Examines how child abuse and youth violence are understood, manufactured, and represented, but still disavowed, in Japan and the United States

In Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures, Adrienne Carey Hurley examines how child abuse and youth violence are understood, manufactured, and represented, but still disavowed, in Japan and the United States. Through analysis of autobiographical fiction, journalism, film, and clinical case studies, she charts a “culture of child abuse” extending from the home to the classroom, the marketplace, and the streets in both countries. Hurley served as a court-appointed special advocate for abused children, and she brings that perspective to bear as she interprets texts. Undertaking close reading as a form of advocacy, she exposes how late-capitalist societies abuse and exploit youth, while at the same time blaming them for their own vulnerability and violence. She objects to rote designations of youth violence as “inexplicable,” arguing that such formulaic responses forestall understanding and intervention. Hurley foregrounds theories of youth violence that locate its origins in childhood trauma, considers what happens when young people are denied opportunities to develop a political analysis to explain their rage, and explores how the chance to engage in such an analysis affects the occurrence and meaning of youth violence.

"“Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures is movingly humane and passionately political. Hurley’s compassionate approach to the topics of child abuse and youth violence, underresearched in the field of Japan studies, transcends the limiting framework of juvenile delinquency and those very tropes about children and youth that are criticized in this study.”" - Journal of Japanese Studies

"“Hurley appeals to those committed to building intergenerational movements for radical social change and transformative justice. Her interdisciplinary analysis will benefit the work of a wide range of actors, from youth advocates, teachers, and social workers to scholars in the newly emerging field of girlhood studies as well as those specializing in the sociology of youth culture.”" - McGill Journal of Education

"What Hurley’s work does is expose the ways in which this reality is masked by the self-soothing message that all children are worthy of protection and that protection will be maintained at all costs. That message alone makes this book a worthy read."  - Human Rights Review