The Boston Gun Project, started in 1994, has also been
called Ceasefire. The project was developed by David M. Kennedy, a researcher
at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, in reaction
to the increase in the number of kids killing kids in Boston during the
early 1990s. The program combined tracking down and arresting illegal
gun suppliers and tracing the ownership of popular handgun models. The
results have been astounding: no juveniles under eighteen died from handgun
fire in all of 1996 in Boston. Additionally, the homicide rate for those
under twenty-five, the age category of most gang members, dropped by two-thirds
from 1995 to 1996. To learn more, visit the National Rifle Association's
Web site at http://www.nra.org/politics96/1197tar.html.
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
Under the direction
of Delbert Elliott, this University of Colorado center has exhaustively
researched "what works" when it comes to violence prevention and reduction
programs. For information, contact
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
University of Colorado
Campus Box 442
Boulder, CO 80309
(303) 492-8465
Family life Development Center
The Family Life Development
Center's mission is to improve professional and public efforts to understand
and deal with risk factors -- in the lives of children, youth, families,
and communities -- that lead to family violence and neglect. It focuses
on strategies and programs to help vulnerable children and youth by strengthening
families and communities. Operating out of Cornell University, the center
accomplishes its mission through research, training, outreach, and education.
It carries out its mandate through program development and implementation
and through evaluation projects serving New York State and the nation,
in addition to the international community. The current areas of special
interest are the role of emerging technologies in training professionals,
childhood violence prevention, and programs to guarantee children's rights.
For additional information, call (607) 255-7794 or send E-mail to jg38@cornell.edu.
Good Behavior Game
The Good Behavior
Game is a positive behavior management program for the first grade classroom.
The program was first tested in 1969 and has since been confirmed as an
effective means of increasing the rate of on-task behaviors in children
while reducing disruptions in the classroom. This program is an approach
to the management of classroom behavior that rewards children for displaying
appropriate on-task behavior during instructional times. To receive more
information on the game or on putting the game into effect in your classroom,
visit the following web site: http://www.scsd.kl2.ny.us/sbit/dirhtml/intfile/intpackg/pkggbg.htm.
Just "For Kids!"
The mission of the
Just "For Kids!" program is to make a difference in the lives of children
by assisting adults in the prevention, early identification, and intervention
of psychological battering of children. A curriculum has been recently
developed to supplement the training of child protection workers who are
forced to recognize and address cases of psychological maltreatment. Just
"For Kids!" also generates and disseminates empirical information pertaining
to prevention, intervention, and the long-term effects of psychological
abuse. For additional information about program activities, contact
Just "For Kids!"
Family Life Development Center
Cornell University
N210 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853-4401
(888) 594-KIDS
Or send E-mail to
just4kids@cornell.edu.
Let's Talk About Living in a World with Violence
This violence prevention
program for school-age children was designed by the Erikson Institute
to be used by teachers and other professionals who work with children.
The program's purpose is to begin a discussion with children and their
parents on the meaning and effects of violence on their day-to-day lives.
The goal is to help children learn to cope with violence and to find alternatives
to aggression. To find out more information about the training program,
or to order program materials, contact
The Family Life Development
Center
Cornell University
MVR Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-7794
E-mail: mjhl9@cornell.edu
Men and Women Against Domestic Violence
MADV is an Internet-based
coalition of men and women working to address the issue of domestic violence.
They stress that domestic violence is not just a women's issue. Therefore,
they have taken the responsibility of launching an initiative to educate
the public and advocate against physical, mental, emotional, and sexual
violence of all kinds. They offer advocacy, information, and statistics,
but not clinical consultation. They can be found at their Web site http://www.silcom.com/~paladin/madv/
or reached by E-mail at jrm@silcom.com.
National Association for the Education of Young Children
NAEYC is the nation's
largest organization of early childhood professionals and others dedicated
to improving the quality of early childhood education programs for children
from birth through age eight. NAEYC exists for the purpose of leading
and consolidating the efforts of individuals and groups working to achieve
healthy development and constructive education for young children. Their
primary attention is devoted to assuring high-quality early childhood
programs for young children. For more information, contact
National Association
for the Education of Young Children
1509 16th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
E-mail: pubaff@naeyc.org
National Birth to Three Center
Birth to Three is
a Washington, DC, program that assists children with developmental delays
in reaching their full potential through developmental home activities
and referral to community resources. The purpose of the program, which
involves both professionals and parents, is to give these children the
opportunity to reach their full potential and become integrated as fully
as possible into their community. To find out more about this initiative,
call Julie Scott, Director of Family Services, at (309) 786-9861.
National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse: Healthy Families America
Healthy Families
America is a program developed by the National Committee to Prevent Child
Abuse that assists parents by assessing a family's needs before and immediately
after their baby's birth and offering the services of a home visitor.
Home visitors are volunteers who are selected for their ability to develop
trusting, nonjudgmental, and supportive relationships with parents. They
work with families to identify their strengths and specific needs, to
link them to health and social services, and to provide support and parenting
education. Today, there are over three hundred programs in forty states
and the District of Columbia. To learn more about the initiative or to
request material on how you can establish a Healthy Families America site
in your community, call 1-800-CHILDREN or send E-mail to ncpca@childabuse.org.
Pathways: A Boys Town Training Program
The goal of the Pathways
program, designed by Thomas J. Everson of Boys Town, Nebraska, is to foster
spiritual development among at-risk youth. Available in training manual
form, this program aims to nurture spiritual values in hope of helping
troubled youth discover meaning in the suffering they have experienced
in their lives. Moral reasoning and faith development are integrated throughout
the program. To learn more, contact
Boys Town National
Resource and Training Center
Father Flanagan's Boys' Home
14100 Crawford Street
Boys Town, NE 68010
Parents as Teachers
Parents as Teachers
(PAT) is a primary prevention program designed to maximize children's
overall development in their early years by laying a foundation for school
success, minimizing developmental problems, and preventing child abuse.
The program covers early childhood development and suggests parenting
activities that encourage a child's language and intellectual growth,
curiosity, and social skills. For more information about this national
program, contact
Parents as Teachers
National Center, Inc.
10176 Corporate Square Drive, Suite 230
St. Louis, Missouri 63132
(314) 432-4330
Fax: (314) 432-8963
Web site: http://www.patnc.org/
The Perry Preschool Program
The Perry Preschool
Program, sponsored by the National Crime Prevention Council, is one of
a small number of programs that have considered the connection between
preschool education and delinquency. The program demonstrates the benefits
of high-quality early education programs for disadvantaged children. It
emphasizes the ability of a sound preschool education to (1) increase
the proportion of young people who at age nineteen are literate, employed,
and enrolled in postsecondary education; (2) reduce the number of children
who drop out of school; and (3) reduce the probability of a child's being
labeled mentally challenged or arrested or growing up to become dependent
on public assistance. The program also offers significant benefits to
the parents of at-risk children. For additional information and detailed
results of the program, visit the National Crime Prevention Council's
Web site at http://www.crime-prevention.org.
Safe Havens Training Project
Witnessing violence
changes a child almost overnight. In the Safe Havens training package,
parents, teachers, and others who care for children are introduced to
the effects on a child's development of witnessing community violence
and are given steps to take in order to counteract the negative effects
of being exposed to violence. All children need safe havens, that is,
places where they can feel safe from the chaos of modern American life.
For more information on creating safe havens (home, school, church, clinic,
etc.) for the children in your community visit the following Web site:
http://www.misterrogers.org
Educators for Social Responsibility
The mission of ESR
is to help young children develop the skills necessary to lead safe, successful
lives. ESR is nationally recognized for its programs to foster social
development and accomplishes its goals through programming in conflict
resolution, violence prevention, intergroup relations, and character education.
The instructional materials that ESR offers are geared toward children
as well as parents. Programs include "Teaching Conflict Resolution Through
Children's Literature," "Who's Calling the Shots? How to Respond Effectively
to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys," and "Changing Channels:
Preschoolers, TV, and Media Violence." To receive more information about
ESR programming or to order a catalog of resources, contact
Larry Dieringer,
Acting Executive Director
Educators for Social Responsibility
23 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
(800) 370-2515
Web site: http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/directories/anti-bias/esrnb.html
The following additional
resources were not mentioned in the text. They are designed to claim youth
before they become lost.
Family Focus: Parenting the Adolescent
Family Focus, a training
curriculum put out by the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension,
stresses the idea that parents are a child's most influential teachers.
