Difficult, Violent Boys

DIFFICULT VIOLENT BOYS

by © 1998
from his book,

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Michael Gurian is a psychotherapist, educator and author of seven books including the critically acclaimed national bestseller:

Michael has served as a consultant to families, therapists, school districts, community agencies, churches, criminal justice professionals and policy makers.Traveling to approximately twenty-five cities a year, Michael leads seminars, consults and is a key note speaker at conferences. He has lectured at the New York Open Center, the Naropa Institute, and the Harvard Gender Issues Forum. His training videos for parents and volunteers are used by Big Brothers and Big Sisters agencies in the United States and Canada.

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Here are some facts gleaned from polls, surveys and government reports about violence among teens.

40 percent of the teens said they knew someone in their age group who had been shot in the last five years;

13 percent said at least half the students in their schools carried knives or guns;

Close to half said their parents were "sometimes or often unavailable" to them;

Poor parents are twice as likely to break up as those with money. Once parents break up, a male child's probability of becoming a criminal and a female child's probability of becoming pregnant before the age of eighteen rise exponentially;

More than three fourths of crime in America, both violent and nonviolent, is committed by male children born to single parents or following their parents divorce;

Half the teens reported the television being on while they ate dinners with their parents;

90 percent of the nation's prison inmates up to age thirty-five were born to mothers under eighteen;

About 20 percent of all violent crime is committed by children under the age of eighteen;

Most of these offenders, whether jailed or not, return to committing crimes;
90 percent of these offenders are boys.

This list of bulleted items make the head spin, doesn't it? They are windows on walls of a room we're sitting in. We're talking in the room about teens and violence. We keep talking about all the reasons a minority of our teensnonetheless a frightening minoritycommit crime and do violence. We've heard all the reasons before. We sit in the room exhausted from looking out the windows, exhausted talking about boys and violence, frightened.

A final window in our list of facts is one of the reasons were so exhausted: we keep putting more and more of these violent and criminal males in jail, but we feel less and less safe. In the last ten years, the number of federal and state inmates has doubled to almost a million. The local jail population has risen nearly three times to almost 500,000. In individual states, like Washington, where I live, we have seen a 79 percent increase in our jail populations an 86 percent in prison capacity, and yet our state population has only grown 18 percent! Said Governor Mike Lowry: "At this rate, everyone in Washington State will be working inor inprison by 2056!"

Males, especially in the hormone-driven teen years, are wired for increased aggressiveness. Cultures have known this since the beginning of time. Tribal cultures have made sure males were guided through these years with constant initiation and elder male attention. Even our own ancestral cultures knew that one of the societys most difficult and important jobs is to train male aggression toward socially useful functions and away from antisocial functions. Studies of other primates indicate similar social strategies among animals around us.

Things have changed. Writes Miller Newton, author of Adolescence, "Adolescence has become increasingly dangerous for a growing minority of teens. Unlike the ritual ordeals of primitive societies, which presented youths with challenges that enabled them to prove themselves and join adult society, today's rituals have become purposeless, dangerous, and threatening."

Young males need training and channeling. If they don't get it, a large minority of them will train and channel themselves to use aggression antisocially. Over the last few years, researchers in both the U.S. and Canada have been measuring testosterone levels among violent male criminals. The average testosterone level of the violent criminal is higher than the average testosterone level of a citizen without a criminal record.

War was once a socially acceptable way of channeling male aggression. War training "kept men in line" and "channeled their natural aggression against the enemy." Most boys do not go to war as this millennium ends. Most do not join the military.

Sports is certainly the most obvious aggression-channeling venue in male culture today. In fact, studies indicate that boys who play organized sports have a lower frequency of involvement in drugs and violent crime than boys who do not. Martial arts is one of the best places for boys to get a holistic sense of the physical, mental emotional, and spiritual challenges of boyhood. Many boys, however, dont choose to play organized sports or get involved in martial arts, lacking the self-confidence, the resources, the encouragement, or the interest. Moreover, a minority of boys who do play sports or engage in martial arts can become more aggressive, uncompassionate, and violent. Despite this, I have never seen a study that leads me to believe the risks of getting more midnight basketball, more organized soccer, more martial arts training into the inner cities outweighs the benefits. The more we help our at-risk youth use sports to find camaraderie discipline, self-image, bonding, personal challenge and a second and third family, the better off we will be at channeling their aggression toward structures they can grow in.

Many boys will act outas they always have, in aggressive behaviorthe shadow side of the culture that raises them. They will mirror with gangly and violent and destructive bodies, the awkwardness they sense in adult life, the violence they feel and absorb, the self-destructiveness of the adult culture as a whole. This is what a frightening minority of our teenage boys are doing today, in gangs, violence, crime. If they do not learn a dance of aggression through some organized activity from male culture that loves, nurtures, and trains their aggression into a disciplined dance, they will be more likely to take their loss of this training, their grief, their anger that they have not received it out on the world around them.

As I've suggested throughout this chapter, I also believe the key to stopping male violence lies in rethinking discipline to mean "a discipline system," following our rethinking of family to include a stable first family, an active second family, a welcoming third family, and constant discourse among the three families in order to achieve consistent application of the discipline system. Are we ready for this kind of solution ?

I think we're closer to being ready than we were, say, five years ago. People who have kids are thinking twice again about getting divorced. More and more teens are abstaining from promiscuous and unprotected sex. The word "mentor" is back in the national vocabulary, especially in inner cities where boys are at risk. Churches are reaching out again. Even the media is listening to calls for more kid-responsible programming.

We live in a wonderful and challenging time. Young boys are awakening and stretching their testosterone levels, but we now have the resources to train and nurture them into whatever kind of man we want them to be.

This excerpt is from the chapter titled, Teaching Boys Discipline

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