HURT LITTLE BOYS BECOME AGGRESSIVE BIG BOYS

What comes next in the chain of events that leads from disconnection and hurt in the early years to the act of committing lethal aggression in adolescence? Chapter Two explored the roots of vulnerability in young boys, emphasizing the process of connecting and the consequences of psychological abandonment and rejection. What stands between this early psychological vulnerability and later youth violence? That is the question I am seeking to answer when I talk with Dennis.

Dennis was sixteen when I first met him, the youngest of two children. Tall with short hair and very intense dark eyes, he grew up in a small city in the care of his mother and father. Both parents worked — he at the post office, she in a hospital. While his parents worked, he was cared for by his grandmother a few days a week and at a day-care center the rest of the time. When he was six years old Dennis started first grade at the school three blocks from his home.

It is my first interview with Dennis. I have been going through the chronology of events in his life — where he lived and with whom, where he went to school and how he liked it, and so on. He lists four different elementary schools he attended as a child. “Why did you change schools so often when you were a child?” I ask. “I was bad,” is his simple answer. “How bad?” I ask. “I’d get in trouble and get suspended,” he replies with a smile. “After getting suspended a few times, I’d get expelled and then move on to another school. That’s the way it went until I got to high school, and then I stopped going most of the time.” He says his parents told him he was always more difficult than his older sister. “I did have one good year, though,” he reports. “At the Alternative School.” There, he tells me, he didn’t get into much trouble. The classes were small, and there were only a hundred kids in the whole school. “The teachers made an effort to understand my problems,” he says. Whatever good they did for Dennis, it was either too late or simply not enough to set him on the right track.

The following year, when he was transferred back to the regular high school program, all Dennis’s old problems resurfaced, and by May of that year he had stopped going to school altogether. A year later he was arrested on a charge of being part of a drug-dealing network in his neighborhood. Convicted of this crime, he served four months in a juvenile detention center. After he was released, he didn’t even bother to go back to school. He simply picked up where he had left off. Six months later Dennis was arrested again, this time in connection with the shooting of two boys in the park across the street from the school he no longer attended.

Fourteen-year-old Thomas tells much the same story. I talk with him while he awaits trial for murdering a seventeen-year-old in a street confrontation two blocks from his home in a small town in rural upstate New York. “I was a terror,” he says, recounting a litany of troubles. Like Dennis’s, Thomas’s problems started in early childhood, beginning with an escalating pattern of disobedience and graduating to fights at school. He lived with his grandmother and her husband, the only child in a household with two middle-aged adults.

When Thomas talks about his childhood, he is quick to point out that he wanted to do better than he did — in school, with his grandparents, and with the neighbors. His grandmother says, shaking her head, “Thomas is a nice boy, but he was always a handful. My husband and I tried our best with him, but . . .” Her voice trails off. I’ve seen the records in Thomas’s case, and they document an ongoing saga of misdeeds: stealing money from his grandmother’s purse, calling in a false fire alarm to his elementary school, skipping school with some older boys when he was nine years old, smoking in the bathroom in sixth grade, not coming home when he was supposed to after school, and getting into fights on the playground.

Malcolm, too, was a difficult child whose problems started early. Recall from Chapter Two that his mother was absent for the first four years of his life. She was in the army, and Malcolm lived those years with his grandmother. Once his mother did return, she tried to impose her will on a little boy who knew her only from pictures, cards, and phone calls, and he rebelled. Malcolm was a troublesome child in kindergarten, always into mischief. If there was a wad of gum in the goldfish bowl, Malcolm was the most likely suspect. If there was a tussle in the back of the line on the way to the gym, Malcolm was probably involved. In second grade he was suspended for a day for punching another boy so hard he knocked the wind out of him. By the time he was in third grade he had started fighting for real, not just the tussles common to many a boy’s childhood but full-fledged fighting. At ten years of age he was suspended from school for a fight that landed another boy in the hospital with a seriously injured eye and a broken nose.

Such stories are not unusual in the accounts of childhood told by violent youths, who by and large started misbehaving early in life. These boys say that the adults who took care of them often remind them of their early misbehavior, even today. Such stories are in the social worker’s notes in Michael’s case file; Michael’s mother had told the caseworker, “The boy has always been a problem — willful and disobedient. No matter how hard I punished him, he wouldn’t behave.” Michael has the scars on his back to validate her claim about using harsh punishment. But he also has taken her words to heart and has folded them into his own self-portrait. Now nineteen years old, Michael says that he was “a rogue” but that his brother Robert was “submissive.” The pattern was set by the time the brothers reached elementary school: Michael fought with other children, disobeyed teachers, and destroyed property, whereas Robert submitted to adult authority in every situation in every way. Today’s violent high school boys are, for the most part, the bad boys in elementary school from five or six years ago.

I saw such bad boys during my own brief stint as an elementary school teacher in the 1960s. I recall one such child as if it were yesterday. As I watched him on the playground, six-year-old Damon dropped a banana peel on the ground and ran off. The principal saw him commit this minor act of delinquency and tracked him down. “Pick it up,” he said to the boy. Damon did, and then promptly dropped it again. “Pick it up and put it in the trash,” the principal commanded. Damon did so, paused, and then pulled the banana peel out of the trash and dropped it on the ground again. “Pick it up, put it in the trash, and leave it there!” the exasperated principal yelled. These are the children who leave their teachers weary every day.

Coupled with aggression, this sort of chronic misbehavior lays down the foundation for bigger problems in later life unless teachers and parents intervene early to get these boys back on track. The good news is that this redirection is possible. According to the results of a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University psychologist Sheppard Kellam and his colleagues, violence prevention programs and effective classroom management techniques in first grade can have a dramatic effect on the likelihood that an aggressive six-year-old will become a violent thirteen-year-old. Kellam’s group found that highly aggressive six-year-old boys placed within well-managed first grade classrooms run by effective teachers were three times less likely to be highly aggressive by the time they reached eighth grade than similarly aggressive boys who were placed in a chaotic classroom with ineffective teachers. This is a critical issue to which I will return in Chapter Seven.

WHEN BAD BEHAVIOR STARTS EARLY

Research by psychologist Leonard Eron and colleagues documents that by age eight boys’ patterns of aggressive behavior and attitude are already crystallizing, so much so that without intervention such patterns tend to continue into adulthood. When they began their studies in the 1960s, Eron and his colleagues asked eight-year-olds to identify the aggressive children in their classrooms. “Who are the children in your class who hit people, who start fights, who kick people?” they asked. When they followed up on these children three decades later, they found that, by and large, the children who had been identified as aggressive at age eight became adults who at age thirty-eight hit family members, get into fights in the community, and drive their cars aggressively. (By the way, this gives a developmental spin to the problem of road rage: it may start as “tricycle rage.”)

