Lost Boys: Why our Son's Turn Violent and How We
Can Save Them
by
James Garbarino, Ph.D. ©1999
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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?
CONTINUE TO PAGE 2
Copyright 1999 James
Garbarino, all rights reserved
