Lost boys: Why our sons turn violent and how we can save them

There was a time not that long ago when the issue of lethal youth violence was marginalized. Everything changed in April 1999 in the wake of the Littleton shootings in Colorado. What changed is that now all of North America, including middle-class white North America, can look in the newspaper and see their kids involved with or victim to violence. We need to understand the legacy of racism and classism that informs this issue and defines it in many ways, but at the same time we need to make use of this mobilization of energy. Simply because energy is mobilized does not mean that people will do the right thing. If it's action you want, North Americans are number one. The slogan “Just do it!” should probably be our national motto. But if what is needed is to think more deeply about the issue, it's necessary to lean on a much more European tradition, where theory and deep analysis have a longer history and greater kind of social credence. There was a German psychologist (Kurt Lewin) who worked in the United States and tried to bring the European approach to America. Lewin once wrote that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” which, to an American ear, often sounds like a contradiction in terms. We tend to think theoretical is over here and practical over there. Lewin understood that to do good practice you have to understand things deeply. This is evident in many sound programs. In our approach to the issue of violence and safe schools, we need to think more deeply. Another way to make that point is with a parable. In the parable of the lamppost, Joe is on his way home from a meeting one night. He comes upon his friend George, on his hands and knees, on the street groping around under a lamppost. Joe stops and says, “George, what's the matter?” George says, “Well Joe, I have lost my car keys. I live 35 miles away and I can't go home until I find them.” “Well,” says Joe, “Let me help you.” They try several different approaches but they still can't find the keys. Finally, Joe is really depressed and says, “Alright George, let's take a really radical approach. Where exactly were you when you dropped the keys?” George says, “I was about a hundred and fifty yards up the road when I dropped the keys.” So, of course, Joe says, “Why are we looking here?” George replies, “The light is much better here!” The reason this parable is applicable to us today is that there are so many forces at work around us and inside us to get us to look where the light is good – where you can get funding, where there are grants, where you can get corporate sponsors, where it doesn't rock the boat and where it is personally comfortable. The point of the parable is that if the real issues often lie up the road somewhere, in the dark places where people don't want to go, then working where the light is good will yield few results beyond the appearance of action. To dig deeper into this issue, and not just to have some meager popular response, we need to improve what I like to call our ‘conceptual toolbox’. There is a series of five or six tools I would put in our box to address the issue of violence. The first is an ecological perspective on human development. When you look at research on human development with your eyes wide open, you find rarely, if ever, a simple cause-and-effect relationship. Cause-and-effect relationships are always shaped and conditioned by culture, society, community, sex, race, ethnicity, and historical period. The issue of violence demonstrates a lot of striking examples of the importance of context. Twenty-five years ago, a study by Mednick (1) asked the question, “Are kids who are born with minor neurological damage more likely to end up as violent teenagers than biologically normal children?” It turned out that if they were growing up in well-functioning families, they were no more likely than biologically normal children to end up as violent teenagers. But if neurologically damaged children were growing up in abusive families and dysfunctional communities, they were four times as likely to end up as violent teenagers than biologically normal children. This is a finding that has tremendous implications for the practice of child welfare. If you're dealing with high-risk kids who have a tradition, a heritage of risk, you better be very careful about where you place them. That's one reason why kinship foster care is a risky proposition in many cases. Consider the issue of bullying (2). A study conducted by German psychologists Friedrich Losel, Doris Bender and Thomas Bliesener tells a very similar story. The German study looked at the base heart rate of bullies, victims, and kids who were neither bullies nor victims, but they also looked at context. They looked at the heart rates in high-risk and low-risk families. In low-risk families, they found a difference in the base heart rate. Bullies had an average heart rate of 65 beats/min, victims had an average heart rate of 75 beats/min, and kids who were neither bullies nor victims had an average heart rate of 70 beats/min. However, in the high-risk families, all three groups had heart rates of 70 beats/min. In a high-risk environment, it didn't take a temperamental predisposition to produce a bully or a victim; the environment is so overwhelming it crashes down on you. The second key concept for our toolbox is the accumulation of risk and opportunity in children's lives. So if we're trying to account for violence, we can't look at one single factor. My book Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How we Can Save Them happened to come out the morning of the Littleton shootings, so it got a lot of extra attention. Journalists kept asking, “What is the cause for this tragedy?” And I kept trying to say that there's no cause, there's only the accumulation of risk. It's as