The program teaches parents adaptive problem-solving skills to use with
their adolescents and also demonstrates how to access community support
when they find themselves struggling to parent a difficult teen. Parents
are taught how to look for early warning signs of "risky behaviors" and
how to address such behaviors as they arise. This parenting course touches
on difficult-to-address topics such as values, drug use, and sexuality.
For more information, contact
Dr. Mary Temke
University of New Hampshire
214C Pettee Hall
55 College Road
Durham, NH 03824
(603) 862-2493
Managing Your Child's Behavior: Ages Birth Through Four
This program, originally
geared for use in military settings, focuses on proactive parenting through
skill building and prevention. This eight-hour training program is designed
to increase parents' ability to anticipate and prevent child behavior
problems in a nonphysical disciplinary manner. The highly structured nature
of the program makes it potentially effective with either large or small
groups of parents, although groups of eight to twelve parents are ideal
for purposes of group discussion and active involvement. The coordinators
recommend that both parents, if possible, participate in the program,
because parental tasks are not gender specific. For more information,
contact
Behavioral Science
Associates, Inc.
PO Box 87
Stony Brook, NY 11790
(516) 689-6114
National Network of Violence Prevention Practitioners
NNVPP is an interdisciplinary
organization consisting of members from the fields of education, criminal
justice, and public health and from youth and community organizations.
This group stresses the importance of arming frontline practitioners with
research-based approaches and knowledge to better serve our communities
by preventing youth violence and strengthening families. Additionally,
the experience, perspective, and wisdom of network members has been collected
and integrated by Education Development Corporation (EDC) staff in order
to provide information to policymakers, government agencies, organizations,
foundations, national advocacy organizations, and practitioners throughout
the United States. To join the National Network or learn more about the
information they offer, visit their Web site at http://www.edc.org/HHD/NNVPP/
or contact Gaea Honeycutt at (617) 969-7101, ext. 2380.
Prevent Violence on Your Campus: Create a Positive Environment for
School Safety and Student Success (PVOYC)
PVOYC is a series
of training packets for principals, school safety officers, counselors
who work with at-risk children, and teachers. These packets deal with
various school issues, from school safety to positive classroom management.
The producers of this material understand that violence is a concern for
all of us and that school safety begins with discipline and good classroom
management. The training packets are designed as an empowerment tool for
at-risk students and present these students with decisions and positive
alternatives to choose from. To order the Prevent Violence on Your Campus
training packets, contact
Corwin Press
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, CA 91320-2218
(805) 499-9774
E-mail: order@corwinpress.com
Resolving Conflict Creatively Program
RCCP is an initiative
put forth by the aforementioned Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR),
a nonprofit organization with a mission to maintain the schools of our
nation as caring and nonviolent environments. RCCP is currently operating
in over 325 schools nationwide, reaching over 150,000 young people. Through
curriculum development, training, and consultation, this program teaches
and advocates peer mediation, conflict resolution, prejudice reduction,
appreciation of cultural diversity, and positive group relations. RCCP
is a multifaceted program for teachers, students, trainers, school administrators,
and parents. For more information, contact
Mariana Gaston
163 3rd Avenue, Room 239
New York, NY 10003
(212) 260-6290
Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways
Responding in Peaceful
and Positive Ways is part of the Richmond Youth Against Violence Project.
This program offers middle school children the information they need to
reduce their involvement in violence and helps them develop the necessary
attitudes and skills. The program's goals are to promote peaceful and
positive alternatives to situational violence by creating an environment
that encourages health-enhancing behaviors and weakens health-compromising
behaviors. The program incorporates a sixth grade curriculum and a peer
mediation component directed mainly at high-risk African American middle
school children.
Strong at the Broken Places: Turning Trauma into Recovery
Strong at the
Broken Places is a documentary that reinforces and portrays true heroism.
The 38-minute film is both inspirational and instructional. People devastated
by trauma and loss who were able to find common ground for recovery teach
us the meaning of the word hero. This documentary shows how personal loss
and suffering can be turned into a powerful toot for restoring hope and
changing society. To obtain a copy of this documentary or to view other
titles available, visit the Cambridge Documentary Films Web site at http://www.shore.net/~cdf
or call (617) 484-3993.
Teen Challenge
The Teen Challenge
program strives to educate adolescents about the harmful effects of drugs.
Teen Challenge is the oldest, largest, and most successful program of
its type. Other educational programs are also offered to the community
free of charge. Additionally, Teen Challenge volunteers reach out to people
in juvenile halls, jails, and prisons. Teen Challenge believes that education
will help the community correct the drug epidemic. For information on
Teen Challenge's curriculum, either visit their Web site at http://www.teenchallenge.com,
E-mail them at tcusa@ncsi.net, or call them at (800) 814-5729.
Therapeutic Crisis Intervention
Therapeutic Crisis
Intervention (TCI) is a "train the trainer" program developed by Cornell
University's Family Life Development Center, for child and youth care
workers. It is designed as a crisis prevention and intervention model
to assist those who work in residential facilities help children deal
with crisis. It gives staff the skills and knowledge necessary to help
children and youth when they are at their most destructive, and it stresses
the importance of adult responsibility for the treatment and protection
of troubled youth in crisis situations. TCI successfully increases a staff's
ability to manage and prevent crisis while decreasing the number of physical
restrains used and the number of bodily injuries inflicted on the children
and staff. To establish TCI at your organization, visit http://www.child.cornell.edu
or contact
Michael Nunno
Family Life Development Center
MVR Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-5210
Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents
The Violence Prevention
Curriculum for Adolescents is a program that addresses the growing epidemic
of homicide and violence in general among young people. This school-based
curriculum acknowledges anger as a normal and natural emotion; alerts
students to the risks of being involved in an act of violence, as either
victim or perpetrator; and offers alternatives to fighting through anger
management and improved conflict resolution skills. This curriculum has
been proven to be effective in high school health, sociology, and psychology
classes. For more information, contact
Millie LeBlanc
EDC Publishing Center
555 Chapel St., Suite 24
Newton, MA 02160
(800) 225-4276
Newsletter for Parents of Children with Very "Difficult" Temperaments
A new electronic
newsletter called Behavior-Development-Individuality is under the
editorial direction of Dr. Kate Anderson. It can be reached at B-DI@temperament.com
with the message "subscribe newsletter."
Chapter 1
THE EPIDEMIC OF
YOUTH VIOLENCE
PROLOGUE: CHICAGO,
JANUARY 1994
I lived and worked
in Chicago for almost ten years, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.
My children grew up there. Throughout 1993, the Chicago Tribune
published in-depth profiles of every kid who was killed in Chicago that
year. As an expert on violence and trauma, I spent a lot of time talking
with reporters in an attempt to help them make sense of what they had
found during their investigation of each case. The reporters worked on
the project all through 1993, and in a single issue at the beginning of
1994 the Tribune published the photo and name of every single child
and teenager who had been murdered during the previous twelve months.
It was a chilling and haunting sight to see the rows and rows of names
and faces -- sixty-one in all.
The same night the
Tribune published the death toll from 1993, my seventeen-year-old
son Josh was heading out for an evening on the town with his friends.
"Be careful," I said. "It's dangerous out there, and I worry about you."
He turned to me, with the Tribune in hand, and said, "Don't worry,
Dad. Just how many white faces and names like mine do you see in the newspaper?"
The reality was that in 1994 he could reassure me by this simple reference
to the facts of the matter; you had to look long and hard at those rows
of photos in the Tribune to find a white teenage face with a non-Hispanic
surname. Even though we lived in the city, within walking distance of
some of the most violent streets in America, Josh felt safe.
When my son's observation
forced me to confront this reality, I recalled a meeting I had attended
just weeks before. I was the lone white person on a panel of African American
and Hispanic professionals for a community forum on violence. During the
coffee break we panel members began chatting among ourselves, and it turned
out that all of us had teenage sons. As we talked about being parents
of teenagers in the city, it became clear to me that while I worried
when my son went out at night, my African American and Hispanic colleagues
felt dread, because they thought of their boys as part of an endangered
species, even though the actual number of children killed that year was
less than one hundred in a city of three million. But that number is a
compelling feature of the violence problem; even a relatively small number
of deaths can stimulate a profound sense of threat and insecurity in a
community. Homicide is the leading cause of death for minority male youth,
and each new death creates tremendous psychological reverberations. The
feeling of extreme apprehension my colleagues experienced was neither
paranoid nor far-fetched.
