Teen Vogue pushes argument that could endanger its young readers

March 3, 2022

By Tim Worstall

There’s pushing political ideas on your readership and then there’s endangering that very readership. Teen Vogue might well have crossed that line with their insistence that it’s necessary to defund, even abolish, the police.

“Across state lines and identity groups, Americans are beginning to look to defunding and abolishing the police as a real possibility,” they reported as something they approve of.

As probably won’t be a surprise, the readership of Teen Vogue is overwhelmingly preteen and teenage girls. Who would be most threatened by a society in which no one was enforcing that rule of law? It might well be those very teen girls.

This is one of the things that the defund-the-police crowd doesn’t quite grasp.

“The homicide increase isn’t happening at random,” the piece says. Instead, “much of the additional violence is clustered in disadvantaged neighborhoods of color that were already struggling with higher rates of gun violence before the pandemic.” Giving the police more money doesn’t help these communities or address the gun violence epidemic.”

This misses who really gets affected by crime – the poor, the weak and the young. Given that these are who suffer then the people who gain from the control of crime are the same groups – the poor, the young, the weak. A peaceful, non-violent, society is one in which it is safe to be any of those things, poor, young or weak.

Teen Vogue tells us that it is “educating the influencers of tomorrow” and it gains some 5 million visits a month as it does so. Within its demographic, those teen girls, it’s an influential voice.

It is entirely true that American policing can be made better than it is but abolition or entire defunding isn’t the answer. It’s even possible to show this. Imagine that you are the parent of a teenage girl. We agree that the police are not perfect. Now that teen decides to walk to the corner store. You would prefer her to do this in a world of imperfect police or one of no police?