There is a formal name for the pattern of behavior that Dennis calls being “bad” and Thomas calls being “a terror.” Psychologists and psychiatrists call it Conduct Disorder. For children to be labeled as having conduct disorder, they must meet a set of criteria developed by the American Psychiatric Association and published in its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The current edition, DSM-IV, defines Conduct Disorder as “a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated.” The manual’s criteria include aggression to people and animals, destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, and serious violations of rules. This is a familiar pattern to me; I see it often with incarcerated boys. That is not surprising, for at least 80 percent of boys in juvenile prisons and rehabilitation programs, boys like Dennis, Malcolm, Thomas, and Kip, carry with them this rather cold diagnostic label.

Particularly important for understanding lethal youth violence is the question of when a boy’s pattern of chronic bad behavior starts, that is, whether it begins early (childhood onset) or later (adolescence onset). British criminologists Farrington and Hawkins report that when conduct disorder begins in childhood rather than adolescence, it is more likely to continue into adulthood. Other investigators, such as psychologist Alan Kazdin, agree that youths with childhood-onset Conduct Disorder are more likely than those with adolescence-onset Conduct Disorder to engage in aggressive and criminal behavior and are more likely to remain chronically dysfunctional into and throughout adulthood.

Why is childhood-onset Conduct Disorder more severe? There are no simple answers, but there are some compelling ideas from child development research. First, if bad behavior starts in childhood rather than adolescence, it has a longer period to build up and interfere with normal development. When it begins in adolescence, a boy is more likely to have positive experiences and relationships from the past to fall back on, and the troubling behavior is more likely to be a temporary phase reflecting difficulty in meeting the special challenges of being a teenager, such as dealing with complicated issues of peer relations. Indeed, surveys show that most boys and many girls exhibit some delinquent behavior during their teenage years, with more than 60 percent engaging in some combination of aggressive acts, drug abuse, arson, and vandalism. I know I did, as did most of the teenagers I have known.

The second reason childhood onset is a bad omen is that when young children exhibit a pattern of bad behavior, it more than likely is linked to some underlying problem in them rather than to simple negative peer influence. According to Kazdin’s research, underlying problems include a difficult temperament, neurological deficits and difficulties (often associated with pregnancy- and birth-related complications), separation from parents, violence in the family, and harsh parenting practices.

Of the boys I’ve interviewed, nearly all would qualify as childhood-onset cases. Dennis reports that he regularly beat up other kids in school. Devon took money his mother gave him to buy sneakers and used it to purchase drugs instead. Adam stole a purse. All these things happened before any of these boys turned ten. Their own self-reports fit within the American Psychiatric Association’s set of criteria for Conduct Disorder.

I sit listening to fifteen-year-old Aaron remember the places he lived in and the schools he attended over the years. He’s a cherubic-looking kid with an engaging smile and a very dignified way of talking. (I can picture him with a herringbone tweed jacket, an ascot, and a pipe.) I am taking it all in, perhaps lulled by his apparently sweet disposition. After he has finished, I turn to the task of verifying the sequence of events he has just reported. “Why did you move from the house on Ferry Street?” I ask pleasantly.

His answer takes me aback. “I burned down the house playing in the kitchen,” he replies, smiling sheepishly.

I pride myself on being unflappable with the boys, so I pause a moment and then say, “Tell me about that.”

And he does: “I burned the house down ’cause I was playing with spaghetti sticks. I was putting them in straws, and the melting plastic was dripping on the floor. I think I was like seven.”

I ask, “So when the fire started in the house, were you by yourself?”

“No, my mother, she was braiding my sister’s hair in the living room. And I was running back and forth playing in the kitchen. My mother was telling me like, ‘Don’t be back there playing with nothing.’ But I didn’t listen, and I climbed up on the wood thing, I got some spaghetti strings and the straws, I took some straws out the drawer, and I stuck them in there. And I lit the stove and stuck it in the fire. And the straws was burning, the plastic was dripping. And when that happened, when the plastic on the floor started burning up, I went in the living room and sat down next to my mother. And she was like, she knew I did something ’cause usually I just was running around the house, but I came and sat next to my mother. I was sitting there watching her braid my sister’s hair. She was like, she looked at me like, ‘What did you do?’ I was like, ‘Nothing.’ So she went in the kitchen and saw it, and that’s when it was already burning up. So we had to leave, and we moved down the street by my grandmother.”

I ask him, “Were you scared when the fire started?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But my mother, she wasn’t surprised I did it, ’cause I was always hyper.”

UNDERSTANDING, NOT LABELING

Although violent boys obviously don’t use the term Conduct Disorder to describe themselves, their self-descriptions certainly match the criteria for this disorder. But the term is only a label. It simply describes a pattern of chronic bad behavior: a boy steals, hits people, hurts animals, destroys property, disobeys parents and teachers, fights with other boys, and victimizes girls. When this behavior occurs over and over again, it is called a chronic pattern of behavior, or Conduct Disorder.

But using this label for a boy can easily become the end of the story rather than the beginning. To go beyond diagnosis, we need to know why a boy is behaving badly and what we — parents and professionals — can do to improve his behavior. We want to understand why a boy would engage in a pattern of chronic bad behavior, but it seems that the process of diagnosis often simply leaves us with the fact that he does habitually engage in such behavior, without shedding light on its origins. For example, during Thomas’s trial, the prosecution’s psychologist diagnosed him with “Conduct Disorder, childhood onset” and left it at that, as though simply pronouncing the diagnosis explained anything and everything the court needed to know. In fact, it explained nothing other than the fact that Thomas’s act of homicide as a teenager was the culminating point of many years of aggressive behavior.

It took hours listening to Thomas’s life story for me to understand how and why he reached the point of killing someone. It took hearing about his being emotionally abandoned by his mother and father, about his early problems controlling his temper and his grandparents’ ineffective responses, about his frustrated attempts to find friends, about his being sent to visit his drug-addicted mother in the war zone of the city. In short, understanding him required hearing his life story, not just learning which diagnostic label he had been assigned.

What is more, labeling a child pushes us away from remembering the human being behind the diagnostic label or category, a consequence of most clinical diagnoses. No one likes to be reduced to a diagnosis. I don’t like being known only as a “white adult male college professor” any more than Malcolm likes being seen only as a “black teenage felon with a history of Conduct Disorder.” So while I rely on research that uses the term, I avoid the term Conduct Disorder as much as possible, and instead will simply focus on the questions of how and why boys get to be who and what they are.

