A recent sociology study by UCLA students and faculty that is currently being submitted for publication found that nearly 60% of Los Angeles area gang members had participated in pinata parties as youths. The study also found that most gang members incorporated pinatas into their ongoing criminal activities.
Examples included:
- shooting at pinatas with shotguns while blindfolded
- using captured members of rival gangs as pinatas, assailing gang members would hand one of their own a bat, blindfold him, send him after the “pinata” and yell out the customary “arriba” and “abajo” to make it easier to hit the suspended “pinata” gang member
- using pinata parties as recruitment tools for young gang members
Personally, I find this behavior both despicable and unsurprising. It corroborates Dr. Hans Fischman’s 2005 study on pinatas as “gateway violence” and proves once again the link between pinatas and violent behavior. Once the study is published, I don’t know how the city and county governments in Orange County will be able to continue to refuse the call for banning pinatas.
source: Jason Crawley, student researcher on the paper, UCLA
PLEASE! This whole site is a ludicrous response to an unfortunate incident! Grow up, kids do stupid things and have silly ideas from all sorts of common events. I am truly sorry your daughter hurt you, but couldn’t she have gotten the same idea playing baseball? Are you going to forbid her from making paper dolls because she might decide to try to make you into one with a pair of scissors? So, you want to send her to counseling? How about loving her, I’m sure she feels awful! I feel bad for your daughter! Lack of normal relationships and parental support during childhood is far more likely to lead to a violent life than a few pinata parties!
And let’s be real… pinatas cause gang violence? Give it up! I think if pinatas had never been dreamed of we would still have gangs and still have violence. This is not only a “slippery slope” logical argument, it doesn’t even make intuitive sense.
This site is what is known as Internet SPAM.
I think that parents that think this is violent crime just need to control thier children not just buying pinatas is dangerous there is other sports like golf or foot ball think of gang members then. I think that any parent that is not controling your child your kid will become dangerous so to speak it is not the traditions it’s the parents.
My band HATES pinatas, and thats why we are protesting them.
myspace.com/pinata protest
Unless you support your statistics with references, your site is nothing but a hyped up unfortunate personal experience taken way out of context. If you really care, present your sources.
This is a classic case of correlation mistaken for causation. Had you stopped to consider that any relationship between pinata use and gang violence might be down to the ethnic/cultural makeup of typical urban gangs? Most gang members come from deprived immigrant communities, and many in the US come from hispanic backgrounds or grew up in areas with hispanic populations. The key factor here is the contact with hispanic culture, not the pinatas themselves.
An analogy would be to say that eating curry daily causes genetic birth defects, a common problem in immigrant asian (indian/pakistani/bangledeshi) communities. The birth defects are actually caused by the practice of marrying cousins often found in immigrants from the indian subcontinent, but if you were to ignore this and focus on people’s eating habits it would look as though lifelong daily curry consumption caused them.
The other problem with this research (I can’t find the original paper though, perhaps it never made it through to publication if it was as flawed as it sounds?) is that there doesn’t appear to be a control group for comparison. If they had compared the gang members to youths from similar cultural backgrounds and shown that gang members were much more likely to have played with pinatas as kids then I would be more convinced there was a real effect. But I strongly suspect that youths of a similar age, cultural background, income & neighbourhood would also have played with pinatas as children. The differences would probably lie in the way they were raised by their parents, their innate tendencies towards particular behaviours, their education, and intelligence. A well brought up kid with no particular innate tendencies towards aggression, impulsivity, addictive behaviour etc will be much more able to resist the lure of gangs than one from a more troubled family background or with a personality type that is attracted to criminal behaviour.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t be surprised if gang members had played with pinatas more often as kids, but with causation in the opposite direction to that which you postulate. Kids who enjoy smashing things up are inevitably going to enjoy pinatas more than a timid, passive, non-aggressive child, and will therefore probably have asked for pinatas at their birthday parties, would have been keen to join in with pinata games at parties, etc. You can easily see this difference between children playing with pinatas, some kids approach them with relish, smashing them as hard as they can and sometimes having to be prevented from continuing to allow others to have a turn, whilst other kids hold back, are more wary of the pinata, tap it gently with the bat, and don’t really seem very excited by them. The first lot of kids are more likely to be the hyper, boisterous types who start playfighting or getting out of control later at the party, whereas the second lot are the quieter, more gentle types who are likely to be found playing more sedate games. The pinata has not caused the difference between the two types of children, it just provides an outlet where their personalities become very apparent. The impulsive, aggressive, over enthusiastic kids will be that way regardless of whether there is pinata there, but they are the kind of kids who will enjoy using the pinata the most. These kids will then go home and ask their parents to have a pinata at their own party, thus perpetuating the impression that pinatas cause violent behaviour.
I’m sorry that you had such a bad experience with your daughter, but unfortunately it seems to have led you to view everything about pinatas through a very distorted lens. Confirmation bias is the tendency (exhibited by all humans) to focus on evidence that supports our point of view, whereas good science is based on seeking out falsifying information (essentially trying to prove yourself wrong). You are going out looking for every shred of information you can find that “proves” pinatas cause violence, but you’re not stopping to evaluate the evidence in a balanced way. Your site kind of reminds me of those “end times” fanatics who see proof everywhere that we are approaching the apocalypse!