July/August 1999

Boys to Men: Questions of Violence

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on April 15, 1999. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction by Carol Gilligan
Panel Discussion with James Garbarino, James Gilligan, and Michael Thompson
Questions from the Audience
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Introduction

Carol Gilligan: I'm delighted welcome you to this most important discussion, "Boys to Men: Questions of Violence."

Our panel members include Jim Garbarino, and Jim Gilligan, and Michael Thompson. Jim Garbarino is co-director of the Family Life Development Center and a professor of Human Development at Cornell University. He has authored or edited 13 books, most recently Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them. Dr. Garbarino has been a consultant on children and families and has received a number of awards for his work. It's a great honor to have him with us tonight. My husband, Jim Gilligan, wrote a book called Violence. The book is based on his 25 years at as the medical director at Bridgewater (MA) State Hospital for the criminally insane, where he worked in the 1970s to take people out of chains. He's been associated with Harvard and Harvard Medical School for about 25 years and a supervisor at Cambridge Hospital. He's the father of three boys, so he knows what he's talking about and it's great to have him join this forum. Michael Thompson is a consultant, author, and child and family psychologist practicing in Cambridge, MA. He's the co-author, with Edward Howell, of Finding the Heart of the Child. Dr. Thompson has lectured widely on topics pertaining to the development of boys and has conducted problem-solving workshops with parents, teachers, and students around the country. He just wrote a book with Daniel Kindlon called Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, which is on the extended New York Times bestseller list which indicates the enormous interest in this subject. I'm going to start with a question and then we'll have a discussion. I hope you'll get involved in this important conversation.

Carol Gilligan: There's been a fair amount of discussion recently about the emotional lives of boys and men. The emotional life of boys and men, or the inhibitions in their emotional life. What is your thinking on the specific needs and issues of boys that need to be addressed in order for them to grow into functional, productive, loving men? How are these needs different from those of girls and women.

Thompson: I want to explain that my co-author Dan Kindlon is the research half of our partnership; I'm much more the clinician. I haven't worked with many violent populations, but I'm concerned about the level of anger among the privileged boys I work with and about the narrowness of their decisionmaking with respect to emotional problems.

Boys are born with the same emotional potential as girls. Boys have faces as expressive as girls do. Boy babies cry more. There is every reason to believe that boys have as much neurological potential for an emotional life as do girls. But something gets lost in boys, and as somebody who has worked in elementary and secondary schools all of my professional career, I can tell you you can watch the loss of facial expression in boys as they turn into men. And we know that by kindergarten a girl is six times more likely to use the word love than is a boy.

By the time their boys are 8 or 9 years old, mothers routinely report to me that they can no longer read their boys' faces the way they used to, that they've gone–somehow-- "stony." A teacher asked me the other day, "What is it that happens to boys in third grade? They're so open and innocent up until then and then we lose them."

By the age of 8 or 9 a boy is measuring everything he does on one dimension, from strong to weak. If you want to understand boy psychology, it's that they put everything through the strong/weak filter. Now girls care about strong and weak, they care a lot about strong and weak, but they also care about nice/not nice and close/far away. Working in co-ed schools, I see that girls are able to operate on more dimensions. Boys feel required to express only a narrow band of what they truly feel.

I was talking with some 15-year-olds last week and one of them said, "You can only show your strong side, not your soft side." And I said, "What happens to your soft side if you don't show it?" And this boy was stumped and another boy said, "You lose it because you become what you show." I might say they think they become what they show, and the problem that Dan and I see is that boys go into the adolescent years with a restricted range of emotional expression and a restricted language that we call "emotional illiteracy." This keeps a boy locked up because he may not be able to articulate his experience and he may be ashamed that he can’t, and if he knows he cannot articulate it and he's ashamed that he can't, then the best course, the strongest-looking course, is to be silent.

Jim Gilligan: Let me pick up on some of those themes. My own work has involved a great deal of work with violent men and male adolescents. I want to mention that one of the most salient things that I noticed about boys and men was the degree to which there was a preoccupation with weak versus strong. It’s not too difficult to see how quickly that evolves into a predisposition to prove one's strength by means of violence, particularly if a child doesn't have nonviolent means available to show that he is strong.

