@font-face { font-family: "Cambria";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
Psssttt….come here. I have a little secret to share with you. You won’t believe it. Check this out—do you know the most common risk factor for becoming a person who commits an act of violence against another person? Trust me, this will surprise you. You wanna know?
It’s being male.
No, really, an X and Y chromosome and you automatically have a higher likelihood of being involved in an act of violence than the other 50% of the population. I am not making this up. Isn’t that mindblowing?
I know you want me to cite you some sources, but I’m just going to give you a website where you can hunt these facts down on your own. It’s the website for the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the Institute for Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder. This is the home Center for a dedicated and brilliant cadre of amazing researchers who have been studying the causes and correlates for juvenile delinquency and violence for years.
Now I realize I can’t make inflammatory statements like being a man makes you more likely to hurt someone without giving that thought some real, focused attention. Because I don’t believe biology is destiny. If human beings were nothing but our bio-chemistry run amuck, there’d be no such things/people as the Peace Corp, Mother Teresa, Ghandi, MLK, the Humane Society or John Lennon. We are not slaves to impulse. We are creatures of thought, compassion, and the ability to sacrifice on behalf of those we love.
I began this post wanting to start a discussion about the issue of kids killing kids because I attended a conference last week about violence in our countries schools. I was surprised as you at hearing that being male is an automatic mark against people in regards to becoming violent. We all know about Columbine and the twelve students and one teacher who died there. But how many of us can name more than one or two of the other 225 victims of violent deaths that have happened in 192 schools since 1999? That is a horrifying count, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even include statistics on the number of injuries. (I don’t know the figure for how many of these homicides were perpetrated by males vs. females, but based on other violent crime statistics, it’s safe to say that most of if not all were by males. If any readers know where to find this answer, please tell me. Thank you.)
I grew up in Oregon and graduated from high school in 1993. In 1998, only a few miles from my old neighborhood, Kip Kinkel, a Thurston High School student, shot his parents one evening, then went to school the next day and unloaded over fifty rounds in the cafeteria, killing two and injuring 22 other students before being tackled by one of his victims. Kip was from my hometown. Kids killing kids is an issue that effects everyone.
And it is an issue that’s almost too ugly to face. Something in our society is teaching our own children that life is hopeless and meaningless. Something in our society promotes violence and rage and instills these tendencies in children, especially male children. There are kids in fourth and fifth grade in America who haven’t lived a day that we were not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan. These children will grow up with the belief that invading and occupying other countries, by any means necessary, is normal, routine, and an acceptable standard for enforcing order and dominance in the world. Many of these children came home from school one day recently to find their parents cheering and toasting the brutal assassination of a guy in a funny hat. What possible message could they glean from that experience? These children will become adults—at least the ones who make it out of high school alive—and then what?
Can you imagine living in a world co-habited by nations in a constant state of war? There’s no question that social order and nationalism would implode and turn our planet into a smoldering cinder in very short order. It’s like the set-up for a bad scifi novel. I have seen the Zombie Apocalypse, and it is us.
Our children are a reflection of us. We may not realize it when we look in the mirror, but we are all complicit in the violence that pervades our world. When we drive our cars and suck up Middle East oil, we are complicit. When we allow our governments to spend more money on prisons and militarism than education and healthcare, we are complicit. When we elect a Bush, Boehner or a Kyl, we are complicit.
The thing is, we all have the answer. We all know that violence and hate cannot end violence and hate. Our species is smart enough to see the flaw in that logic. But we are afraid, and fear leads to irrationality, and irrationality leads to being easily manipulated by rhetoric and demagoguery...Damn, I’m getting on a soap box here and there could be no end to this rant. Before I get out of hand and start running down the street screaming for revolution, let me divert back to what we can do to help our kids. Because we want them to have a future that’s as good or better than our present. Right?
Ahem. Okay, studies show that a combination of three or more simple protective factors have infinite power to help even the most hopeless, troubled children turn things around and become thoughtful, intelligent, pro-social adults who will contribute to ending violence and hate, instead of perpetuating it. Here’s a list:
- Caring by, high expectations from and supportive relationships with adults. Kids who are loved and know that they are loved, and who know their parents believe them capable of being successful are happier and, yup, more successful. It doesn’t even have to be their parents who love and believe in them. Any adult in a child’s life has the power to make that child’s life better.
- High academic achievement. Kids who try and succeed have a greater sense of self-worth, higher self-esteem, and more positive outlook. In other words, they feel good. People who feel good don’t feel like hurting other people.
- A positive, welcoming, and safe school climate. Kids spend almost half their waking hours in school from age 5 to 18. If they are afraid, alienated, and unhappy while there, how can they be expected to learn basic academic lessons? If they’re living in a state of fight-or-flight, higher order thinking takes a back seat to these automatic survival reactions. The only thing they’ll be thinking of is how to make it through the day without getting bullied, beaten, or busted.
What’s the takeaway from all this? It comes down to a question of values. Is it more important to lock people up for smoking pot or vandalism than it is to funnel money into our country’s schools and child development centers, and pursuing every possible option to prevent children from falling into cycles of crime and punishment? Because it all starts when people are young, folks. If we don’t provide the basic needs of safety, intellectual stimulation, emotional balance, and physical nutrition now, today’s children will never mature beyond the bottom tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Ten years from now, if the world is ruled by a generation that believes war is normal and reacts to everything out of primal self-interest, we’re doomed friends and neighbors. With a capital “D.”
@font-face { font-family: "Cambria";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
Disclaimer: The thoughts and opinions above are strictly mine and do not necessarily reflect the intent or opinions of CU’s Insititue for Behavioral Science or the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.