That was 1994. Fast-forward
to 1998. By May of that year, I was living and working in Ithaca, a small
university town located in the rolling hills of central New York State.
Ithaca is a lovely place, mostly known for being the home of Cornell University.
For many years and for most of its citizens, Ithaca has been a kind of
idyllic paradise where the big news is likely to be the awarding of a
prize to a member of Cornell's faculty or a local school board meeting
(among vegetarians it is famous as the home of the Moosewood Restaurant,
which inspired a popular cookbook).
On May 22, 1998,
my fifteen-year-old daughter Joanna and my fourteen-year-old stepson Eric
sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, which that morning was
filled with accounts of the shooting of twenty-four students in Springfield,
Oregon, by fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel. Looking up from the front-page
story, Joanna, shaking her head, said, "I wonder who it's going to be
at our school."
NO ONE IS IMMUNE
The 1997-1998 school
year will go down in American history as the turning point in our country's
experience and understanding of lethal youth violence. October 1, 1997,
Pearl, Mississippi: after killing his mother, sixteen-year-old Luke
Woodham opens fire at his high school, killing three and wounding seven.
December 1, 1997, West Paducah, Kentucky: fourteen-year-old Michael
Carneal kills three students at a high school prayer meeting. March
24, 1998, Jonesboro, Arkansas: thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson
and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden open fire on their schoolmates, killing
four of them and a teacher. April 24, 1998, Edinboro, Pennsylvania:
fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst kills a teacher at a school dance. May
21, 1998, Springfield, Oregon: after killing his parents, fifteen-year-old
Kip Kinkel walks into the school cafeteria and shoots twenty-four classmates,
two fatally.
These cases made
the national and international news. All the assailants were middle-class,
white teenagers from small towns or the suburbs. But these headline-grabbing
shooting sprees reminded some families and victims of youth violence of
crimes that, although similar, did not seem to merit the attention of
the national and international media. Standing just offscreen, beyond
our gaze, were hundreds of other kids who had committed acts of lethal
violence. Most of us never heard about the adolescents who shot and killed
other kids in the inner-city neighborhoods of Houston, Chicago, New York,
Los Angeles, and Detroit during that same school year. They remained mostly
anonymous.
What about the fourteen-year-old
African American kid who shot an eighteen-year-old convenience store clerk?
The fifteen-year-old Hispanic kid who opened fire with an assault rifle
on a street full of kids? The sixteen-year-old African American who gunned
down three teens outside his apartment building? The fifteen-year-old
Asian boy who executed a sixteen-year-old with a single shot to the head?
Rarely do cases like these make the national news, and when they do, the
perpetrators are usually described in dehumanized terms ("cold-blooded,"
"remorseless," "vicious") that lead us to speculate on whether or not
these kids are even human. Rarely do we hear of inquiries into their emotional
lives or of efforts to make sense of their acts. Why is that?
Is it because the
high-visibility cases all involved white kids from the small towns and
suburbs of the American heartland while the anonymous killers were poor
kids, predominantly African American and Hispanic, living in inner-city
neighborhoods? Is it easier for the media and the general public to forget
or demonize the low-income minority kids who kill? Some informed observers
of the role of race and class in our society have said publicly that they
think the answer is yes.
Given our society's
history of institutional and interpersonal racism, it would be naive to
think that poor minority kids automatically get the same attention and
concern as white and middle-class kids do. A number of respected African
American psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers, and community leaders
addressed this point in interviews conducted by journalist Zachary Dowdy
in 1998. Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint said, "When white middle-class
kids kill, there is always a public outcry of why and a search for what
went wrong, but when inner-city minority kids kill, the public is warned
of demons and superpredators." Bill Talley, a public defender who has
spent years representing inner-city kids in court, put it this way, "No
one's calling these white youths 'maggots or animals.'" Judge Milton Wright
noted that when Kip Kinkel committed his murders in Springfield, Oregon,
Newsweek began its coverage this way: "With his shy smile and slight
build, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel has an innocent look that is part Huck Finn
and part Alfred E. Neuman -- boyish and quintessentially American." Wright
went on to say, "Quintessentially American? That always means white."
I have seen firsthand
verification of this class and race bias. When I began working on issues
of lethal violence and violent trauma in the lives of inner-city kids
more than a decade ago, it was hard to get the attention of most Americans,
beyond the professionals and parents who lived or worked in inner-city
minority communities. The rest of America could afford to ignore the violence
when it seemed to be "them," not "us." Perhaps the worst example of this
came when a staff member from a congressional committee visited me in
my office in Chicago to discuss the issue of lethal youth violence. He
found out the problem was mainly confined to inner-city minority populations,
and when he communicated this fact to the legislators he represented,
they decided it wasn't worth holding hearings on the matter. Nasty, indeed,
but brutally honest as an expression of politics as usual.
But the lack of interest
among mainstream white America has its origins in more than racism and
class bias. Until recently, most American parents could count on
the fact that random youth violence was not their problem but a problem
for others. After all, 84 percent of the counties in the entire country
recorded no youth homicides at all in 1995, and parents and children in
most places must have felt a kind of immunity -- if they thought about
it at all -- because they, like my son in 1994, didn't see themselves
in the pictures of the killers and the killed. But that was before Jonesboro
and Paducah and Springfield, before the cast of characters expanded, and
young middle-class Americans, like my daughter, came to see that this
could happen to them and their schoolmates.
Now new voices of
concern are heard, new faces appear in the newspaper, and new people show
up for my lectures and my workshops on violence, trauma, and kids who
kill. The killings in the small towns and suburbs during the 1997-1998
school year have served as a kind of wake-up call for America. But this
is also an opportunity for Americans to wake up to the fact that the terrible
phenomenon of youth violence has been commonplace for the past twenty
years and to learn from the experiences of those who have lived with this
problem for the last two decades.
In June of 1998,
I was speaking at a meeting of mothers who had buried murdered sons. There
were more than a dozen mothers in the audience, mostly African American
and Hispanic women, bearing the black-draped photos of their dead sons
and wearing the commemorative ribbons as testimony to an epidemic of lethal
youth violence that is all too familiar to them. But they are no longer
alone. The old faces and voices have not disappeared or grown silent but,
rather, have been added to as every parent in the country now wonders,
Where next? Is my child safe? Could it happen here? What can we do?
WHAT CAN WE LEARN
FROM THE PAST?
What do the large
number of anonymous killings have to do with the highly publicized killings
in Jonesboro and Paducah and Springfield? What do they have in common?
In this book we will find answers by moving beyond the surface differences
between the two groups of violent boys -- principally class and race --
to see the profound emotional and psychological similarities that link
them together. By getting to know the circumstances under which the epidemic
of youth violence first took hold, among low-income minority youth in
inner-city areas, we can begin to gain some insight into the lives of
the boys in places like Jonesboro, Paducah, and Springfield.
My goal is to understand
why kids kill and to help other parents and professionals understand so
that they can do something to prevent it in the future. Certainly, there
are individuals and cases that defy explanation; some youth violence is
committed by kids who have totally lost touch with reality. But these
truly are the exceptions. I believe we can make some sense of youth violence
from the inside out, that is, by looking deeply into the lives of kids
who kill and by listening closely to their own stories. In doing so we
can see how problems accumulate and recognize the sequence of events in
the life of a child that leads from childhood play to lethal violence,
whether these events occur in urban war zones or in the small towns and
suburbs of the heartland.
For the past twenty-five
years I have studied children and youth in many different settings. My
research fills books. Hardly a week goes by that I don't talk with a journalist
or get on an airplane to go lecture to professionals or concerned citizens
about murder, child abuse, war, and other violent trauma. How do I know
what to say to people? Where do I find clues to understand how an innocent
infant grows up to be a killer? In my work I always try to combine two
sources of information: First, I listen to children who have killed to
hear their individual stories. Second, I examine systematic research on
the causes of violence in the lives of children and youth. In the pages
and chapters that follow, I blend these two sources, drawing upon one
to illuminate and make sense of the other, always with the intent to show
how what we have learned about the epidemic of killing among inner-city
boys can shed light on the boys of the American heartland who are the
new casualties of that epidemic.
HOW MUCH KILLING
IS THERE?
The FBI reports that
there are about twenty-three thousand homicides each year in the United
States. In about 10 percent of these cases, the perpetrator is under eighteen
years of age. If we extend the age cutoff to include youth up to the age
of twenty-one, the figure is about 25 percent. But while the homicide
data, which are used widely for comparative purposes, may be reliable,
their meanings are not transparent or unambiguous. There are many complexities
and subtleties to be considered in making sense of the numbers.