Working primarily with violent men, I’ve been struck by the degree to which the concern about proving that one is not a coward, not a weakling, will drive men, if they don't have nonviolent means available to uphold their sense of identity and their sense of self-worth, to engage in levels of violence that are not only destructive to other people but ultimately can even cost their own lives. There's something about proving that one is a man by means of showing how brave and courageous he is, which often means engaging in risk-taking behaviors, so that boys and men, for example, die and are injured from accidental injuries at several times the rate of women. And this is true in every culture on earth. And needless to say, boys engage in violence more than girls, and men more than women.

When I started asking myself why men are so much more violent than women, it struck me that from the time they are little kids, boys are taught that the worst thing to be is a sissy or a coward or a mama's boy. If we are ever going to raise a generation of males who grow into less violent men, then it seems to me we have to start challenging some of these stereotypes about masculinity.

There are some ancient traditions in our culture and in most patriarchal cultures that condition boys to feel that they are not really male unless they are willing to fight.

I think this is a theme that needs to be emphasized. We're all familiar with the many ways the polarization of sex roles is disadvantageous to women; I think it's important now to recognize how those gender roles are also disadvantageous to men.

Garbarino: I've worked in the field of child abuse and neglect for about 25 years. Most recently I've been focusing on boys incarcerated for committing murder or other severe acts of violence. If you come at things from a psychological point of view, you know the term developmental psychopathology, which is a field based on the idea that by studying extreme and abnormal psychological developments, we can shed some light on normal development. The work that I am currently doing might be called developmental social pathology, in that it is looking at boys in really terrible social environments and seeing what light that sheds on normal social environments of boys. So that is part of the context for what I would have to say.

It is important to approach these issues from what we usually term an ecological perspective, meaning that individual development doesn't really become clear unless you understand the context in which it occurs. I was struck by Carol’s question of what needs to be addressed in order for boys to grow into functional, productive, loving men. My first thought was, the context may make those mutually exclusive. The implicit thing is that the right context will allow boys to be functional and productive and loving men at the same time. I think that part of the problem is that those three goals are often in opposition from a boy's point of view, and in fact it may mean giving up one in order to achieve another.

On the other hand, there is some research that points to a kind of uniformity across many cultures, at least on the psychological level that is, when you look at the foundations for resilience, the ability to deal with stress and threats. Aimee Vernard, in her review on resilience, points out that androgyny, the combining in one person of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine attributes and characteristics, emerges as one of the correlates or underpinnings of resilience across a wide range of cultures, which certainly would argue that what is needed then is literally to tame boys and to enhance their "softer" side to make them more resilient. That certainly flies in the face of what most boys and men think–namely, that they have to suppress their feminine side in order to be strong enough to survive. But, as you heard from Jim Gilligan, while it seems counterintuitive to boys, the fact is that the more narrowly masculine they become, the more likely they are to end up in early death and early incarceration and other damage. So there is certainly something to be said about using resilience as a criterion to promote this more well-rounded development.

Getting to Resilience

One of the big issues that pulls us all together is juvenile vigilantism, which is boys' adaptation to a situation in which their need to be strong seems to be threatened by the lack of adult strength in their environment. A boy in Michigan said to me, "If I join a gang I am 50% safe; if I don't join a gang, I am 0% safe." The bottom line is he doesn't see that aligning himself, allowing his aggression and his needs for power to be channeled into prosocial adult agendas, is likely to meet his basic need of safety. When I asked a nine-year-old boy from a dangerous neighborhood in California, what it would take to make him feel safer here, the only answer he could come up with was, "If I had a gun of my own."

One 16-year-old boy we interviewed in our prison project pointed very specifically to one day, at age eight, that he understands now to be the turning point in his life. He says he was in third grade, on the schoolyard, when one of his friends was jumped by a bunch of older boys--fourth graders. He said the teacher turned her back and went inside. In that moment he realized that he was on his own out there. Given the essential priority of being safe and being strong, given that adults are not going to help that, obviously you are on your own and a lot of very dangerous things happen because of that.

Gilligan: Girls don’t passively become what society at wants them to become. We found that in our research on adolescent girls. Where are the sources of boys’ resistance?

