Dealing with Children's Exposure to School and Community Violence

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Highly Recommended:

Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, by James Garbarino, Ph.D., an well-respected expert on this subject. Published by the Free Press, 1999.

Sometimes as I listen to people talk about violent youth, I doubt that they really want to understand the dangers that our boys face and to make sense of how their violent acts flow from their experiences in our society. Sometimes it seems that few people really care about hurt little boys who have grown up to be violent teenagers, except as potential threats to the community. It is as if we want to forget how they got to be kids who kill in the first place. We are willing to incarcerate them but not to understand them. Perhaps we feel that understanding them is unnecessary because punishment is the only issue, or perhaps we feel that an attempt to understand them is dangerous because it might excuse their actions.

-- James Garbarino, p. 20

This book is a must read for anyone interested in trying to begin to understand this topic. The book is divided into two parts. Part one is called "How boys get lost," and part two is called, "What boys need." An appendix list prevention and intervention resources, which I have included among the links below.

In chapter one Garbarino discusses risk factors for violent behaviors among boys. These are also discussed in psychologist Roger Zagar and his colleagues in a 1991 paper (listed below). These factors are as follows:

Later in the book he lists "ten facts of life for violent boys, each of which implies principles to be used for rehabilitative programming in residential settings such as prisons and detention centers":

  1. Child maltreatment leads to survival strategies that are often antisocial and/or self-destructive.
  2. The experience of early trauma leads boys to become hypersensitive to arousal in the face of threat and to respond to such threats by disconnecting emotionally or acting out aggressively.
  3. Traumatized kids require a calming and soothing environment to increase the level at which they are functioning.
  4. Traumatized youth are likely to evidence an absence of future orientation.
  5. Youth exposed to violence at home and in the community are likely to develop juvenile vigilantism, in which they do not trust an adult's capacity and motivation to ensure safety, and as a result believe they must take matters in their own hands.
  6. Youth who have participated in the violent drug economy or chronic theft are likely to have distorted materialistic values.
  7. Traumatized youth who have experienced abandonment are likely to feel life is meaningless.
  8. Issues of shame are paramount among violent youth.
  9. Youth violence is a boy's attempt to achieve justice as he perceives it.
  10. Violent boys often seem to feel they cannot afford empath.

Resources (see Garbarino, 1999, for more information on each of these)

Other Useful Links

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