For one thing, improved
medical trauma technology has meant that an injury that would have been
fatal just twenty years ago is today much less likely to result in death.
Children survive gunshot wounds and stabbings that once were fatal, just
as a 90 percent cure rate saves them from certain childhood cancers that
forty years ago promised a nearly certain early death. An example of the
change with respect to homicide is seen in Chicago, where from the mid-1970s
to the mid-1990s the number of serious assaults (attacks that could lead
to the death of the victim) increased 400 percent while the homicide rate
remained about the same. This factor is particularly important when we
try to look at long-term historical trends, such as when we compare the
homicide rate of the nineteenth century with that of the twentieth century
or when we compare data from the first half of this century with data
from the last ten or twenty years.
Furthermore, any
consideration of the overall homicide rate should be tempered by an appreciation
of the role of age and gender in this crime. For instance, it is well
known that young men are about ten times as likely as young women to commit
murder. Thus, historical comparisons may be skewed by changes in the population's
age and gender profile. For example, if a society with an average age
of fifteen has the same total homicide rate as a society with an average
age of thirty, it probably means that the first society has much less
lethal youth violence than the second one.
American homicide
data are subject to distorted analysis if one fails to consider two important
facts: First, the average age of perpetrators of homicide decreased in
the United States from thirty-three years of age in 1965 to twenty-seven
years of age in 1993. Second, while the overall homicide rate has been
relatively constant over the last thirty years, the youth homicide rate
has risen. The period of greatest growth was from the mid-1980s to the
mid-1990s, when the youth homicide rate increased by 168 percent. In other
words, the problem of youth homicide is obscured when one looks at the
total national picture, because the increased numbers of older Americans
dilute the effect of rising youth homicide rates on the overall rate for
the country as a whole.
Much has been made
in the press and in city halls around the country of the welcome news
that the total national homicide rate took a dip from 1991 to 1997. Similarly,
after more than a decade of steady increase, homicides by juveniles dropped
17 percent between 1994 and 1995 (which still leaves the rate more than
50 percent higher than it was in 1980). Does this mean the problem is
under control? Not necessarily, according to criminologist James Fox of
Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice. For one thing,
homicide rates in general and our juvenile homicide in particular remain
much higher in the United States than they are in other industrialized
societies, such as the countries of Europe. Closer to home, Canada is
reporting a youth homicide rate about one tenth as high as the United
States.
What is more, criminologists
expect fluctuations because of the many influences on the number of murders
there are each year. For example, higher rates of incarceration for lesser
offenses take some likely killers out of circulation. The lethal violence
associated with the highly competitive nature of illegal drug dealing
has been associated with the extraordinary levels of youth homicide reported
for some inner-city neighborhoods. But since the mid-1990s, the drug business
in some cities has settled down and become better organized, resulting
in a decrease in the youth homicide rate. And several communities have
been undertaking major campaigns to curtail violence in their inner-city
areas. In the mid-1990s Boston was able to cut its youth homicide rate
to zero for a period of two years. As we shall see in Chapter Seven, these
city programs have a great deal to teach suburban and rural communities.
To reach a true understanding
of why children kill, we need to look beyond short-term trends. Certainly,
the long-term trends are very disturbing. According to the FBI, juvenile
arrests for possession of weapons, aggravated assault, robbery, and murder
rose more than 50 percent from 1987 to 1996. Looking back still further,
we can see a sevenfold increase in serious assault by juveniles in the
United States since World War II. But perhaps the most disturbing trend
is that while the overall youth homicide rate dropped in 1997, the rate
among small town and rural youth increased by 38 percent. And that last
statistic highlights my conviction that no longer can any of us believe
that we and our children are immune to lethal youth violence, because
today almost every teenager in American goes to school with a kid who
is troubled enough to become the next killer -- and chances are that kid
has access to the weapons necessary to do so.
KIDS WHO KILL THEMSELVES
Throughout this book
we will be looking closely at children who lash out at other children
or adults. But we shouldn't lose sight of the young people who turn their
violence inward, the kids who kill themselves. Suicide among juveniles
is a serious problem. According to recent statistics, each murder committed
by an adolescent is matched by a suicide -- about twenty-three hundred
each year. And just as youth homicide rates have risen dramatically in
recent decades, so too have youth suicide rates sky-rocketed -- 400 percent
since 1950.
According to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey of youth, 15 percent
of high school boys seriously considered suicide in 1997. About 12 percent
of boys made a suicide plan, and 5 percent actually attempted suicide.
Two percent of the boys attempted suicide in ways that required medical
attention. The CDC study also shows that while girls are more likely to
contemplate, plan, and attempt suicide, more boys than girls complete
the act, reflecting the more lethal methods chosen by boys. Boys use guns
while girls tend to use pills.
Harvard University
psychiatrist James Gilligan points out in his in-depth look at the world
of incarcerated violent men that acts of self-destruction and the destruction
of others often have a similar source in the psychology of men involved
in lethal violence, namely, the sense that life is intolerable. Thus,
the links between suicide and homicide for boys are an important part
of the problem facing anyone who cares about kids. Sometimes only at the
last minute does a boy choose between killing himself and killing others;
sometimes he does both.
In some cases, the
act of killing others is itself intended as a suicide attempt. The phrase
"suicide by cop" has been used by journalists and police to denote the
act of provoking a confrontation with the intent to be killed by police.
The first words spoken by fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel when he was wrestled
to the ground by fellow students after his shooting spree in Springfield,
Oregon, were reportedly, "Kill me! Kill me!" Understanding the frequent
self-destructive impulses in kids who kill is a necessary element of the
overall task before us.
WHERE DID THE EPIDEMIC
OF YOUTH VIOLENCE START?
As I noted earlier,
the federal government's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
reports that 84 percent of all counties in the United states had no juvenile
homicides in 1995 and 10 percent reported only one; in fact, 25 percent
of all known juvenile homicides that year were committed in five cities:
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Houston. Together these cities
contain about 10 percent of the nation's population. Why was there such
a concentration of youth violence in these cities?
Think about the characteristics
that increase a teenager's risk of joining the ranks of boys who kill.
As a result of their research, Chicago-based psychologists Robert Zagar
and his colleagues published a paper in 1991 that offers a picture of
this risk. These researchers found that a boy's chances of committing
murder are twice as high if he has the following risk factors:
* He comes from a
family with a history of criminal violence.
* He has a history of being abused.
* He belongs to a gang.
* He abuses alcohol or drugs.
The odds triple
when in addition to the aforementioned risk factors the following also
apply:
* He uses a weapon.
* He has been arrested.
* He has a neurological problem that impairs thinking and feeling.
* He has difficulties at school and has a poor attendance record.
The odds increase
as the number of risk factors increases. This is a general principle in
understanding human development. Rarely, if ever, does one single risk
factor tell the whole story or determine a person's future. Rather, it
is the buildup of negative influences and experiences that accounts for
differences in how youth turn out. This is one of the most important things
to remember in understanding boys who kill. If we try to find the
cause of youth violence, we will be frustrated and confused; we may even
decide it is completely unpredictable and incomprehensible. It is important
to recognize the central importance of risk accumulation. Understanding
comes from seeing the whole picture of a boy's life, whether he is a troubled
middle-class boy in a town like Springfield, Oregon, or a troubled poor
child in inner-city Los Angeles.
Chicago, New York,
Los Angeles, Detroit, and Houston have in common large and numerous inner-city
"war zone" neighborhoods where many children experience a buildup of the
risks identified by Zagar's group. These neighborhoods have the highest
rates of adult criminality, child maltreatment, gang activity, illicit
drug sales, possession of illegal hand guns by kids, health problems in
newborns, and school failure. In addition, most of the children in such
neighborhoods have experienced the ravages of racism. Sociologists have
long recognized that the experience of racial discrimination provokes
feelings of rage and shame, which play a potent role in stimulating violence.
Interestingly, the
U.S. populations most affected by the epidemic of youth violence are the
ones that have been disproportionately influenced by the particular historical
and cultural patterns found in the South. Social analyst and journalist
Fox Butterfield, who explored this Southern effect, reported that the
highest homicide rates in the United States are found among those who
have roots in the Old South. For example, in 1996 all of the states that
constituted the Confederacy during the Civil War were on the list of the
twenty states with the highest homicide rates. The ten states with the
lowest rates were located in New England and the northern Midwest. Thus,
for example, in 1996 Louisiana's homicide rate was twelve times that of
South Dakota. This pattern was as true in the nineteenth century as it
is today.