Garbarino: The larger cultural contexts in which male and female resistance occur are pretty different. That is, a girl who is being called a tomboy, is considered uppity, trying to be something better than she should. The boy who is called a sissy is considered to be lowering himself. And so the resistance is of a different nature. For that reason, it may well be easier to empower the girl because she is moving into a domain that is understood to be valuable by both sides. For boys to complete their humanity, has a lot of overtones of giving up a privileged position to take on the attributes of something in a patriarchal culture that is viewed as being less.

The way I experienced resistance from boys is that boys who, in the collective of the youth prison are fully functional in that they are almost completely affectless except for expressions of bravado. In public settings they are very guarded, in their tones of voice and posture, but in the intimate private setting that we create in the interview, they often find a space where they can participate in the other part of their humanity because my partner and I very clearly give them models of that and permission to do that and it is pretty clear that this is all confidential so nobody else is going to know that they have these feelings when they leave the room.

I think that speaks to a resistance movement which, if you also think about the masculine culture, does offer some stylized and ritualized opportunities to be expressive, which the boys gobble up. For example, in athletics, boys can hug and do things that are not permitted outside of the ritual context.

The other element of these boys in prison that complicates the task is that very often they have been cast into a kind of developmentally inappropriate relationship with their mothers. Because their fathers are often absent from their lives and often the men who are intimate with their mothers are aggressive towards their mothers, they early on become some combination of protector and confidante for their mothers. When they reach adolescence and they need a lot of structure and discipline, they don't respect their mothers. They may love their mothers but they see them as being weak and unable to protect them. The boys have had to protect their mothers. This complicates their ability to respect their feminine side because they associate it with victimization

Jim Gilligan: What I am struck by is how little effort there is toward changing the traditional male role. What I am trying to say is, despite all the work on gender and the tremendous amount of discussion that we have had about expanding the opportunities and the expectations and so on, how very little we have said or done about changing male sex roles or gender roles. Our male leaders are so terrified of looking like wimps, are so terrified that somebody will say you are soft on crime, or you are not tough enough to stand up against this enemy or that. I think the silence about how problematic the male gender role is is just deafening. I think it would healthy and rational and realistic to start recognizing how bizarre it is to say that one sex should be the only one that can be functional and active and so forth and that the other sex is supposed to be more restricted and passive. Regardless of where these ideas may have come from historically, they are so manifestly maladaptive now that one would think that ordinary rationality would lead to a much more powerful critique of them.

Thompson: I am the psychologist for the Belmont Hill School, an all boys' school. When I accepted the job there, a lot of people, men and women, said, oh, don't go there. Nobody will talk to you, you will be like the Maytag repairman, they have no use for you. It is not a psychological place and men won't open up. And though I work at the whole other end of the socioeconomic spectrum from where you two have worked, what you say resonates with me. So many boys come in and give me an indication that they are crushed by the culture, saying "I am not a real athletic boy" or "I am not a real Belmont Hill boy." What they are saying is, "I find myself lacking in those attributes which I know I am supposed to have." But if you can persist and stay with them and find a way to speak to their sense of humor or capture them somehow, boys will signal that they are suffering. In my work I see that they are grateful when I find a way to get behind the mask that they have put up.

The other thing I see, in the schools where I consult, is that boys claim they are tough and they claim they need to fight. I interviewed two boys from Concord, MA,--a tenth grader and twelfth grader. I asked, what does it mean to be a man? And this tenth grader said, "You have to be ready to fight at any time. "I looked at these two well-fed boys from Concord and I asked, has either of you ever actually had a fight? And the twelfth grader got my drift and he said, "No, but you have to be ready to fight at any time."

What I find is, in the schools where I have worked where the level of adult supervision is very high and the protections are great, how grateful boys are after there has been a possible threatening incident and adults have stepped in. It is as if they say, "Thank you for saving us from what we were about to do to each other" and that is a real resistance to what the culture requires of them.