Avoiding dehumanizing labels is particularly important when dealing with adolescents and issues involving adolescents. Many adults have a prejudice against teenagers. We make jokes about it as parents. i survived being the parent of a teenager, says one bumper sticker. We tend to shy away from teenagers in groups, for example, at the mall or on the street. Thirty years ago, when I told people I had volunteered to teach junior high school, and thus to spend my day with classes full of kids just entering adolescence, many thought this was clear evidence of insanity on my part. One reason for this bias is that while most adults find children familiar and comprehensible, they find teenagers alien and inscrutable. Part of this is the myth that adolescence is a time of unpredictable changes and that it represents a disconnection from childhood. Child analyst Anna Freud promoted this view. In fact, as she saw it, there is something unhealthy about a child who doesn’t go crazy and become rebellious, defiant, and troublesome as a teenager. Our culture has a tendency to see adolescence as a time of dramatic changes that come out of nowhere, unpredictably. In her book Children Without Childhood, social critic Marie Winn refers to the “myth of the teenage werewolf”: the idea that well-behaved and nice children become monsters when the hormonal surges of adolescence take over.

But research conducted by psychologist Daniel Offer in the United States and psychiatrist Michael Rutter in the United Kingdom generally tells a different story. Only about 20 percent of kids demonstrate a tumultuous adolescence, one full of crisis and turmoil. Most kids do not evidence the dramatic changes for the worse that the myth of the teenage werewolf would lead us to expect. Rather, they show a pattern of continuity from childhood into adolescence, particularly if the circumstances of their lives remain relatively constant and supportive. Psychologist Aaron Ebata finds that children with depressive tendencies generally become depressed teenagers. A report compiled for the American Psychological Association documents that aggressive children generally become aggressive teenagers.

Yes, adolescence brings about changes and intensification, but generally these are along the lines laid out in childhood. Kids who experience a tumultuous adolescence generally had a difficult childhood. Violent boys are not so different from other boys in this regard. It is a question of their intensifying the negative while other boys are accentuating the positive. The process is the same, but the negative outcomes can be as disastrous as the positive outcomes can be wonderful. And in some boys it is a time when problems that were swept under the rug in childhood come bursting out into the world, as the suddenly powerful teenager replaces the previously powerless young child. For example, University of Pennsylvania sociologist Richard Gelles reports that most teenagers who assault their parents were once children assaulted by their parents. This is the domain of the lost boys, the boys who go beyond the bounds of normal male aggression to become violent teenagers. The recognition of adolescence as the culmination of what begins in childhood directs us toward an understanding of the core question, Why would a boy be so bad at an early age in the first place?

ARE BOYS BORN BAD?

Some people are tempted to say that some kids really are just born bad. That is where the popular expression bad seed comes from. Some of the troubled boys’ parents and grandparents seem to accept this explanation, as do some professionals who work with them. Yes, some boys are born with difficult temperaments; they are irritable, hyperactive, and resistant. And, yes, being born difficult increases the challenges faced by parents and other caregivers and thus increases the likelihood that such boys will be rejected, abandoned, abused, neglected, and mishandled. But this is not synonymous with being “hardwired” in the womb to behave badly and become a violent teenager.

The question of whether bad behavior is preprogrammed genetically is one of the central controversies in child development. An informed starting point is to remember that child development requires the interplay of biology and society, the characteristics children bring with them into the world and the way the world treats them, nature and nurture. Sociobiology emphasizes a genetic origin for social behavior: some characteristics promote survival, and thus reproduction, more than other characteristics. In contrast, what researcher Benjamin Pasamanick calls social biology concentrates on the social origins of biological phenomena (e.g., the impact of poverty on infant health). Sociobiologists look for the origins of biological phenomena (i.e., genetically transmitted characteristics in a population) in its social history (i.e., the differential life success of individuals and groups in reproducing and thus passing on those characteristics). The key is that there are social implications of genetically based individual behaviors; the social impact of biologically rooted traits can affect the survival of individual people and groups of related people, and thus the likelihood that a particular genetic pattern will be passed along to surviving offspring.

From a social biological perspective, one can say that children face different opportunities and risks for development because of their mental and physical makeup and because of the social environment they inhabit and because of how well their inborn traits match up with what their social environment offers, demands, rewards, and punishes. Social environment also affects the very physical makeup of the child. These effects may be negative (e.g., the impact of poverty on birth weight or the influence of industrial carcinogens in one’s neighborhood in producing birth defects) or positive (e.g., intrauterine surgery or nutritional therapy for a fetus with a genetic disorder). A social biological perspective on the question of lethal youth violence accepts the premise that biologically based predispositions to violence only translate into behavior when they occur in social situations that permit or encourage their expression.

So when all is said and done, I think the best theory of child development comes down on the side of a focus on the social context, what psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner has called an “ecological” perspective on the question of nature and nurture. How genetic influences, such as temperament, and environmental influences, such as early trauma, will affect a child’s development depends upon the context in which those influences are played out. One of the challenges we face in understanding human development is the central importance of these contexts. Few processes work universally and independently of specific situations. Rarely does any specific X cause a specific Y in every time and place and with every human being. Indeed, in matters of human development, when the question is “Does X cause Y?” the best answer is almost always “It depends.” It depends.

The critical importance of social context is as true of the consequences of child temperament as it is of any other characteristic relevant to understanding youth violence. Does it matter if a child is born with a minor physical anomaly, such as low-seated ears and a slightly misshapen head, which are indicative of minor neurological problems arising from disorders of pregnancy, particularly in the first trimester? Does being born with these anomalies predict that a child will end up as an aggressive adolescent? It depends upon the family the child is born into and in which the child grows up.

Sarnoff Mednick and Elizabeth Kandel studied the impact of being born with such a minor physical anomaly on the development of violent behavior, speculating that the neurological damage signaled by the physical anomaly might be biologically linked to such behavior. They found that such children who grow up in well-functioning, stable families have no greater risk of being arrested for violent crimes by age twenty-one than do physically normal children (the arrest rate was about 15 percent for both groups). However, when such damaged children grow up in unstable, troubled families, they are three and a half times more likely to end up being arrested for violent crimes by age twenty-one than are physically normal children in similar families (70 percent vs. 20 percent).

A study conducted by German psychologists Friedrich Losel, Doris Bender, and Thomas Bliesener tells a similar story about the role of social context. These psychologists looked at the role of child temperament in high-school-age bullies and victims. They started from the general finding that a low resting heart rate in children is associated with antisocial behavior. Why? The hypothesis is that such children have a low resting heart rate because the emotional reaction system in their body is set low. This means, among other things, that they don’t show as much fear in response to the threat of punishment and are more impulsive. Apparently, they are less likely to be frightened off by scary situations and are more willing to take the risks associated with antisocial behavior. By the same token, timid children typically have high resting heart rates, suggesting that their emotional response systems are highly reactive and that they thus are easily frightened.