In his book Murder
in America, historian Roger Lane of Haverford College points out that
until the 1960s America's big cities had murder rates lower than the national
average because Southern states had the highest rates and were predominantly
rural. What is the reason for this connection between Southern culture
and violence? Historian Samuel Hyde at Southeastern Louisiana University
has explored this phenomenon and has concluded that it reflects the special
cultural and political history of the South, notably the system of Slavery
and the violence associated with the prosecution and aftermath of the
Civil War.
Institutionalized
violence plays a role in breeding a cycle of violence across generations.
But religious tradition is important as well. Sociologist Christopher
Ellison at Duke University found that the public religious culture of
the South plays an important role in legitimizing violence by making revenge
a moral requirement. Those who transgress against one's honor or kin must
be punished.
Psychologist Richard
Nisbett and his colleagues at the University of Michigan have also studied
this phenomenon and confirm that it is the code of honor that is passed
on from generation to generation through childrearing that accounts for
this cultural susceptibility to homicide. Nisbett's research has found
that when a young man from the South encounters an insult (e.g., being
bumped and called a jerk by a fellow student in a school hallway), his
pattern of response differs from that of a young man from the Northeast.
Southerners tend to react with anger, and their bodies show an increase
in stress-related hormones. Northeastern young men are more likely to
respond with laughter and without any detectable rise in hormone levels.
Whereas Fox Butterfield has detailed these issues in his work, it is beyond
the scope of this book to further explore the cultural and social forces
in Southern history. Yet these forces do play a role in lethal youth violence.
How?
One place to look
for answers is in the fact that the African Americans who constitute the
bulk of the population in inner-city neighborhoods have their origins
in the Old South. This is not simply a matter of long-ago generations
making the trip from the South to the cities of New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, and Detroit; it is common for younger generations to spend time
in their family's ancestral homes in the Old South. When I interview boys
in prison, I often hear them speak about summer trips to Alabama or Mississippi
or being sent back to Louisiana or South Carolina when they get in trouble
"up North."
It is not race per
se but, rather, the role of race in the situation created by all
the other influences that makes the difference in homicide rates. In 1994
the African American youth homicide rate was eight times the rate for
white youth. Butterfield's analysis makes clear that this disparity has
much more to do with the Southern origins of black youth than with their
African heritage. Speaking to this point, psychiatrist James Gilligan
reports that the homicide rates of blacks living in Africa are generally
no higher than the homicide rates in other countries. And in the United
States, the rate for African Americans outside inner-city neighborhoods
is no higher than that of the rest of the population. The combination
of racism and cultural values that promote violence as a response to perceived
insult exerts a devastating influence on children wherever it is geographically
concentrated and coupled with economic deprivation, such as is the case
with blacks in South Africa, who have been shaped by apartheid, and the
aboriginal peoples of Australia, who suffered through generations of cultural
genocide. In fact, these two groups have homicide rates that are among
the highest in the world.
What I have attempted
to show is that the origins of lethal youth violence lie in a complex
set of influences. The Southern culture in the United States as a single
influence does not explain everything, of course. A code of honor by itself,
no matter its origins, does not explain everything. Indeed, no single
factor -- neither racism nor economic deprivation nor child abuse -- can
provide the answer to the question of why kids kill. But this does not
mean we are powerless to make sense of what is happening. Quite the contrary.
We have at our disposal concepts that can take us far in our efforts to
understand why our sons turn violent and how we can save them. Most important,
these ideas shed light on the influences at work that are spreading the
epidemic of youth violence.
The risk factors
that Robert Zagar and his colleagues identified in 1991 as correlated
with a boy's chances of committing murder continue to increase:
* Child abuse:
According to the best study we have on the rate of child maltreatment,
from 1986 to 1993 child abuse and neglect rose from 14 per 100,000 to
23 per 100,000. These statistics refer to children who have already experienced
harm. If the standard used in defining maltreatment includes Children
who are at risk for imminent harm -- what the study calls "endangerment"
-- the increase is even larger, with the rate nearly doubling, from 22
per 100,000 in 1986 to 42 per 100,000 in 1993.
* Gangs: According to research compiled by the federal government,
more and more communities are facing the problem of youth gangs. Surveys
find that more and more children and youth report that there are gangs
active in their schools and community -- up 50 percent from 1989 to 1995.
* Substance abuse: Hard drugs have spread throughout the United
States; virtually every community in the country has a drug subculture.
For 1997 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, in the
annual "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance," that 9 percent of all high-school-age
males had used cocaine. Moreover, 50 percent of adolescent boys reported
having used marijuana, and 30 percent had used it in the previous month.
After a decline in overall drug use among teenagers, which started in
1976 (when 45 percent admitted to some drug use) and continued to 1994,
the reported overall rate is on the increase again and now stands at 36
percent. What is more, heavy alcohol use among teenage boys is common:
37 percent of the boys reported that they drank five or more drinks on
one occasion at least once in the previous month.
* Weapons: Surveys attest to an extraordinary increase in the likelihood
that kids will carry weapons. They do so primarily because they feel threatened
and can't count on adults to protect them. The most recent data, from
the 1997 CDC survey, reveal that 28 percent of adolescent boys carried
a weapon -- a gun, a knife, or a club -- in the previous month, with 13
percent carrying a weapon to school in the previous month. Fascination
with guns often begins at a very young age. Eleven-year-old Andrew Golden
of Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, were among
them; both spent much of their time immersed in the gun culture.
* Arrests: Arrests of youth under age eighteen have increased dramatically
since 1980 -- up 50 percent from 1980 to 1994 for serious offenses. In
addition, law enforcement agencies in many communities have taken a much
more active approach to arresting juveniles in response to community pressures,
political directives, and court rulings that limit their discretion and
their authority to use informal means of redirecting delinquent juveniles
(e.g., taking kids home and confronting parents or ordering kids to make
restitution without arresting them and involving court sanctions).
* Neurological problems: Surveys point to a significant increase
among children with conditions such as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD),
which may reflect neurological problems and which certainly result in
behavioral difficulties. Improved medical care for highly vulnerable babies
means that more and more premature infants who might have died in previous
decades are surviving today. For example, in 1960 only 10 percent of newborns
weighing less than two pounds survived; by the early 1990s that figure
had risen to 50 percent. This appears to mean that more and more kids
are living with neurological difficulties, as a result of their prematurity,
that can impair the processes of thinking and feeling. The rate of learning
difficulties in children who were born prematurely is about 25 percent
higher than the rate for those not born prematurely. The use of drugs
and alcohol by pregnant women compounds this problem.
* Difficulties at school: Data show that for any thirty-day period,
about one in three high school kids reports having skipped school at least
one day. The likelihood of skipping is greatest among kids who live in
a family constellation other than a two-parent household (the rates are
30 percent for two-parent households, 24 percent for mother-only households,
and 37 percent for all others). The declining proportion of kids living
in a two-parent household corresponds to an increase in truancy. What
is more, research reveals increasing rates of behavioral, emotional, and
intellectual problems that affect the ability to succeed in school. Since
1969 the percentage of high school students who have cheated on a test
increased from 34 percent to 68 percent. According to the 1997 CDC survey,
20 percent of all high-school-age boys reported that they were in a physical
fight on school property in the past year, and 26 percent of the boys
said their property had been stolen or deliberately damaged on school
property. Four percent of high school boys said that on at least one day
in the previous month they felt too unsafe to go to school.
More children and youth across the country are experiencing the specific
negative influences that increase the risk of youth violence. Where and
when these negative influences show themselves in actual acts of aggression
may differ from group to group. For example, the kids who committed the
infamous school shootings in the 1997-1998 school year killed and injured
multiple victims in a single incident and did not have some secondary
criminal motive such as robbery or drug dealing. This is different from
most of the lethal violence committed by inner-city kids. Also, while
for most middle-class teenagers school is a very important social setting
and what goes on there of vital emotional significance, for many inner-city
kids, in contrast, school has lost its significance by the time they reach
adolescence, and they have already dropped out. But once the shooting
stops, the net result is the same for parents, friends, teachers, and
civic leaders who must cope with the aftermath.