Garbarino: I think the boys that I speak with also are very grateful. The key to their being grateful is that when we begin to talk with them, we make it clear that the last thing we are going to talk about is their crime, because they are so used their crime being the only entry point into their lives being their crime. And they have a sense of relief and gratitude that we want to hear about the rest of their life, and eventually, maybe weeks from now, maybe we will talk about their crime. I said at the opening, developmental psychopathology tries to shed light on normal development by looking at the abnormal. I think these boys in many ways are the most "American" boys, because in being ready to fight at any minute, if you are in a prison is not a hypothetical construct; that is the reality. I have interviewed boys in several different prisons. One that was remarkable was the New York State Youth Prison system, in that the adults really were in charge of the facility, unlike at the other four I visited. I spoke with boys who had been in the other four and they had the sense that they were now in an environment in which the adults really are in charge, perhaps for the first time in their adolescent lives, and they relax, they talk about not needing to be as hypervigilant as they were before. That was really summed up by one boy I interviewed. The director of the facility walked by, and the boy said to me, "That is the owner." Not the director, but the owner. And this is a boy who had been in a lot of other places and had been involved in a lot of violent activity in other places, but here he felt the owner was in charge and so all these implicit issues about aggression could stay implicit, and I think that is an important lesson in the microcosm of the prison, and also in the society at large.

With the decline of the sense of their being a benevolent adult authority, I think teenagers, particularly boys, have a sense that there is nobody to provide order and stability in their world, and so they are left to this kind of dog-eat-dog world that takes its ultimate form in the prison.

Carol Gilligan: Jim, I was just thinking about what you said in the seminar about the conditions under which a boy with a history of trauma and abuse takes a violent pathway. I thought it would be useful if you would talk about that, and then I want to pick up on the point that you just made

Garbarino: One really illuminating study on this transition from early victimization to aggression is by Kenneth Dodge, who is now at Duke University. What Dodge asked is what do abused kids do that leads them into chronic violence and aggression? He found that only about 35% of the abused children moved into this pathway and it was almost entirely accounted for by whether or not they drew four conclusions or four adaptations to being an abused child. One, they become hypersensitive to negative social cues. That is, when exposed to a social environment, they perceive threatening looks, hostile gestures, negative tones of voice. Two, they become oblivious to positive social cues, so they don't see in the same social environment, the smiles, the warm tones of voice, the beckoning gestures. Three, they develop a readily accessible repertoire of aggressive behavior, so their first and almost exclusive answer is aggression. And fourth, they develop a conclusion about the way the world works; namely, that aggression is successful.

So thinking of children as anthropologists, we see that they look at their world and they conclude, yes, when my mother bugs my father, he punches her in the mouth and then she doesn't bug him. When my brother demands an ice cream cone and my mother kicks him down the stairs, he doesn't ask again. So they form these conclusions. What Dodge found was that if an abused child didn't develop those four conclusions he was no more likely to develop chronic aggressive behavior than non-abused children. But an abused child who did develop these four conclusions was seven times more likely to develop this pattern of chronic aggression. Those kids, who by age nine had this pattern of chronic aggression, acting out and violation of rules, are the group from which the most damaged and damaging teenagers come. About a third of those boys become serious violent chronic delinquents, and more than 90% of them will ultimately have such big problems that they will probably be institutionalized, maybe not in a prison, but somewhere. So this is a very important dynamic and the big question is why some kids draw those conclusions from being abused and others don't.

I think future research will focus on temperamental differences that lead to intellectual differences, that lead some kids to draw more diffuse conclusions. It is really helpful to pinpoint where the critical juncture is, and that leads us to think about what we could do about it. Another study that I think is very important is by Shepard Kellum at Johns Hopkins University. Kellum has found that first grade is a critical moment in boys’ evolution. He finds that aggressive boys who come into a first-grade classroom and find a chaotic class and a weak teacher form aggressive peer groups that are evident in seventh grade. But when those same aggressive boys come in and find a strong, organized teacher they react differently. I think of my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Annunziata a giant woman with an enormous bosom and a big wart on her face. You walked into her classroom and she said, "Children, this is my classroom, you are here to be civilized." Kellum finds that teachers who are loving but strong tame those boys and don't allow aggressive peer groups to form

Thompson: I have been astonished by the capacity of very little boys to scare adults. That is, adults are fearful of boys in groups even in second and third grade and though they may not say it overtly, they manifest a kind of fear that is terrifying for the boys because they don't want to scare adults. But, having scared adults, they get hooked on it.