Losel and his colleagues went beyond this simple dichotomy to look at the role of temperament (as measured by heart rate) in two situations: low-risk families (i.e., those with low levels of stressful events and trauma and a high level of effective family functioning) and high-risk families (high levels of stressful events and trauma coupled with a low level of effective family functioning). The heart rates of bullies and victims were quite different in the two groups of family situations. In low-risk families there were significant differences between the heart rate of bullies and that of victims: in contrast to other children (who had rates of 70 beats per minute), bullies had low heart rates (62 beats per minute) and victims had high heart rates (75 beats per minute). But in high-risk families there was no difference in the heart rates of bullies, victims, and other youth (at about 70 beats per minute). Context matters in the impact and expression of temperamental characteristics. We must never forget that.

THE STORY OF ONE DIFFICULT CHILD

Being born difficult does not mean that a child will end up displaying a chronic pattern of aggression and bad behavior in adolescence. I know this from firsthand experience. I myself was a difficult infant and toddler — cranky, troublesome, willful, and aggressive. At two I was found standing on the wall of the balcony outside our sixth-floor apartment and talking to the cats in the courtyard. When my mother ordered me in, I refused. That same year, I ran away from home one night and was found wandering the streets in my pajamas. When I was three, the neighbors routinely came to my mother to complain that I was beating up their six- and seven-year-old children. When I was six I would stand at the top of the monkey bars on the playground, let go with my hands and challenge other children to try to shake me off.

But by the time I reached adolescence, my aggressive days were over and I became something of a model citizen. I was vice president of the student council and editor of the yearbook in my high school; I was even sent to Washington in 1964 as an exemplary youth by the Lions Club in my town. Few who saw the difficult child I was at three would have predicted the model citizen I became at sixteen.

Why did I turn out as I did while other difficult children do not? My success had a lot to do with the social context in which I grew up — my family, my neighborhood, my community, my school. I was the first child in my family and for more than four years the only child, so I had my parents all to myself. My mother devoted her every minute to me, literally “taming” me as one would a wolf pup. My father was there for me, a positive force in my life. When I started elementary school, I was assigned to strong and effective teachers in the early grades who took charge of me and the rest of their students and made sure we behaved in a civilized manner. Although I lived some of my early years in a public housing project in New York City, it was when “the projects” were still a safe and sane place, before they began the descent that transformed them into a war zone twenty years later. I was taken to church every Sunday morning, and the president of our country was a trusted and reassuring father figure. When I turned on the television or went to the movies, the violence I saw was very tame by today’s standards and the sexiest thing on either screen was a slow kiss. When I reached adolescence, I went to a small high school where I felt safe and was taught by teachers who cared for me. There were no gangs, guns, or drugs in my neighborhood.

Each of these elements of my life supported, protected, guided, and nurtured me. A boy like Malcolm experiences a negative mirror image of my early life: for each protective factor I experienced he is dealt a risk factor. Context matters, and one of the most important features of context is the balance between protective influences and threatening risk factors.

RISK ACCUMULATES

Threats accumulate; support ameliorates. The presence of only one or two risk factors does not disable a child. Rather, it is the accumulation of threats that does the damage. And trouble really sets in when these threats accumulate without a parallel accumulation of compensatory “opportunity” factors. Once overwhelmed, defenses are weakened the next time the child faces threat. Children and adolescents become highly sensitive to any negative social influences around them. I look at it this way: Give me one tennis ball, and I can toss it up and down with ease. Give me two, and I can still manage easily. Add a third, and it takes special skill to juggle them. Make it four, and I will drop them all. So it is with threats to development.

This accumulation approach to developmental threats offers hope to those responsible for policy and programming on behalf of youth. It tells us that life need not be risk free for development to proceed successfully. And one way to succeed with kids is to inject compensatory opportunity factors into the equation of their life. Then we can expect to see positive results — as long as we can prevent the coping capacity of youth from being overwhelmed. If there are one to two threats to our children’s development beyond our immediate control, they need not be destructive. At the same time, they should be an urgent warning, telling us to protect the children in our care from any further risks and to marshal our resources to build opportunities to enhance their development.

As threats accumulate, children’s intellectual development suffers and they cannot bring to bear cognitive strength in mastering the challenges they face. In a study by University of Michigan psychologist Arnold Sameroff and his colleagues, eleven-year-olds with less than three risk factors had above-average IQ scores; those with four such risk factors had below-average IQ scores.

The threat to intellectual competence compounds the effects of negative social influences in the environment by undermining a child’s resilience and coping processes. With the accumulation of threats — an absent father, a low resting heart rate, ineffectual teachers, whatever — children not only achieve less but, as a result, value themselves less. Thus begins a downward spiral: those who enter adolescence lacking the reservoir of skills and attitudes they need to deal with negative peer influences in their communities are drawn into or seek out aggressive peer groups, including gangs.

We always need to look at the whole picture, not just one element of the situation. Psychologist Alan Kazdin speaks of “packages” of risk factors that interact to produce chronic patterns of bad behavior in boys. Psychologists Carl Dunst and Carol Trivette speak of the “accumulation of opportunity factors” in improving the prospects of children with disabilities. When I look back on my own childhood, I see a healthy social environment rather than a toxic one; when I listen to Malcolm’s story, I hear the opposite. I will return to this exploration of just how toxic or healthy our social environment is in Chapter Four and again in Chapters Six and Seven, for that is what we must try to change in our effort to save violent boys.

THE SEEDS OF BAD BEHAVIOR

In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris pinpoints a series of temperamental traits that put a child at risk for becoming troubled and aggressive. These include high activity level, insensitivity to the feelings of others, lack of physical fear, being easily bored with routine, tendency to seek excitement, and less than average intelligence. Put these characteristics together in one child, and you have a parent who faces a very difficult challenge.

But why do some difficult children become well-socialized youth while others end up troubled or in trouble? One important reason lies in early experience. As I pointed out earlier, chronic bad behavior and aggression are more than a simple matter of male biology or hardwiring in the brain. They result from experience, experience that may start with an infant’s nonresponsiveness in the early months of life, which is mostly an adaptation to early mistreatment, rejection, and inept parenting. In a study by child psychologists Stuart Erickson, Byron Egeland, and Robert Pianta at the University of Minnesota, children who were maltreated at an early age were noticeably less cooperative than children who had not suffered harsh punishment at the hands of their parents or guardians. Indeed, the early badness of violent boys — that is, being noncooperative and resistant to parental directions and commands — often starts as a reaction to maltreatment. Many incarcerated boys echo sixteen-year-old Scottie when he recalls, “I wouldn’t listen. I just was not going to be told what to do by anybody.” This makes the task of anyone who would reform these boys very challenging indeed. By the time these boys reach prison, they often have a decade and a half of noncompliance under their belts. It’s a tough habit to change, and much easier to prevent in the first place.

