BETWEEN OCTOBER 1997 AND JUNE 1998, six well-publicized school shootings in as many states left 15 dead and 42 wounded. This school violence was perpetrated by at least seven boys, one age 11, one age 13, two age 14, one age 15, one age 16, and one age 18. Like the two teenagers who terrorized Littleton, Colorado, and traumatized the nation last week, all the boys were white and lived in suburbs or rural communities. But these incidents differ widely with respect to everything from the killers’ motivations to their relationships with parents. Police charged a Fayetteville, Tennessee, high school honor student with fatally firing on a boy who dated his ex-girlfriend; an Edinboro, Pennsylvania, eighth-grader was charged with killing his science teacher at a graduation party; a Pearl, Mississippi, 16-year-old was convicted of murdering his mother before shooting nine classmates, assisted, police believe, by two other boys; and so on to Littleton.
Even before Littleton’s bodies were cold or its police investigation begun, the tragedy-mongering national media broadcast instant analyses. This no-time- for-mourning medium must have its message, and its message about the Columbine High School bloodbath was on balance reassuring. In particular, psychologist-psychiatrist-counselor-whatevers spoke authoritatively about certain “warning signs” which parents, teachers, and other adults can reliably use to spot (and stop?) a sullen or surly 16-year-old who is on his way to becoming a suicidal-homicidal psychopath.
Let me see if I understand. If Junior’s lethargic loner, hide the cat. But if he’s instead an energetic joiner of a creepy crowd, you should also hide the cat. Or, if you find the cat strangled, hide the gun. And if you find the gun hidden under Junior’s three-month-old pile of dirty all-black laundry, just hide.
The truth is that it is not possible, either for the small but spectacular set of recent school-violence cases or for vicious acts of youths generally, to isolate the causal influence of any given variable. Access to guns. Absence of fathers. You name it. The list of risk factors scientifically associated with criminal violence is long, changing, stubbornly probabilistic, and woefully hard to manipulate to achieve desirable outcomes, whether via public policy or other means.
One thing that research published over the last 15 years has established beyond a reasonable doubt, however, is that childhood abuse and neglect increase the odds of future violence. But increase it by how much? Consult a few of the best studies published in the 1990s. A longitudinal study of 1,000 seventh and eighth-grade students found that 70 percent of those who were victims of maltreatment before age 12 reported committing violent acts–as did 56 percent who were not maltreated. Another study compared the arrest records of 908 persons who had experienced substantiated abuse or neglect before the age of 12 with 667 others with no history of maltreatment. The study found that 11 percent of the abused or neglected children had a juvenile or adult arrest for a violent crime–as did 8 percent of those who suffered no abuse or neglect. “Cycle of violence” research found that 16 percent of children who experienced physical violence, versus 8 percent of those who suffered no violence (either physical or sexual), were later arrested for violent crimes.
Thus, the television expert who asserts that “abuse makes today’s child twice as likely to be tomorrow’s violent offender,” or the government research agency that headlined its latest prisoner survey “Prisoners Report High Rates of Physical and Sexual Abuse,” has scientific legs to stand on. It is nonetheless true that most kids affected by most risk factors–regardless of race, creed, or socioeconomic status and including kids who look, sound, and act weird, troubled, or scary — are more likely to become quite CPAs than they are to become career criminals or cold-blooded killers. Prisoner surveys justify the headline “Over 80 percent of Prisoners, Like Over 80 percent of All Americans, Have No History of Physical or Sexual Abuse.”
Honest experts can endlessly debate the macro-social trends relevant to such multivariate phenomena as youth violence. Broadly speaking, as the sub-population of teens exposed to factors known to increase the marginal propensity to violence grows, we might expect the incidence of those rare youths who become seriously violent–the statistical “out-liers” — also to grow. We can attempt to counteract the trend by supporting anti-violence education programs, restrictions on gun sales, faith-based youth outreach, or whatever else we think might do the most to prevent the few dangerous outliers from eventually harming us and themselves.
But we can rarely explain or forecast individual propensities to youth violence. And even if we could, we would seldom do much about it. Whether in middle-class rural towns or poor inner cities, the obstacles to getting a child-specific grip on youth violence are not merely intellectual but legal and social. The veteran school psychologist whose training, common sense, and intuition tell her that a particular sophomore is a time bomb is supposed to do — what? Write a report and file it, call his parents, notify the school board–and get fired or sued or both? And when is the last time you so much as looked crosswise at somebody else’s monstrously ill-behaved toddler or teenager, let alone opened your mouth about the child’s offensive dress or anti-social demeanor?
The late great University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang was the first to document that a small fraction of boys is responsible for a large fraction of violent crimes. He was also among the first to warn about the “subculture of violence” among America’s youth. Near the end of his life, he spoke and wrote to me about his research in certain Chinese villages that had remarkably low rates of crime, delinquency, violence, and recidivism. The Communist state’s draconian punishments were hardly a major factor, for the relatively crime-free existence of these people predated it. Rather, he marveled at the villagers’ “moral affluence,” at their propensity to “teach morality” in private as well as in public. Adult villagers, he stressed, did not hesitate a moment before kindly but firmly correcting another person’s child or scolding an abusive parent. It reminded me of the one-for-all blue-collar ethnic Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up — a mother watching behind every curtain and a father behind every door.
But we nonjudgmental 1990s Americans do not want to monitor other people’s kids, and it’s absurd to pretend the parents of a child who makes a profession of hating or harming others need a checklist of “warning signs.” Dangerous outliers, whether they reside in two-parent middle-class suburbs or fatherless welfare-dependent cities, are able to behave dangerously because their parents are not ready, willing, or able to control what they do.
Public schools won’t stop dangerous outliers, either. In recent years, inner-city public schools have tightened security and cracked down on misbehavior, often with wonderful results. But suburban and rural schools have expanded students’ opportunities for “self-expression,” often to the point where drugs are openly traded, thugger-mugger wannabes routinely disrupt classes, and older kids seriously hassle or hurt younger kids on schools buses, all with impunity.
Character abhors a vacuum. Children of all demographic descriptions are raising themselves in America today, and these children will be a bit less darling and a bit more dangerous so long as they have neither decent on-the-job parents nor other responsible adult authorities present every single day of their lives.