Epidemics tend to
start among the most vulnerable segments of the population and then work
their way outward, like ripples in a pond. These vulnerable populations
don't cause the epidemic. Rather, their disadvantaged position makes
them a good host for the infection. That the exact nature of the problem
may change a bit as it spreads is not surprising. It is not uncommon for
infections to mutate as they spread, with one strain being particularly
successful in invading a particular host. The Black Death of the Middle
Ages started in the poorest and most deprived homes and neighborhoods,
where sanitation conditions and nutrition were most primitive, but it
eventually reached into the palaces of the nobility. Unmarried teenage
pregnancy over the past thirty years has shown the same pattern: the high
rates observed among low-income, inner-city minority girls in the 1960s
are to be found throughout America today, among small town, suburban,
and rural girls. The same is true of the phenomenon of "latchkey children."
Finding young children at home without adult supervision was once common
among low-income families but almost unknown among the middle class. Now
it is common everywhere.
The same epidemic
model describes what is happening with boys who kill. The first wave of
lethal youth violence in schools peaked in the 1992-1993 school year,
when fifty people died, mostly in urban schools and involving low-income
minority youth. In response to what we now call Stage One of the epidemic,
inner-city high schools scrambled to devise and implement measures to
teach teenagers nonviolent conflict resolution techniques, to disarm students
before they could enter the school building, and to remove them if they
did enter the school with weapons. American high schools have become the
major market for worldwide sales of metal detectors. We are now in Stage
Two, the spread of youth violence throughout American society. How did
we get here?
HOW DO EPIDEMICS
OF VIOLENCE SPREAD?
My use of the word
epidemic to describe what's been happening with youth violence
is deliberate. The study of epidemics (epidemiology) provides some useful
tools for analyzing and understanding the situation of violent boys. For
one thing, it helps explain how conditions can change so dramatically
and quickly. One of these tools is the concept of the "tipping point,"
the moment in the development of an epidemic at which only a small change
in the presence of the germ produces a big change in the rate of infection.
Although the tipping point is characteristic of epidemics of physical
illness, it is true of social epidemics as well.
Jonathan Crane, a
geographer in Illinois, has identified the tipping point in the social
decline of neighborhoods. He found that when the proportion of "affluent
leadership class" families in a neighborhood drops below 6 percent, there
is a rapid increase in such social pathologies among teens as delinquency,
out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and dropping out of high school. Once this tipping
point is reached, the neighborhood is ripe for becoming an "inner-city
war zone." This is clearly what happened in many neighborhoods in cities
like Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, setting the stage for the dramatic
upsurge of youth violence that occurred during the 1980s.
Harvard University
sociologist William Julius Wilson documented this phenomenon in Chicago
and other cities by demonstrating how an end to strict racial segregation
allowed affluent and middle-class African American families to leave the
ghettoes to which they had been confined by segregationist laws and policies
and find homes in middle-class and integrated communities, thus leaving
behind an ever-poorer and more isolated population to deal with the decline
of the industrial sector jobs that had sustained them in earlier times.
Neighborhoods that were once complete and resilient communities became
homogeneously poor and socially troubled environments, the perfect "host"
for an epidemic of violence.
Public policies have
played a direct part in the latter process, for example, by clustering
public housing in large projects, rather than dispersing it as scattered
site housing, and then forcing middle-class families out of public housing
by setting income limits. I know this from firsthand experience. As a
three-year-old child, I lived in a large public housing project in New
York City, a racially integrated project that included families of many
varieties. Five years later my family was forced to move out because my
father's income exceeded the ceiling set by shortsighted policy-makers
and administrators. As a result, what had been a very livable community
in the 1950s joined the ranks of the urban war zones by the 1960s. Unfortunately,
that story has been repeated over and over again in city after city around
our country.
War zone neighborhoods
are places where almost every fourteen-year-old has been to the funeral
of a playmate who was killed, where two-thirds of the kids have witnessed
a shooting, and where young children play a game they call "funeral" with
the toy blocks in their preschool classroom. Since the 1960s, such war
zones in the biggest, most crime ridden cities have been the primary sites
for kids who kill, but in the last two decades additional cities have
spawned war-zone-like neighborhoods.
The change came first
with the addition of a second tier of medium-to-large-sized cities like
Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, which had long been held up as paragons
of civic virtue and social well-being. These cities increasingly spawned
microenvironments exhibiting the plague of gunfire in the climate of fear
and pervasive insecurity that came to symbolize inner-city life. In some
cities it may be only a few square blocks, but it is there nonetheless.
Even Salt Lake City, Utah, the home of the Mormon Church, isn't immune,
as I learned when I was invited there to address a gang violence task
force in 1994. As the years have gone by, smaller cities have joined the
ranks. Now, even places like Battle Creek, Michigan, the home of Kellogg
Cornflakes, have had drive-by shootings. And in my own small town of Ithaca,
New York, there is a small section of town from which there are regular
reports of shootings, stabbings, gang activity, drug dealing, and all
the other accoutrements of the urban war zone.
This development
has a special significance for small cities, towns, and rural areas. In
big cities the large population base has allowed for multiple large public
high schools and for the maintenance of private high schools by affluent
families and by others who wish to escape from the threat of inner-city
youth violence. This means that "trouble spots" can by and large be avoided
by most affluent families. But outside the largest cities, avoidance is
not possible. For example, in Ithaca every teenager goes to the one public
high school. This brings the problems of the micro-war-zone home to my
daughter, who now goes to high school in Ithaca, in a way that was not
experienced by my son, who went to high school in Chicago a few years
ago. Ironically, she feels more threatened going to school in small-town
Ithaca than he did going to school in big, bad Chicago.
But this account
of the rise of micro-war-zones in small cities and towns is not the whole
story. Another implication of the tipping point theory is that conditions
in families and neighborhoods throughout society may deteriorate for years
before suddenly achieving a critical mass for lethal youth violence. I
have witnessed this in my professional lifetime. As a young graduate student,
I accompanied my mentor, psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, on a trip to
the American heartland in 1970. We attended a community meeting in Racine,
Wisconsin, a small city nestled in the American Midwest. Bronfenbrenner
was there to talk to a group of civic leaders and parents about the trends
he was detecting in American society that he thought boded ill for coming
generations of children and youth, trends he had recently described in
his book Two Worlds of Childhood. The assembled group listened
politely to what he had to say, but their questions and comments following
his presentation revealed that their overall reaction to his analysis
had been, "This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with
us here in Racine?"
A quarter of a century
later, I was invited to speak to a similar group of community leaders
and parents in Racine. The meeting was held in the same room where Bronfenbrenner
had spoken twenty-five years earlier. I was there to talk about my 1995
book Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment, in which
I had taken Bronfenbrenner's analysis into the 1990s. The audience listened
avidly as I described the unfortunate changes that were occurring in American
life, changes that I said were "poisoning" more and more kids. At the
end of my speech outlining the problem and what it would take to turn
things around, there was sustained, loud applause. I then asked the group,
"How many of you think what I have said today is relevant for the situation
you face in Racine?" Every hand went up. One man exclaimed, "Yes. This
is exactly what we are dealing with here. We have to act now!"
When I reported back
to Bronfenbrenner, now retired but still active, his response was not
a smug "I told you so" but, rather, one of sadness. He said, "Twenty-five
years ago, when this was just starting, how much easier it would have
been to turn things around. Now..." He sighed. Now we have come to the
tipping point -- and gone beyond it in many places in our country. In
almost every community in America, growing numbers of kids live in a socially
toxic environment.
Though they may weight
the odds in one direction or the other, social conditions alone do not
cause boys to kill. Those conditions must be incorporated into the way
kids think and feel about the world, about their world, and about
themselves. Ultimately, it is on the inner lives of boys that environmental
influences take their toll, setting in motion the chain of events that
results in the horror of Jonesboro, Springfield, or Paducah.
The surface conditions
that we find associated with the inner damage to kids in, say, Washington,
DC, and Detroit may not be entirely the same as those that play a critical
role when the epidemic comes to the suburbs and small towns. As I mentioned
earlier, school may be the site for some kids while the street plays that
role for others. Exploring the links between external social conditions
and the psychological conditions inside boys is the focus of later chapters,
where I outline the role played by depression, shame, rage, alienation,
and bloated self-centeredness in the origins of youth violence. I am concerned
first and foremost with understanding why kids kill; I know that
many individuals are desperate for answers, but do we as a society really
want to know?