Some parents believe that the way to encourage cooperativeness and obedience in a child is to be harsh and punishing from the very start. But in her classic study of the relation between maternal responsiveness in the first three months of life and the child’s compliance at twelve months, psychologist Eleanor Maccoby and her colleagues found just the opposite. Rather than producing “spoiled brats,” responsive mothers were rewarded with obedient children. In fact, Maccoby found that the more responsive mothers were in the first three months of life — for example, going immediately to pick up the baby when he or she cried — the more obedient the child was at one year. Maccoby measured obedience by how long the child would stay away from a desirable toy if the mother said, “No. Don’t touch.” Babies who had more responsive mothers were more obedient than babies who had less responsive mothers. Of course, Maccoby’s study did not directly measure how easy or difficult the children were, temperamentally, from the start. But psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan has taken this part of the equation into consideration, and he finds that although it takes a special kind of responsiveness from the mother (including a lot of physical soothing), even temperamentally difficult children can learn to behave well.

It is ironic. Mothers who seek to prevent the disobedience they believe comes from spoiling a baby can end up producing exactly the opposite of what they desire. University of Oregon researcher Gerald Patterson and his colleagues found that chronic bad behavior is most likely to arise in the early years of life when parents use harsh, inconsistent punishment practices instead of clear, firm, but warm responses when the child exhibits unacceptable behavior. The former approach reflects inept parenting, the latter competent parenting. As it turns out, parents who use harsh punishment and mainly pay attention to their child’s negative behaviors and ignore the positive ones are unintentionally encouraging aggression.

This is a good starting point for understanding the seeds of a troubled boy’s behavior. Mothers and fathers who parent according to the rules I have just described, or whose own psychological condition or history makes them emotionally unavailable to the child, are setting the stage for their child’s disobedience and defiant behavior. Not surprisingly, early disobedience and defiance are building blocks for trouble later on, particularly if the child’s peers are themselves disobedient and defiant.

One of Patterson’s contributions to our understanding is to highlight the fact that parental behavior affects child behavior and vice versa. Alternative behavior patterns are possible for the same parents and children. Behavior is not fixed as a matter of personality. How a child eventually turns out is not decided solely by what goes on inside the family, between parent and child, of course. The world outside the family, particularly the school environment and peer group, plays a powerful role in translating the child’s personality traits and predispositions into behavior.

Children may start off on a negative path in part because parents mistakenly withdraw from them in the first months of life (perhaps because they have been taught that leaving a young infant to cry in the crib is the best medicine or because they find the baby too much to handle). The truth is, in the early months of life the big danger is not too much attention but, rather, inattention. It is only later that effective parents begin to shape their child’s behavior by responding to desirable and undesirable behavior in different ways. Infants require unconditional attention, regardless of how undesirable their behavior may be. “Discipline” only comes later.

It is hard to know what goes on inside the head and heart of an infant, but I believe babies are angry and confused when no one comes to them when they cry and that they are pleased and reassured when someone does come. Is this the beginning of a pattern of estrangement and isolation that builds up through childhood? It certainly seems so when I listen to violent teenagers talk about the way they see the world, that is, with distrust, suspicion, and rage. Malcolm says, “I don’t trust nobody. You can’t count on anyone except yourself. That’s a fact.” Scottie tells me, “I just say, forget them. They don’t want me, I don’t want nothing to do with them,” and Bobby has arrived at this conclusion: “I’ve learned one lesson about life: it sucks.” Where did they learn these bitter lessons about life? I believe they learned them first as infants and found reinforcement for those beliefs as they passed through childhood into adolescence.

Psychologist Byron Egeland and his colleagues report that children whose mothers are psychologically unavailable have more behavioral problems than other children. These problems include most forms of emotional and intellectual dysfunction and disability, as well as aggression. Why do some mothers ignore their children? There are many reasons, of course, some having to do with temperament and others with circumstances. Some mothers may be self-centered or self-absorbed or may be the product of an abusive childhood themselves; others may suffer from drug or alcohol abuse, depression, or domestic violence. Whatever its origins, a parent’s psychological unavailability is a form of child maltreatment, and maltreatment plays a central role in the development of bad behavior and aggression in children.

Recall that in Chapter Two I mentioned that problems with early attachment are one of the sources of vulnerability among children. Byron Egeland, Alan Stroufe, and their colleagues at the University of Minnesota explored the relationship between attachment problems and aggression by studying preschool-age children in social situations. They identified two groups of children for the study: those who often took the role of victimizer and those who were frequently the victimized. They found that the “victimizer” children had displayed avoidant attachment as infants. (Recall that avoidant attachment describes children who fear their caregivers. It is often a sign of some significant disruption of the parent-child interaction early in life, perhaps including maltreatment.) Egeland’s research suggests that early maltreatment plays a role in diverting the development of young children toward aggression.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF ADAPTING TO CHILD ABUSE: NEGATIVE SOCIAL MAPS

Nothing tells us more about the link between child maltreatment and aggressive bad behavior than the research of psychologist Kenneth Dodge and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University. Child maltreatment teaches children to adapt their behavior and thinking to the harsh fact that those who are in charge of caring for them are the same people who hurt, terrify, ignore, and attack them. This very adaptation ultimately becomes the source of their problems in later years. According to the studies by Dodge and his colleagues, children who are maltreated are much more likely than non-maltreated children to develop a chronic pattern of bad behavior and aggression. The key lies in the fact that the child comes to understand how the world works through the lens of his own abuse. Put another way, a child’s worldview is a matter of how he draws his social map.

Of course, all children develop social maps and codes of behavior, which are initially the products of their experiences as filtered by their temperament. For most children, the social map portrays the world in positive terms: I can trust people. If I behave well, I will be treated well. I am lovable. I have allies in the world. And as a result, these children naturally develop benign codes of behavior: Listen to adults. Cooperation pays off. Be patient. Share. I will keep my hands to myself. Such social maps and codes of behavior give direction to life.

Abused children develop their social maps by adapting to an abusive environment. The more they learn these lessons, the more likely it is that they will learn a code that is compatible with a pattern of bad behavior and aggression by the time they are eight years old. There are four specific elements of this code that are especially important for subsequent behavior and development.

1. Children become hypersensitive to negative social cues. Thomas sits with me watching staff and other kids pass by the window of the interview room. As each one goes by, he has something to say that marks them as dangerous. “This one looked at me funny yesterday,” he says. “That one is bothering me,” he tells me. “See that guy there? I think he’s got a blade hidden.” No one escapes his watchful eye. He continues: “Just the other day one of the teachers insulted me. She made me feel stupid for asking a question in a class.”

2. Children become oblivious to positive social cues. Michael cannot think of one nice thing that anyone has done for him in the past year of his incarceration, yet I know of at least three staff members who have gone out of their way to offer him a kind word or some special bit of help. And I know that the teacher who Thomas says insulted him makes a point of praising him whenever she can.

3. Children develop a repertory of aggressive behaviors that are readily accessible and can be easily invoked. Malcolm tells me, “I know how to fight. Someone touches me, I’m going to finish it. Somebody hits me, I hit him back twice as hard. I hit him until he bleeds ’cause that way he’s not going to hit me again. You know what I mean.” I do.