if a boy is building a tower of blocks, block after block after block and finally he puts one more block on the tower and it falls over. You can't really say that the last block is the cause of the fall because if that block were there by itself, it wouldn't fall over. Indeed, the research shows that it is the accumulation of risk factors that does the damage. A classic study demonstrating this notion of accumulation of risk was done by University of Michigan psychologist Arnold Sameroff and his colleagues (3). The Sameroff study is about how risk accumulation affects intellectual development, which ultimately plays a role in violence and aggression. Here are the risk factors he looked at: poverty, absence of a parent, drug abuse in a parent, mental illness in a parent, low educational attainment in a parent, child abuse in the family, exposure to racism and large family size. When none of these risk factors were present, the average IQ scores were 119. As risk accumulates, the story becomes very interesting. With one risk factor, the IQ scores were still 116; with two risk factors, 113. Most kids can thrive with two risk factors but when you go from two to four risk factors, any four, the IQ scores go down to 93. By the time you get to eight risk factors, scores drop to 85. That is the effect of the accumulation of risk. None of those issues is a problem in and of itself. When we put too many burdens on a kid's shoulders, he can't stand up under the weight. On the other side, you have the accumulation of opportunity. More and more people are using the term “asset” to refer to these influences, based upon the work of the Search Institute, located in Minnesota, where they researched 40 developmental assets. These assets range from things inside the child and inside the family, to things inside the school and inside the community. The list is incredibly diverse, including assets such as ‘family life provides high level of support’, ‘child goes to church or religious institutions for at least an hour a week’, and ‘young person is optimistic about his/her future’. What they found was that the more assets a kid had in his life, the less likely he was to have problems. Let's look at violence from this perspective. Of the kids who had 31 to 40 assets, only 6% were found to be in the violent category. Of the kids who had 21 to 30 assets, 16% were in the violent category. Of the kids who had 11 to 20 assets, 35% were in the violent category. And of the kids with zero to 10 of these assets, 61% were in the violent category. The issue is not which asset you have, but, rather, the number of assets you have. An issue worth considering, however, is the 6% of the children with between 31 and 40 assets who were in the violent category – how could they be violent? It should also be noted that even with zero to 10 assets, 39% weren't in the violent category. One-third of them were still hanging in there. The 6% of the kids who were violent even though they have all of these assets might be called asset-resistant. Maybe they have a troubled inner life we need to find out about. This assets approach also opens our eyes to opportunities for intervention. For example, of those assets, approximately 10 of them are very much a function of the school a child attends. What kinds of schools are most likely to provide these assets to kids and, thus, make the schools safer for themselves, from themselves and for the community? One issue to consider is size. Research from the 1950s (4) showed us that small high schools create a different social climate than big high schools. The assets associated with schools include such things as ‘participate in music or theatre and art at least three hours a week’, ‘participate in sports or youth organizations’, and ‘parents are actively involved with school programs’. In a small high school, everyone is needed because the context demands participation. This was particularly true for marginal students, those at risk for dropping out, those who were disaffected, those whose parents didn't support their education and those with lower IQ scores; for those kids, the research found that small schools were better. In a big school, you try out, and because most kids don't make the cut, most kids don't participate. The research found that when high schools got bigger than about 500 for grades 9 to 12, they very quickly crossed over into the dynamic of bigness. In 1955, the average size of high schools in the United States was 500; by 1975, it was about 1500. The third concept we need to bring to our toolbox is a kind of humility about resilience. Resilience is the ability to deal with adversity. In this judgmental society, it's a short step between celebrating coping and judging those who are not coping. Psychologist Pat Tolan, from the University of Illinois, has provided an intellectual foundation for the humility we need in thinking about resilience (5). He asked what percentage of kids would break down under the burden of various levels of additional risk factors. They measured “breaking down” either in academic terms or in mental health terms. The risk factors he considered included living in violent, impoverished neighborhoods; suffering abuse and neglect; being between the ages of 13 to 15 years; being male; and being a person of colour. Tolan wondered what percentage of children with all five of these risk factors would show one or both forms of breakdown. Not surprisingly, the answer was 100%. Many of them find a way back, but anyone with that burden takes a major hit. The fourth concept for our toolbox is the issue of temperament, the recognition that children come to us with different packages of attributes – active, passive, soothable, unsoothable, etc. Temperament, however, is not destiny; it is probability. Temperament is what the child offers up to the world as a possibility and a