Carol Gilligan: Now heard Jim say that these boys need a sense of order and a strong adult presence and I want to know how can we move to a sense of clear structure without moving back into a patriarchal structure

Garbarino: I think the political answer is pluralism, which is diversity within a common purpose and a common structure. Mrs. Annunziata in my first-grade classroom was not a dictator, but she clearly said that adults set the context in which you can flourish and grow up. It may be that that reflects some primal need for hierarchy and structure and order, which may be particularly boys’ primary characteristic wherever it comes from. In chaos you see the more barbaric elements emerging, whereas if you have at least a benign structure, I think boys will live within that but they will demand some kind of organization.

I am less concerned about boys being over controlled. I think if anything, the issue is to think about counter socialization--that is, to tame the boys and embolden the girls. Mrs. Annunziata did both in her classroom because she prevented the boys from dominating the girls and thus gave the girls a safe context in which they could be more active and assertive. Had she been weak, the aggressive boys would have set a chaotic tone, the chaos in the classroom would have been filled, that vacuum would have been felt by the aggressive boys and they’d react by seizing control, and I would rather have the teacher in charge than those boys.

James Gilligan: One distinction I would like to make between restraint and punishment or between control and punishment, when people's behavior is out of control. By punishment I mean the deliberate infliction of pain on somebody for the sake of making them hurt and for getting revenge, versus simply restraining people if they behave in ways that are dangerous to themselves or others. We all know what that means if we are talking about little children. Any of us who have raised children know that if a young child is running out in front of traffic and they don't respond to words, you hold the child so he or she won't run out and get run over. Or if a child is beating up his little brother or sister, and doesn't respond to words, you restrain the child. You pull him off, hold him back, but that does not mean you have to be violent toward the child. You hold the child, you try to teach, you talk. In fact you are trying to prevent violence and pain.

Now I wish we could make that same distinction on a more global scale. As parents, for example, you know you don't have to hurt your child to make him behave. But when we get to larger context, I think of how punitive our society has become with respect to the boys who get into trouble. I was appalled when we went through this epidemic of schoolyard shootings over the last couple of years. What appalled me was not only the events themselves, which of course were horrendous and tragic, but the response of many adults. Instead of realizing what a tragedy this was for everybody involved, many said, "Gee, can't we try these kids as adults and can't we put them in adult prisons and can't we lock them up for the rest of their lives? And in fact, can't we even kill them?" A legislator in Texas introduced a law to bring the age of the death penalty, so that we could start executing 12-year-olds. The United States is only one of a tiny handful of countries that still can execute children as young as 16. That puts us in the same company as Iraq and Iran and the Sudan and some other countries we don't ordinarily like to be in the same company with. We speak of the epidemic of violence among our youngsters or adolescents, and yes, there is an epidemic in relative terms. From 1984 to 1994, the rate at which teenage boys committed homicides tripled. Over the last 30 years, the homicide rate has increased about sixfold. But what people often forget is that the suicide rate has also increased fivefold for that age and, in fact, if you put these rates on a chart, the increase in the homicide rate and the increase in the suicide rate overlap each other. Both increased explosively. The people who are so eager to be more punitive toward our teenagers, as though we have raised a generation of evil children or something, seem to me to be asking the wrong question. The question is how have we raised a generation of young kids who reach their teenage years in such a state of despair that they don't care whether they live or die, let alone anyone else. That is a question we need to ask ourselves, as much as them.

I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers to that question. But I do know at least a few clues that might be worth considering. One is that far more children in America are killed by poverty than are killed by murder. The United States happens to have the highest poverty rate among its children of any developed nations on earth. The age group that has the highest rate of poverty is children, meaning people under the age of 18; the highest rate is among those under the age of 6. We have increased governmental support to keep older people out of poverty, which is a wonderful development, so that the lowest poverty rate is among those over the age 65. But the fact is the amount spent to do that has increased enormously over the last 30 years, while spending for children has just been flat.

I think we have taken an attitude toward our children that makes it understandable that the degree of trust they have in us has gone down. I think that we adults have to take the responsibility for that development.