4. Children draw the conclusion that aggression is a successful way of getting what they want. Dennis says, “I learned early in life that there’s winners and there’s losers. The winners end up on top. The losers bleed. I can take care of myself if I need to. I know the rules.” He learned that lesson first at home, at the hands of his parents, and it was later reinforced on the playground and on the street.

The code of violent boys and the social maps it reflects partially explain the nature of their bad behavior. They are not dumb. They observe and they experience, and they draw conclusions based on what they see and feel. Specific experiences become general patterns that together become the lenses through which they see the world. In early childhood they begin to draw negative psychological conclusions about the world and about their place in that world. With these negative social maps in place, they act accordingly.

According to psychologist Alan Kazdin, about 4 to 7 percent of kids exhibit chronic patterns of bad behavior and aggression that are serious enough to constitute a diagnosable mental health problem, such as Conduct Disorder. Boys are anywhere from three to four times as likely to display this pattern as are girls. How specifically are the social maps that abused kids develop linked to their later bad behavior and aggression? Dodge and colleagues found that if a child is maltreated and develops none of the four critical code elements associated with a negative social map (described earlier), the odds that he will exhibit chronic bad behavior and aggression are 5 percent, about what’s normal for the population as a whole. But if the child manifests at least three of the four code elements, we can expect a sevenfold increase in the risk that the child will exhibit the pattern of chronic bad behavior and aggression that defines Conduct Disorder.

WHY DON’T MOST ABUSED KIDS DEVELOP BAD BEHAVIOR AND AGGRESSION?

While most kids don’t become violent criminals, of course, it is true that the majority of boys incarcerated for violent crimes were subject to abuse or neglect as children. But what about the abused kids who don’t develop the negative social maps and don’t develop chronic bad behavior and aggression? What about them?

Only 35 percent of abused kids with negative and aggressive social maps become violent, according to Dodge. Why is it that 65 percent of the kids who have been abused and have negative social maps do not develop a pattern of bad behavior and aggression? Why do some boys who are abused develop some or all of the self-defeating behaviors and activities that characterize bad boys while others do not? Some children probably respond by developing other kinds of problems, perhaps confining their response to the internalizing problems of depression, low self-esteem, self-destructive behavior, and bodily troubles like headaches and stomachaches.

Some children do seem resilient. Why? With some boys, the answer seems clearly linked to a compensatory relationship — that is, a relationship with a devoted grandmother, a father who balances out an abusing mother, a loving mother who compensates for an abusive father, perhaps someone outside the family who is positively crazy about the child and who does not let the child’s emotional life wither on the vine but lovingly helps redraw the child’s social maps. The resilience of some children is due to the fact that the abuse they experience is limited to physical assault and they are able to feel a measure of love and acceptance from their parents at the times when they are not abused.

Some at-risk children are saved by an intervention program, perhaps a highly effective early childhood education program or the work of a child guidance clinic. Therapists can help children improve their attitudes and their behaviors. Some of the same psychologists who study the origins of bad behavior and aggression in children also remedy those problems. For example, the same Gerald Patterson who studies the emergence of aggressive and oppositional behavior among children develops and implements therapeutic programs to help parents and children escape from being entrapped in coercive relationships. All around the country there are professionals doing this good work with young children.

The mystery remains, however, as to why some children have the fortitude and strength to resist adapting to abuse and other experiences in ways that put them at risk for becoming violent. Some boys achieve a state of grace in which, though victimized, they find a positive path. This is resilience at its highest level, and I will return to it in Chapters Six and Seven.

There is, of course, another question implied by Dodge’s research: Why do some nonabused children develop bad behavior and aggression? Perhaps the answer in this case comes from research on parents who withdraw from but do not actively abuse their kids. These are neglectful, passive parents, about whom much less is known. But some things are clear: neglect often results from parents who are incapacitated by drugs or depression, by what social worker Norman Polansky called the apathy-futility syndrome. Also, some parents find themselves unable to cope with temperamentally difficult children and gradually withdraw from them. Their goal each day is only to avoid the aversive experience of confronting the child and dealing with the resulting shouting, screaming, crying, hitting, punching, slamming of doors, stamping of feet, destruction of property, and general mayhem. These parents find an escape from their children, but the result is often emotional and physical neglect.

In fact, neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally. According to the federal government’s National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, there are almost 900,000 cases of neglect and about 750,000 cases of abuse. Neglect leaves a social vacuum that may send a young child looking for connection somewhere else, or with someone or something else. That somewhere else may include television, where the child can learn countless negative lessons about violence and antisocial behavior.

Someone else may include peers who actually have been abused and who thus can model and teach neglected children the ins and outs of bad behavior and aggression. A significant proportion of the acts of violence committed by boys occurs in groups, and in groups there is often a psychological chemistry that makes the violence potential of the group greater than the potential for violence of the individual members. Acting under the influence of peers, any boy may be led to do things he might not do alone, and boys who have a desperate need to fit in may be particularly likely to join in hurtful, aggressive, and dangerous activities.

BEYOND SOCIAL MAPS: DISSOCIATION AND EMOTIONAL NUMBING

There is more to the link between child maltreatment and the development of violence and antisocial behavior than its effects on the child’s social map, however. Actual brain damage may be involved, perhaps accounting for some of the unexplained differences between children who become violent youth and those who don’t. Baylor University psychiatrist Bruce Perry and his colleagues documented damaging effects to children’s brains as a result of the trauma of child abuse. Particularly vulnerable to such damage is the cortex of the brain, where higher thinking that controls moral reasoning takes place.

There is a third explanation for the link as well, lying in the emotional disconnection that psychologists and psychiatrists call dissociation. Much has been made of the famous fight-or-flight response to threat. But as Bruce Perry points out, rarely do children have the option of either fighting or fleeing a situation physically, particularly when, as often is the case, the situation is their membership in an abusive family. Perry notes that the fight-or-flight response is mainly observed mostly in male adults, who, when confronted with a stressful threat, can actually choose between fighting or fleeing. Trapped in their home, in a schoolyard, or in a neighborhood, how do children respond?

The most likely option for children is to flee psychologically, that is, to shut down emotionally and disconnect themselves from their feelings so that they don’t have to feel them anymore. It’s a survival strategy that seems to work — in the short run. By cutting off or disowning the feelings that threaten to overwhelm them, children can survive traumatic threats. But at what cost?

