Wilding

Origins

After the woman in the Central Park case, who was beaten, raped, and left for dead in a ravine, was found, police rounded up minority youth who had been in the park that night. Five boys, ages 14 to 16, were ultimately convicted of the crime and served 5 to 10 years in prison. In 2002, a man serving sentences for other violent crimes confessed to the rape, insisting that he acted alone, and DNA testing confirmed his claims. The convictions of the five boys were vacated. Although there is some debate over the actual origin of the term wilding, it probably first appeared in a New York Times article quoting a detective who reported that some of the youth brought in for questioning in the case had said the attack, and other lesser crimes in the park that night, were part of a pastime called “wilding.” Others have attributed the term to a misunderstanding between a tabloid reporter and a teenager from the same neighborhood as the accused, arguing that the youth had actually been referring to the Tone Loc song “Wild Thing.” When asked what his peers were doing that night in the park, he allegedly said they were out “going wild thing,” referring to either having fun or looking for consensual sex. The reporter may have misheard this and come up with the term wilding, in reference to the crime. Others have argued that the term was purely a deliberate invention of the police and the media. Either way, the term became the primary way of framing the Central Park jogger case and was quickly branded a new kind of urban threat. However, the term never had any basis in actual youth culture or behavior and existed solely in the realm of the media and public consciousness.

Usage and Meanings

The term wilding has no legal meaning, and its popular usage and meaning continually shifted during the jogger case and in the years following the case. As a result of popular disagreement over the meaning of wilding, the application of the term to specific incidents was often inconsistent and almost exclusively a media exercise. Although the police reported that the jogger case had nothing to do with race, and wilding initially referred only to sex crimes committed by groups of teenagers, the term quickly became racialized, and the media classified any violent crimes committed by Black and Latino youth against Whites as wilding. The term played on criminal racial stereotypes of young Black and Latino men as dangerous threats to social stability. It also invoked animalistic stereotypes of minority youth and was often combined with such terms as savages, animals, and wolf packs. The key criteria in labeling an incident wilding, in most cases, seemed to be Black and Latino teenage offenders and White victims. Critics were quick to point out that the term was rarely used to describe crimes where the offenders were White youth. Later, the media began applying the term more widely, to include minor crimes such as vandalism and street harassment. The use of the term wilding tapered off over time, and by 2000, [Page 903]the word was very rarely used. After the youth in the jogger case were exonerated in 2002, the term was revisited, but largely from a retrospective position.

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