Abuse and neglect are embedded in a wide range of adolescent problems – delinquency, parricide, running away, and prostitution, to name but four that are mentioned frequently in research and clinical reports – with the degree of coincidence being in excess of 65 percent in some samples. These links provide an important aspect of the context within which we must understand and intervene in adolescent maltreatment. A second aspect of that context is public and professional stereotypes about adolescents.

Some of the most prominent observers of adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s saw negative stereotypes of youth as both the cause and effect of adolescent alienation from the adult world. Classics such as Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1956), Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent (1959), and The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms (1965) explored this theme. Goodman's title is self-explanatory. Friedenberg emphasized the way adults often regard adolescents in general with fear and contempt, with high schools as the principal arena in which adult society plays out this theme:

Twenty years later, as controlling school crime and meeting basic scholastic requirements have become dominant issues, Friedenberg's analysis remains timely.