Thompson: I couldn't agree with you more. I think we have deep underlying attitudes toward boys. We are far more violent toward boys than girls: 90% of American families still hit their children and boys are hit more and hit harder and are more likely to be physically abused. Yet when you said tame the boys, I felt provoked, because I actually think that we have an attitude that boys are more animalistic than girls. We react to the physicality and the impulsiveness of boys. By school age, three-quarters of boys in the class are more physically active than any girl. I believe that the psychological overlap between girls and boys is very great on most dimensions, but we know that on the physicality and impulsivity dimensions, there is a difference. And how you feel about boys’ physicality, how you react to it, tells a boy a lot about what kind of a man you expect him to be. I was on a talk show in Minneapolis yesterday. I followed the governor, Jessie Ventura, by about ten minutes. He had endorsed corporal punishment in the schools. Shortly before I got on, he said that he had been paddled, it had gotten his attention, and hadn't had any damaging effect on him. He went on to say that the pain hadn't been all that bad, it was the humiliation that left an impression. There was a flood of calls. I took a position absolutely contrary to this and was baited by the talk show hostess, coming from Cambridge and being a psychologist . Then a Minnesota state policeman called. He was a good man, but he said that this idea that corporal punishment for boys is violence, is entirely wrong. He argued that if boys need to be corrected and we need to get their attention and we need sometimes to spank them, that is not violence. He was trying to make a distinction between violence against boys, what would be REAL violence, and spanking. And I heard this state police officer really struggling with an idea, I thought struggling unsuccessfully. So I said to him, "If you are a small boy and the person you love most in the world is out of control and angry and hitting you, that you may be rationalizing it as you are doing this for his own good, but that boy experiences only violence. He is overwhelmed and frightened, and the moral content of the lesson is completely lost for him in the fear and the overwhelming effect of the moment. And what he remembers is not what he did wrong, but that he had this scary experience. And here an old concept of Freud's comes in, identification with the aggressor. If you are that frightened, there are only two things you can do: you can think, "I can be subjected to that again," or "I could hope to grow up and be like that and be on that side of it sometime," and then you start to act like that.

When we discipline girls in school, we say to two girls who have had a rough go at each other, " Now, why did you do that to her? Don't you think you hurt her feelings? Put yourself in her shoes? How would you have felt?" I use it as an opportunity for empathy training, right? But with a boy, I am likely to stand over him and use my body and say, "Cut it out, I don't want to see it in this classroom." We have to look at the way we discipline boys and how much we frighten them, because what I see is that many boys are giving back exactly what they have seen. Sometimes, in a very raw and confrontational way, we are looking into a mirror of our view of boys

Carol Gilligan: I have one more question for this panel, before we I am going to invite your questions. You are three white men talking about boys and violence in a society in which we have a disproportionate percentage of black boys in prison and I wonder how as white men you feel about these issues of race and how you address the racism of the society and of the criminal justice system?

Jim Gilligan: The poverty rate is three times as high in the African-American community as it is in the white community. That is not unrelated to the fact that black babies die at three times the rate of white babies and African-American mothers die in giving childbirth at five times the rate of European-American mothers, and so on. The death toll that poverty inflicts on the African-American community is far greater than all of the death and violence caused by crime that we pay so much attention to. Let me give you one example.

We all know how much concern we have had in this country about the rate of murder and other violent crimes over the last 30. We really have been going through an epidemic, which has just begun to wane. Presidential elections have been won and lost over the issue of who can prove to the voters that they will be toughest on crime and murderers. The highest the murder rate in America has ever been is roughly ten murders per 100,000 people per year. If you look at the difference in the death rates of whites and blacks in this country, roughly 300 more black people per 100,000 population die than do whites. In other words, if the death rate is 1,000 among whites per 100,000 in a given year, it will be 1300 for blacks. And we know that this death rate is not due simply to behavior. It has been studied very carefully. You can control for all the health risks like diabetes and hypertension and alcohol and drugs and murder, but a large percentage of those deaths can only be attributed to poverty and all the concomitants of poverty, which of course include poorer medical care, poorer nutrition, poorer housing, less access to knowledge, and so on. But that death rate of 300 per 100,000 never gets talked about. The death rate of 10 per 100,000, we absolutely get hysterical about. They both happen to be important, but we have our priorities totally contrary to where the real deaths are occurring and where the real violence is occurring. The real violence is in the social and economic system, much more than it is in the behavior of the relatively few individuals who respond to that inequitable social and economic system by exploding in violence