MAKING SENSE, NOT
EXCUSES
Sometimes as I listen
to people talk about violent youth, I doubt that they really want to understand
the dangers that our boys face and to make sense of how their violent
acts flow from their experiences in our society. Sometimes it seems that
few people really care about hurt little boys who have grown up to be
violent teenagers, except as potential threats to the community. It is
as if we want to forget how they got to be kids who kill in the first
place. We are willing to incarcerate them but not to understand them.
Perhaps we feel that understanding them is unnecessary because punishment
is the only issue, or perhaps we feel that an attempt to understand them
is dangerous because it might excuse their actions.
In the days after
the Jonesboro, Arkansas, shootings in March 1998, an opinion poll revealed
that about half the adults in America believed that the two boys who shot
their classmates should receive the death penalty. Throughout the months
of their incarceration prior to the trial in August, the jail where they
were being held received numerous letters containing death threats aimed
at the boys. In the days leading up to and following the trial and the
verdict, reporters recounted firsthand accounts of adults in the community
explicitly stating that they would kill the boys if they were released.
These threats continued when the verdict was made public (the boys were
sentenced as juveniles, to be held in custody until their juvenile status
ended).
In our anger and
fear, many of us seem ready to impose the ultimate penalty against children.
When fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel in Oregon went on his killing rampage,
it seemed that every newspaper account mentioned -- often, it seemed,
regretfully -- that although he could be tried as an adult under Oregon
law, the boy was too young to receive the death penalty. After the Jonesboro
shootings, a Texas legislator gained national attention by bemoaning the
fact that an eleven-year-old couldn't be executed in his state and announcing
his intention to remedy the problem by lowering the age for imposing the
death penalty to eleven.
A couple of weeks
after the Jonesboro shootings, I was on a radio talk show to respond to
some questions about the development of boys who commit such violence.
One of the hosts said that at first she had thought the death penalty
was justified for such an act but that now, as she learned about the boys'
backgrounds (including the report that at least one of them had been sexually
abused), she was changing her mind. She was learning about the life experience
of boys who kill. This kind of learning is essential if we as a society
are to choose the path of understanding, which leads to humane treatment
and rehabilitation, rather than savage punishment to feed our hunger for
revenge. This latter path produces an unending chain reaction of pain
and suffering for our entire society. We build more prisons to punish
these boys, and in those prisons their rage and despair hardens, so that
they emerge even more dangerous than when they entered. Such a course
of action only serves to validate the ancient proverb "If you start out
on a journey of revenge, begin by digging two graves, one for your enemy
and one for yourself."
On one side stands
a simple moralism that says if kids can kill, kids should die (or at least
serve long prison terms), as if they were adults. On the other side stands
an impulse to understand and, if understanding is possible, to rescue
the troubled and hurt child from inside the killer. I stand with the latter,
which is why I do what I do to help people understand. But it's no easy
task.
WHO CARES ABOUT THE
CHILD INSIDE THE KILLER?
In 1995, I was called
to testify as an expert witness in the trial of a Denver teenager charged
with murder. The defense wanted my testimony to explain how this boy's
history of abuse and exposure to violence in the community was relevant
to an understanding of his motives and actions. By then I had become accustomed
to hearing about the violent acts boys commit, so I was prepared to deal
with the details of this boy's crime. What surprised me most about my
experience in the courtroom was the prosecutor's response to my testimony.
He had access to the same records I did and had heard the boy's account
of life in his family and on the street. Nonetheless, the prosecutor denied
the relevance of the boy's childhood experience, declaring indignantly,
"Who cares what happened to him when he was a child?" As the prosecutor
saw it, the only thing that mattered now was the crime the boy had committed.
Nothing more. The only relevant question for him was, "Did he do the crime?"
It's not enough.
Each of the violent
teenage boys I meet moves and intrigues me as I come to know him as a
human being rather than as just a "host" to an epidemic of violence. Many
have committed monstrous acts. Their victims are testimony to that. And
yet when I meet one of these boys, I can see beyond the facts of his crime.
He is a sad woman's son, a young girl's brother, a baby boy's cousin.
While never forgetting about the victims of his violence, I always seek
to see him as more than a perpetrator, as more than his crimes. He is
a boy, a dangerous boy to be sure, but still a boy. Sometimes I discover
that the boy loves basketball or baseball, as I did as a teenager, or
that he excels in a school subject that was particularly dear to my heart
when I was in school. One boy I spoke with shares my love of mystery novels.
Another shares my birthday.
Some of these boys
appear so tough on the outside. But when I get a glimpse of their inner
life, I am deeply touched by their vulnerability and their pain, and I
come to see their toughness as a survival strategy, as something that
helps them get through another day. In many ways their cold exterior is
a defense against overwhelming emotions inside. They puzzle me, seeming
in some ways so much like my own teenage son yet in other ways so alien.
These boys are incarcerated as criminals, and they sometimes have long
records that include multiple lethal assaults and armed robberies. Yet,
young or old, they often seem naive and childlike as they talk about their
life. More than one of the boys I have interviewed even sucked his thumb
as he recalled the events of his life for me.
It was these experiences
that led me to refer to them as "lost boys." Some boys get lost because
they are systematically ted into a moral wilderness by their experiences
at home and on the streets, where they are left to fend for themselves.
These are the boys upon whose behalf I testify in court, trying to help
judge and jury see the injustice of their experiences and how they have
been robbed of their childhood by abusive and neglectful parents, by malevolent
drug dealers, and by the sheer viciousness of their daily life. And I
argue that to simply punish them with death or decades of incarceration
only compounds the injustice imposed upon them by the world in which they
grew up.
Other troubled boys
are better understood as having gotten lost through unfortunate accidents
of human development. In their cases, no one set out to abuse or neglect
them, but they ended up feeling rejected and humiliated nonetheless. Adults
in their lives made ordinary efforts to teach them how to live in society,
but these ordinary efforts were not enough. Sometimes the unfortunate
circumstance is the absence or withdrawal of positive adults from a boy's
life, a void that occurs not through some plan but as a result of the
parents' fumbling efforts to deal with problems in their own lives --
for example, a divorce -- and their own disappointments. It is always
something outside that becomes deadly when filtered through the lens of
a boy's tormented inner life.
These boys fall victim
to an unfortunate synchronicity between the demons inhabiting their own
internal world and the corrupting influences of modern American culture.
They lose their way in the pervasive experience of vicarious violence,
crude sexuality, shallow materialism, mean-spirited competitiveness, and
spiritual emptiness. These factors affect us all to some degree, but they
poison these especially vulnerable kids. The unforgiving nature of modern
life puts so much pressure on kids to grow up perfectly -- perfectly powerful,
perfectly sexy, perfectly rich, perfectly resistant to day-to-day pressures.
However, whether they are deliberately misled or just unintentionally
lost, some boys find their way to lethal violence. Every boy has his limit;
some reach it earlier than others. With at least one gun in nearly half
the households in the country, with two-thirds of our teenagers reporting
they could get a gun in an hour, with virtually every kid exposed to vivid
movie and television scenarios legitimizing violence, we live in dangerous
times.
In my desire to understand
these boys better, I needed to know how a parent, guardian, teacher, or
coach might have diverted them from their downward spiral. And I needed
to know how these boys could stop the violence in their lives once it
started and how they could change the path they were on so that they would
not spend their teenage years in prison or end up in the morgue when they
should have been in school. I learned that I could only answer my questions
by digging deeply into the lives of violent teenagers. I decided that
rather than surveying large numbers of kids, where I might only have the
results of a paper-and-pencil survey, or conducting an hour-long interview
to get inside the head or heart of a number of boys, the best way for
me to proceed was to focus on a small group of lost boys, taking time
with each one to build a trusting relationship and to hear his story in
depth.
SUCCESS STORIES
I know that some
boys who enter into the world of lethal violence do find their way back
into the mainstream of American life. I came to know one such success
story quite well. His name was Julio, and he was a student in a course
I teach at Cornell University. Julio had gone to a maximum security youth
prison at age thirteen for the shotgun shooting of another kid who was
competing with him as a drug dealer for a bit of turf. Julio had all the
risk factors identified in Zagar's study: he came from a family steeped
in criminality, he had been neglected and abused by his parents, his mother
was a drug addict and his father a drug dealer, he was recruited early
into a gang, and he lived in an urban war zone in New York City. As luck
would have it, the boy he shot survived; Julio was therefore charged only
with attempted murder, and he faced the prospect of release from prison
within a few years' time.
Like many kids with
the deck stacked against him, Julio developed a pattern of aggression
that was well in place by the time he was ten years old. At thirteen,
he was standing at the edge of the abyss, with one foot over the edge.