John was six years old when his mother was murdered. He knows that because he was there. The day of the killing his stepfather showed up at the door at three o’clock in the morning, hoping to sneak back into the house after having been thrown out the day before by John’s mother. The little boy awoke when he heard the kitchen door open, and he got out of bed to see what was happening. He found his stepfather opening the refrigerator to get a can of beer. “Shush,” the man said as John appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “I don’t want your mother to hear me.” “Welcome back, Daddy Bill,” little John said. “Are you supposed to be here?” “It’s okay, boy,” John’s stepfather replied, patting the boy on the head and moving down the hallway to the master bedroom. John stood in the middle of the kitchen, sleepy but hoping for a glass of milk. In a minute Daddy Bill was back in the kitchen, but he looked very angry. At first, John drew back in fear, because he had experienced his stepfather’s anger before.

But Daddy Bill was not angry with little John this time. “Don’t be scared, boy,” the man said. “You okay. Now just reach in that drawer there,” he continued, “and get me that big knife your mother uses to cut meat.” John did as he was told. He reached into the drawer next to him and pulled out the big knife, then handed it over to Daddy Bill, who took it in his hand and disappeared down the hallway toward the master bedroom again. The next thing John heard was shouting and screaming coming from the bedroom. He stood there, frozen to the spot, for five or ten minutes, until he felt the pee running down his leg onto his foot. Then he walked down the hallway to the bedroom and looked in. Years later, he says that what he remembers is the red walls. His stepfather killed John’s mother, stabbing her fifteen times.

“How did you feel?” I ask him, now two decades later. “I don’t remember,” he says. “I suppose scared, but I would be lying to you if I said I really remember anything but giving Daddy Bill the knife, hearing the screaming and the shouting, and seeing the red walls.” He remembers the events, but he has no memory of the feelings. Poor little boy. As I talk with him, he sits on death row, awaiting execution for stabbing to death a fifty-year-old woman in her bedroom. “How did you feel when you killed that woman?” I ask. “I don’t remember,” he replies.

Emotional dissociation becomes a hard habit to break. It becomes generalized, giving others the impression that a boy has no feelings. In fact the reverse is true: his feelings are so powerful that they must be put in a box and pushed aside to ensure his survival. When incarcerated boys talk about their lives — and sometimes their crimes — they often seem emotionless. But I know it’s not that they don’t have feelings; their feelings are locked up inside the young child they have banished for his own protection.

This is emotional territory that is familiar to most males. Boys are routinely taught to ignore or deny their feelings by parents and others who are training them to be men in a culture that demands male stoicism. It is no secret that boys and men in many societies, including our own, are encouraged to put their emotions in boxes, to keep them out of consciousness, and to regard the expression of powerful feelings of pain and sorrow as a highly dangerous activity. We call this compartmentalization, and it is dissociation’s first cousin. One of the emotions specially targeted for compartmentalization and dissociation is fear.

Fear

For teenage boys, particularly those who have to be tough on the streets or in their families, fear is a dangerous commodity. Boys often talk about the testing that goes on among their peers, whether it be in school, on the streets, or in prison. They are virtually unanimous in their belief that to show fear is to invite victimization. But do they feel fear? While the boys I see generally won’t admit to feeling fear when they talk to their peers or even to adults who have power over them, they sometimes do so in the privacy of our interviews.

Sharnell is a tough kid. He’s battle scarred from his life on the streets and in the juvenile detention facilities where he has spent four years of his life since he turned twelve (he is now sixteen). We sit and talk about his life. Forty-eight armed robberies. He tells me how he and three of his friends would take the subway out to middle-class neighborhoods and rob other teenagers there at gun point. Drug dealing. He explains how the most dangerous point in a drug deal comes when the money is in sight. Once he had to punish a buyer who tried to cheat him; he hit the man on the head with a lead pipe. “Did he die?” I ask. “No,” he replies. “My mistake, ’cause a week later the guy surprised me in the hallway of my building and stabbed me in the chest.” He shows me the scar. When I ask him about fear, Sharnell tells me, “Nah. I ain’t afraid of nothing. Nothing.” At which point he rocks back and forth in his chair and sucks his thumb, an act of self-soothing carried over from early childhood. What is going on inside this boy?

As I watch Sharnell rock back and forth, I think of Bruce Perry’s study of the children who survived living in the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, and who had lived through the confrontation that took the life of its leader, David Koresh, and most of his followers. After the shooting and fire, when the surviving children were safely evacuated, Perry interviewed them. Even though they seemed calm on the surface, their hearts were beating at 148 beats per minute (far above the normal 70 beats per minute for young children at rest).

Violent boys often erect this facade of fearlessness early in their lives. I suspect for some it reflects a biological predisposition, an element of temperament. Recall the study in Germany conducted by Friedrich Losel and his colleagues showing that in low-risk families, high school bullies had unusually low heart rates (62 beats per minute, compared to 70 beats per minute for other boys) and victimized children had high heart rates (75 beats per minute). This may reflect a temperamental predisposition to fearlessness.

Some boys are temperamentally primed to take on aggressive roles, while other, more timid, boys are likely to be targeted as victims — and thus develop the elevated heart rate indicative of traumatic response. This pathway is evident in families where environmental conditions permit temperament to shine through. But in high-risk families the trauma affects all the boys, and neither bullies nor victims differ from the normal heart rate patterns found among other children of the same age (70 beats per minute). Perhaps this means the bullies among them have had their heart rates accelerated from dealing with traumatic experiences while the timid victims have used dissociation to train themselves to deaden their emotions so they can get through their stressful days without exploding.

Some boys are too fearful from the start to react delinquently to parental mistreatment or to the threatening environment they find on the streets. They simply try to conform to parental dictates and seek out some small measure of safety in conforming to adult conventions. Michael’s brother Robert was one such boy, and Michael referred to him as “submissive,” a highly undesirable trait for most boys because it flies in the face of dominant images of masculinity, images that are reinforced nightly on television and in the movies. Thomas reflects the culture around him when he derisively labels as “sissies” the boys who cave in to parental pressure or who stay at home to avoid dealing with the challenges of the streets.

This is always an issue for boys in a situation of social conflict and danger. I sat in a home in the Gaza Strip in 1988 with a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy named Hamad and his parents at the height of the uprising against Israeli occupation. Hamad’s older brother was serving time in an Israeli prison for his acts of political violence. While I sat in his living room with Hamad, other boys his age were on the street in front of the house throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers, and getting teargassed in repayment. His parents had made a deal with the authorities. If they kept him inside and out of the conflict for another three months, the police would release his older brother from jail and the whole family would be allowed to emigrate to Canada. If the younger son joined the conflict, he too would be arrested and both brothers would spend years in jail. I watched Hamad as the battle raged outside. His shame at being safe at home was terrible for him. He was a sissy in Thomas’s terms, a “kit kat” in the local youth slang of the Palestinians.

Some boys do cave in, but other boys fight back against the world when they experience trauma at home. Compare Michael, who is facing the death penalty for first-degree murder, with his brother, who is working in a record store. But some boys are given no choice. They live in environments in which failure to participate in violent peer group activity is not an option. Billy was such a boy.