Garbarino: When I go into a youth prison, it is always going to be 90% African-American teenagers. Fox Butterfield has analyzed the role of Southern culture in the culture of violence. The Southern states have had the highest homicide rates going back over 200 years, and he has done a pretty nice job of illuminating why that might be. It actually has a lot to do with the settlement patterns in the old South, particularly the Scots. The Scots are about the most aggressive group going. They were sent to Ireland to beat the crap out of the Irish and they sent them over to the colonies to beat the crap out of the Indians and the slaves and everyone else. I was in Scotland a month ago, and if you look at the homicide rates among youth, Scotland is number two, after the U.S. Walking the streets in Scotland one night with a colleague, as a bunch of rowdy, aggressive, boisterous, Scots boys came by, he said that if they had guns the way your boys do, we would beat you out for the homicide rate. So that is something to think about, that the disproportionately high homicide rate among African-American young men is much more a function of their Southern heritage than their African heritage, and there are a lot of ways to explain that. A fascinating study done by a psychologist at the University of Michigan had Northern young men and Southern young men walk down a hall, and the experimenter's ally bumps into them and says, "Jerk." What they measure is the physiological level of arousal in the youth bumped into, and they are able to demonstrate that Southern young men are more aroused than Northern young men. Certainly when I talk with boys, you encounter this Southern heritage very clearly. Although they may live in New York State, their family origins are in the South. They are sent back to the South and there is a constant infusion of that Southern culture of a particular kind of violence. That is one particular issue in Fox Butterfield's case study. The other thing is the psychological significance of racism as a day to day reality.

Some of you probably saw the study conducted in Washington State, in which they asked whites and African-Americans "How often does race come into your mind as something that is going to affect what happens to you today?" Among whites, some 2% said "often," and among African-Americans I think it was at least 65% who said, "virtually every day." So the added element of dealing with racism always has to be factored into the equation and when it is complicit with poverty, when it is complicit with the Southern tradition of vengeful violence, and when all that is mixed together in an accumulation of risk model, it is not surprising that it pushes over the edge, without even getting into institutionalized racism and the dealing with kids and who gets suspended and all of those kinds of issues.

Let's remember that the life course of these boys often begins with early suspensions in elementary school and the failure to deal with that issue and with truancy, and allowing this momentum to build up figures very prominently. There is clearly a racist overlay there in what is tolerated and expected. I think it is necessary that we confront those effects to really make progress on this. Of course we are loathe to talk about race as an active force in the social environment of kids, but I think it is very powerful. In many of the boys I know, the opening for their transformation is to begin a kind of academic study of racism as students in their prison. And it is when they begin to read Malcolm X and Eldridge Clever and all the rest of the visionaries that they begin to develop a level of self-awareness and consciousness which I think is often an opening to transformation that they never got through their education before.

Thompson: As a clinical matter, in working in schools that are largely white and where African-American are in a very small minority, I know that they suffer from the need to look strong because to open up, particularly to white people who want to be helpful, to open up and articulate feelings of sadness or vulnerability feels to them that they are going to confirm in some way the racist notions of the white people around them. I think it is almost impossible to do clinical work with African-American teenagers without addressing racism as the first agenda, because they can't talk honestly and openly until you have talked to them about it, and there has been some acknowledgement about what the racist environment is and what the impact on them is. It is the only way that you can develop whatever trust you can develop, so that they can articulate their feelings and find other strategies for dealing with the humiliations in the environment and begin to feel comfortable enough to do something other than to seem strong and closed and potentially explosive

Garbarino: If given a little more time, we could explore the significance of the word taming, but I think of "The Horse Whisperer" as opposed to those who break horses. We tend to stand the boys up and way, what did you do? We ought to take them on our laps and cuddle them, and that is what is meant by taming, the horse whisperer, rather than the breaking model.