But unlike so many other boys, Julio used the opportunity of being exposed
to the prison program to turn his life around, to learn to read, and eventually
to parlay his high intelligence, strong will, and sense of divine intervention
into a college scholarship that put him on the road to a career in social
work. What Julio found in the youth prison to which he was sentenced was
not just more of the same but, rather, an opportunity for reflection and
personal development in a safe setting. He became a monk in prison --
reading, reflecting, and praying -- and started the process of rebuilding
himself from the ground up. Julio's path exemplifies the monastic model
I will introduce in Chapter Eight as a strategy for reclaiming boys after
they are lost. When I talk with kids who kill, I always hope and expect
to find others like Julio so that I can deepen my understanding of why
some kids turn their lives around and how we can use their experiences
as a guide.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
LEGAL REALITIES
One thing I have
learned from talking to violent boys is that homicide is just part of
the violence in their lives. Legally, there is a world of difference between
violent assaults that end in death and violent assaults that fail to produce
a dead body. I see this in the cases of boys I know. Michael shot two
police officers; one died after being hit by one bullet while the other
survived four bullets to the chest. He now faces the death penalty. Larry
shot a police officer seven times, and the man spent only two nights in
the hospital; Larry is serving two years. Conneel fired an assault rifle
into a crowded playground and killed no one; he served three months on
a weapons charge. Thomas fired a single "warning shot" from his .22-caliber
pistol and felled a sixteen-year-old boy with that one small bullet; he
was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
The legal system
feasts on these distinctions, but I find them to be of very limited psychological
significance in most cases. Thus, my concern is with potentially lethal
violence as much as it is with homicide. We must look at kids who engage
in assaults that can kill, even if they don't actually end a human
life. It is very hard to predict with precision which boy will end up
taking a life. Much more practical is to identify the boys who are at
greatest risk for engaging in potentially lethal violence.
As I noted earlier,
according to the surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, in any thirty-day period, nearly 30 percent of our boys
attending high school carry a potentially lethal weapon around with them
as they go about their business in the community, and 12.5 percent of
our boys have carried a weapon to school. Recent research suggests that
less than 10 percent of all juvenile killers are psychotic, that is, have
symptoms of severe mental illness such as delusions and hallucinations.
The rest commit acts of lethal violence in connection with, in roughly
equal proportions, conflicts (such as disputes or arguments that get out
of hand) or crimes (such as robbery or rape). This means there is always
great potential for lethal violence in the day-to-day world of boys who
attend American high schools. I talk mostly with the boys who have fulfilled
that awful potential. Where do I find these boys who can help us understand
youth violence? Sometimes they find me -- or, rather, their lawyers find
me and I am called upon to testify as an expert witness at their trials.
But mostly I find them in a project I run with my partner, Claire Bedard,
at youth prisons maintained by the New York State Office of Children and
Family Services.
REAL-LIFE BOYS
The Austin MacCormick
Center is located in a wooded section of central New York State, about
fifteen miles from Ithaca. MacCormick is generally regarded as a model
facility, and kids routinely report that it feels safer than any of the
other secure facilities in which they have spent time. Still, it can be
dangerous to work with these boys. In one two-month period in 1997, three
staff members were sent to the hospital as a result of struggles with
boys on the units: In one incident, a staff member had his nose broken
as he tried to restrain a boy. In another incident, two staff members
required stitches from a melee that ensued from their attempts to confiscate
a razor blade found in the sock of a boy who had just arrived from another
facility.
When I first see
the boys I will come to know at MacCormick, they are usually part of a
group walking down the hall. At first glance they are rather anonymous,
with their generally guarded expressions and their MacCormick uniforms
of red shirts, khaki pants, and white running shoes (the colors of the
laces differentiate the boy's degree of progress within the facility's
system).
Some are tall and
very muscular, some are short and compact. Some have acne and the disproportionately
developed bodies common to teenagers everywhere, and others are strikingly
handsome. Some affect the "gangsta shuffle" they learned from rap music
celebrities; other just walk. Most display a guarded expression, but some
flash a menacing scowl and a few even smile. As I get closer, I see that
many of them carry scars on their hands, arms, and face from beatings
and fights, recent and long ago. With their shirt and pants on I can't
know how many of them also carry physical reminders of wounds on their
chest, back, and legs.
Like most teenagers
in a group confronting adults, they don't want to let on that they are
anything other than just like everybody else. I have to spend time with
each boy alone, without the weight of peer scrutiny and the baggage of
the "us versus them" attitude if I want to see and hear more; That's when
I really meet a boy, when it is just the two of us alone in a small room
and safely distanced from the outside world. At times there is instant
rapport. Malcolm, sentenced to a term of four to ten years for second-degree
murder, was such a boy.
Malcolm
The night before
I met Malcolm, his mother called to tell him that his girlfriend, six
months pregnant with his child, had been shot and killed while walking
on the streets of his old neighborhood. Malcolm's loss is by no means
unusual for violent boys. If anything, such loss is a common thread (not
long after Malcolm's girlfriend was shot, the girlfriend of another boy
was killed).
Malcolm's mother
told him that the baby-to-be had died too. He recounted this as I sat
with him in one of the facility's two isolation rooms, used both to punish
boys who were in trouble and to keep a watch on boys who were sick or
were thought to be suicidal (a reminder that more violent individuals
die at their own hand than are put to death by a society committed to
the death penalty).
Troubled as he was,
Malcolm still was ready to talk. I learned later that talking was one
of his strategies for coping with the traumas of his life. As the months
went by, Malcolm opened up to me more and more, and I saw many sides to
him. I discovered that he had started reading books while at MacCormick.
Sometimes we talked about the books he was reading; the Autobiography
of Malcolm X was a favorite of his (and of many of the other boys
as well). His interest prompted me to buy a copy of a book he wanted to
read but could not find in the prison library -- Street Soldiers
by Joe Marshall. When I gave it to him as we sat together, he looked at
it, his head down, for a few moments. Then he looked up at me as a tear
rolled down his cheek. "This is for me, really? Thanks, man. Nobody ever
gave me a book before." A single tear is a precious commodity in the emotional
economy of boys like Malcolm.
When the boys first
speak of their experiences with violence, they are often cool and matter-of-fact
about it. However, eventually, weeks or months later, some of them talk
to me about the residue of trauma that results from living in a world
where violence is so intense and pervasive. Inside almost every violent
teenager I've spoken to is an untreated traumatized child. How do they
cope? Each has his own strategy. Malcolm told me that he tried not to
be alone, and he talked all the time. He once said, "When I'm alone, I
see the faces of the people I killed in front of me, in a line. They be
like ghosts. It's most bad at night, because then there's nobody to talk
to, nothing to do except listen to those ghosts. It's bad, man." Then
this tough, violent boy let a tear escape. Another single tear.
From Malcolm to
Kip and Luke and Andrew and Mitchell and...
Malcolm and most
of the others at MacCormick are among the most visible of those infected
by the American epidemic of youth violence. But as we shall see in the
chapters that follow, many of the elements of the stories I hear are also
present in the lives of most young people who display lethal violence,
wherever they come from.
These elements are
often hidden and muted when a boy is from Springfield, Paducah, or Jonesboro
rather than the inner city, but white boys from the American heartland
reveal many of the same patterns in their most intimate and important
relationships and in their inner lives as do their brothers at the Austin
MacCormick Center. They may come from what appears on the surface to be
a "good family" from the right side of the tracks, rather than one that
is obviously dysfunctional. They may appear to be doing well in school,
rather than dropping out for life on the streets. But the accumulation
of risk factors is there to be found if we look carefully, deeply, and
without prejudice. They are all our sons.
The risk factors
are there to be found in the more subtle forms of psychological maltreatment,
in alienation from positive role models, in a spiritual emptiness that
spawns despair, in adolescent melodrama, in humiliation and shame, in
the video culture of violent fantasy that seduces many of the emotionally
vulnerable, and in the gun culture that arms our society's troubled boys.
There is an epidemic
of youth violence, and no community is immune. This is the story I must
tell in the chapters that constitute Part One of this book, as I trace
how the inner life of a boy develops to the point where he is a candidate
to become lethally violent. But we are not powerless. We can do more than
simply watch this happen. What we can do will be the focus of Part Two.
Excerpted from Lost Boys © Copyright 2012 by James Garbarino. Reprinted with permission by Vintage Books. All rights reserved.
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