challenge, or a direction. If temperament is a challenge, how do parents succeed in meeting that challenge? It is important to understand how the child sees and experiences the world. As I said before, temperament takes place in context, too – temperament predicts violence in some situations but not in others – and we can override temperament to a large degree. The next key concept to put into this equation is rejection. Anthropologist Ronald Rohner (6) studied rejection in 118 cultures around the world and found that in every one, kids who are rejected turn out badly in ways that were culturally inappropriate. They develop whatever is considered bad in that culture. This is very important because one of the themes for kids who are violent is the problem of rejection. It may be interpersonal rejection in the family or in school, or it may be linked to homophobia or to racism. In any case, it is internalized as rejection of who you are as a person, of your identity. Rejection produces shame, shame produces anxiety about psychic annihilation (you feel you will cease to exist), and violence is one sure way to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you do indeed exist. If positive acceptance isn't provided, there is always the negative route. The last addition to this toolbox is the concept of spirituality – the recognition that human beings are not simply animals with complicated brains, but spiritual beings as well. Not meeting your spiritual needs can produce damage in much the same way that not meeting your physical, nutritional, emotional and intellectual needs does. Of all the things I found in common among the kids I interviewed who had killed, spiritual emptiness was perhaps the most common thread. I think there are at least three reasons why a spiritually empty kid is in jeopardy. First, because a spiritually empty kid has a kind of hole in his heart and that hole must be filled with some sense of meaningfulness. Second, a kid who is spiritually empty has no sense of limits. Third, a spiritually empty kid has no emotional floor to fall back on when he gets sad. He can go into emotional free fall and can fall as low as a human being can possibly go. If you start to put all of these concepts together – spirituality, rejection, temperament, accumulation of risk, ecological perspective and humility about resilience – you begin to have the tools to look at the different pathways that kids take. With these tools, it becomes clear that 90% of the kids who are put on the pathway that includes abuse, deprivation and oppression develop a chronic pattern of aggression, bad behaviour, acting out and violating others' rights – behaviours that might meet the diagnostic standard for conduct disorder – by the time they are 10 years old. We know that 30% of kids diagnosed with conduct disorder by age 10 end up as delinquents in adolescence (7). But even then, context has its effects. It depends on the context in which they grew up, the context of peer support, the context of gun availability and the context of media imagery. I was in Canada on the day of a school ‘massacre’ in Ottawa a few years ago – a 15-year-old boy attacked his school. They sent five kids to the hospital, all of whom were released with minor injuries because the only thing the attacker could come up with was a knife. Put that same boy on the American side of the border and there would have been a gun. That's part of the toxicity in which these troubled kids are drowning. Remember that 90% of the kids who develop a chronic pattern of severe aggression, bad behaviour, acting out and violating others' rights come from backgrounds that include abuse, deprivation and oppression, and often genetic vulnerability to impaired information processes. These kids who face such a powerful accumulation of risk factors usually go down the route of conduct disorder. Whether they end up as killers depends a lot on how toxic or benign the culture is around them, but there is also that other 10% who aren't abused and who don't develop early conduct disorder but who become so troubled in their thinking and feeling that they really lose their way in the world. They develop a secret life because they don't want to disappoint their parents; their parents love them. They don't want to disappoint their teachers; their teachers care for them. Boys in particular keep this secret world. The real challenge for us in thinking about school safety and safe schools really is to find a way to use these concepts to understand the development of every child who walks in the door, whether they're prone to be in the 90% or the 10%. We need to develop the infrastructure of mental health services, of caring, of participation, of character education to support, accept and nurture kids that will meet their spiritual as well as their emotional needs. And if we do all this and we keep our eyes open, and we are willing to walk into the dark places where the keys to violence lie, then we can probably have safer schools and safer communities. Violence such as that seen in Red Lake, Minnesota, USA, is an area in which many of us feel helpless, yet parents and others may look to us for help in prevention – for ways to intervene early. Many of us have received little or no formal education about violence. Dr James Garbarino gave an outstanding talk at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto following the Columbine massacre and further provided Paediatrics & Child Health with his text for publication. With his permission, it was adapted by Dr Haslam to provide an overview of Dr Garbarino's keynote address. We hope to stimulate you to learn more about violence and then work within your practice, your schools and your communities to help support the “assets” for prevention that Dr Garbarino so eloquently spoke about. 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