When I interview him on death row, Billy recounts his struggle as a timid child to find a way to avoid joining in with the violence that was all around him. He is now a slight man with fine features and a soft voice. I can imagine him as a small, skinny child, a frightened child, easily bullied. He tells me how the more aggressive boys in his neighborhood were bound and determined to get him to join them. They threatened him. They beat him up day after day, on his way to and from school. Finally, they threatened to kill his mother if he didn’t join them. At that point he succumbed and joined the program. It was all downhill from there as he went further and further down the path of aggression and bad behavior, learning to hide and bury his feelings as he went. He was nineteen when he killed on the orders of his gang.

Unlike violent boys such as Billy, who start out as victims and later make the switch to bully as a matter of survival (who are, in effect, drafted), other boys seem to volunteer to join the ranks of violent youth. These boys often remember a physical fearlessness from an early age. Robert speaks of eight-year-old playmates with whom he jumped from second-floor window ledges onto mattresses below. Rasheen recounts walking a plank between two buildings four stories off the ground. “Was I afraid?” he said, extending my question when I asked him how he felt four stories off the ground on a single plank. “Nah. No problem, man. It was cool.” “How about when you heard shooting outside your building?” I asked. “Nope. I ain’t afraid of nothing,” he replied. Where is the fear? More important, where are the feelings at all?

Dissociation as a Way of Life

The dissociation of violent boys is more than simple temperamental fearlessness. It goes beyond that, so far beyond that it makes me wonder about their overall emotional life. Where is the hurt? Where is the anger? I asked Michael what he did with the anger he felt toward his mother for the beatings she inflicted on him and for the favoritism she displayed toward his older brother Robert. He thought and thought with an intense look of concentration. Then he shook his head and said, “I guess I just held it inside.” I asked him how he felt about his mother’s preference for his brother. “It’s just a fact of life,” he replied. But it’s an overwhelming emotional fact of his life. Most people would find the feelings intolerable. How did Michael deal with these feelings? One small clue appeared when he told me that the only thing he was ever afraid of was that he would lash out at his abusive mother and do to her what she had done to him, take an electric cord or a fist and even the score. Here was the fear that grew out of the hurt. And here was the anger. How are they related? Anger is repressed sadness, and sadness can mean depression.

In I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Terrence Real provides a road map to the hidden emotional life of boys and men. He traces the links between masculine culture and covert depression, and the detour sadness takes to become violence. By burying their feelings in silence and externalizing them through aggression and addiction, sad and hurt men find a way to get through the day. Speaking of one of his patients, Real reports, “A life-time of inattention to his emotions and his relationships was perched precariously over a childhood of profound psychological neglect.”

That’s what the future holds for aggressive boys if they are not helped to reconnect with their emotions and see clearly the role these feelings play in producing their acts of violence and thus wrecking their lives. This redirection can happen for boys, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of skilled psychological and spiritual leadership. Cuts to mental health services in schools and juvenile detention facilities and the secular nature of most programs put this desperately needed leadership in short supply. It is a major public policy issue for citizens and governments to address.

For a young child, this is not a grand issue of public policy or institutional practice. It is a matter of inner life or death. Without loving guidance, spiritual counsel, and psychological nurturance, children see little alternative but to cope as best they can, and that generally means dissociation — no matter its cost to a child’s inner life and his external behavior. For a child, the intolerable can be made tolerable by being stripped of its emotional content and consigned to the world of simple fact, with the emotional content being locked away in a psychological vault. That’s the point of dissociation as a survival strategy.

But while they are locked away in that psychological vault, the emotions that arise in response to rejection, abuse, and abandonment don’t just sit there, inactive. They earn emotional interest. Rage compounds. And the negative emotional bank accounts of the lost boys are often bloated with rage and shame and fear and humiliation. For some boys the psychological vault cannot hold all the hurt and anger that is stored there. Events — sometimes what appear to be trivial events — trigger a break that results in violence. I will return to this issue in Chapter Five when I take a look at the moral development of violent boys, and how their concepts of justice and right and wrong reflect their troubled emotional lives.

These boys need someone to help convert their negative emotional stockpiles, to therapeutically take the anger and make it over into insight and eventually into something constructive for the soul. Terrence Real and Robin Casarjian find in their therapeutic work with the men these boys become that without this psychological and spiritual help violence sometimes becomes a chronic addiction for the men, something to divert attention from their pain and sadness and a way to punish the world and themselves.

HOPE

When I think of helping violent boys find their way, I often think of one particular troubled youth who grew up in Jamestown, New York, in the early years of this century. The boy had to deal with the emotional predicament of living in a household dominated by an alcoholic and abusive father. To escape his horrible family life, the boy wandered the hills and found solace in nature, particularly in birds. This fascination with birds sustained him, but by the time he reached high school he was a lonely, troubled boy. A teacher in his school formed a Junior Audubon Club so that the boy would have at least one positive setting at school in which his interest in birds could be nourished. This act of acceptance was decisive. It provided a positive link for the boy to peers and adults. As a result of this experience, the boy did not get lost. He went on to become an internationally acclaimed expert on birds and wrote a best-selling guide. His name was Roger Torrey Peterson. When I met him near the end of his long life, we talked about his personal history, and he told me this story as a testament to the potential power of a caring teacher, to the power of hope.

I believe that one of the most important elements in the developmental equation for violent boys is the larger social environment outside the family, for it is there that one of three things happens: (1) an early pattern of bad behavior and aggression is identified and treated; (2) an early pattern of bad behavior and aggression plays itself out in a socially benign setting (in which no matter how bad the boy’s behavior gets, there is little danger); or (3) an early pattern of bad behavior and aggression falls on fertile ground and grows into chronic violence and delinquency as the child partakes of the dark side. All three courses are possible options.

Option one is the most likely outcome in families and communities that are rich in social and educational resources, where parents, teachers, and mental health professionals have the time and energy to focus on redirecting troubled little boys. I saw it in my own life when I was in elementary school. In my school and in our community, most boys were doing pretty well, but there was enough time and energy to go around for the boys who were in deep trouble.

Option two still exists in some places and certainly was more common in our society in decades past. When a troubled boy lives in a safe and peaceful social environment, there is a cushion for him. In the past, a boy living in a small town found a slow pace of life, without drugs and gangs and guns. In such an environment, a boy with bad behavior tests the limits, but his being bad is very unlikely to result in lethal violence. After all, other societies tell a different story from our own. For example, Canadian kids get in fights, too, but their youth homicide rate is less than a quarter of ours. Even American girls have a higher homicide rate than boys in many countries, such as Japan and Sweden.

Context is critical. Enter option three. It is because of the dangerous larger social environment many boys find themselves in today that we are so concerned that early “childish” bad behavior and aggression will turn into lethal behavior in adolescence and young adulthood. In the next chapter we see how learning the secrets of the dark side plays a role in the evolution of youth violence.

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