discrepancy is most likely the result of methodological differences and, in particular, methodological errors. A brief discussion of the major methodological errors or problems found in ageism research may be helpful in clarifying this point.

The first major problem is that the majority of ageism research suffers from a mono-method bias. In other words, each study used only one method to operationally define the ageism construct. Methods commonly used have included sentence completion (Golde & Kogan, 1959), semantic differential (Kogan & Wallach, 1961; Rosencranz & McNevin, 1969), Likert scales (Kilty & Feld, 1976), and adjective checklists (Aaronson, 1966). The problem inherent in the use of a mono-method is that any effect found may be an artifact of the method employed rather than the construct under study. Thus, a researcher should employ more than one method to look for consistency in the results.

Another problem, according to Kogan (1979) is the use of within-subjects designs in ageism research. In other words, a subject will be asked to complete a questionnaire regarding both younger and older adults. Kogan asserts that by using this methodology, age is pushed to the foreground of a subject's mind. The subject thus becomes aware that the researcher is looking for age differences. Therefore, age differences are found.

The use of primarily younger populations to study ageism represents another problem with ageism research. The majority of ageism research uses children, adolescents, or young adults as subjects and examines their perception of older adults. Only a few studies have examined the perceptions of the population whom the construct affects most - older adults. Those studies which have used an older subject population have unfortunately used primarily institutionalized individuals as subjects (Kastenbaum & Durkee, 1964a; Tuckman & Lavell, 1957). Therefore, they do not represent the vast majority of older adults.

Another problem with much of ageism research is that it only examines the negative stereotypes of old age. More recent studies have suggested that while attitudes toward the aged are increasingly positive, they are still stereotypic (Austin, 1985). Therefore, ageism has been expanded to include positive stereotypic images. However, these are rarely studied (Brubaker & Powers, 1976).

Two additional problems are primarily theoretical in nature. First, ageism research rarely examines or attempts to understand the causes of ageism. Thus, while much theoretical work has been conducted concerning the factors contributing to ageism, little empirical research has been conducted in this area. Second, ageism research rarely examines the interaction between ageism and other "isms". As many individuals are in a position to experience more than one prejudice, the interaction between these prejudices needs to be examined.

Ageism. (n.d.). Webster University. Retrieved February 21, 2010, from http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/ageism.html

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