Real Boys

by William Pollack

  The fact is that we all live in a world of violence, and that our boys are particularly vulnerable to its many manifestations. Only a small percentage of boys perpetrate or participate in the worst sort of violence—violent crime—or are direct victims of it. But every one of them is a witness to extreme violence of one kind or another: in school, on the street, in the news, on television programs, in the movies, at the computer, in books and magazines, and, sadly too often, at home.

  Most parents of boys will have to contend with the issue of violence very early in their sons’ lives, just as every boy must contend with it himself. The challenge for parents is to understand the difference between action, which boys love, and violence, which most boys don’t—and to learn how to help boys keep on this side of the line that separates the two. When does roughhousing get too rough? When does teasing become bullying? When does boldness cross the line into unnecessary risk-taking?

  As parents we want to encourage our boys in their pursuit of action but keep them from becoming part of the national statistics that pertain to violence in our society. We can do so through the potency of connection we’ve discussed throughout this book—by staying closely involved with our sons, teaching them how to handle the anger that can turn to violent rage, and imparting as much information as we can to help them avoid becoming victims of others’ hurtful acts.

  A NATIONAL CRISIS

  The fact that most violence in our society is done by or to males will come as no surprise to most people. But what’s alarming—and less well known—is that the violence that surrounds us in this country increasingly involves young men and boys.

  For example, consider a seemingly commonplace and nonlethal example. The American Medical Association determined that one in ten boys has been kicked in the groin by the age of sixteen. Twenty-five percent of those kicks result in an injury. We might shrug off this finding, and assume that many of the kicks are unintentional or that they are simply part of normal boyish roughhousing and play. But the AMA also discovered that most boys don’t tell their parents about the groin kick or the injury. And, even more significant, about 25 percent of the injured boys exhibited signs of depression within a year after the injury. In other words, these boys did not consider a kick in the groin as just a routine part of boyhood. The event bothered them, they felt shame about the injury. They were disturbed by the violence but felt they couldn’t or shouldn’t talk about it, so they hid their emotions behind the mask. Neither boy involved in the incident—the kicker or the one kicked—may end up as a spouse-beater or a gun-toting criminal, but both have experienced violence.

  Young men and boys also suffer a great deal of violence that falls into the category of risk-taking behavior gone wrong. Michael Kennedy, the sixth child of Robert Kennedy, was killed in late 1997 while playing a game of football on skis. Although he was thirty-nine, hardly a boy, when he slammed into the tree, he was engaging in the kind of violent, “boys-will-be-boys” behavior that our society not only tolerates but has come to respect, encourage, and even revere. Statistics show that Michael Kennedy was not alone—although males account for about 60 percent of all skiers, 85 percent of all skiers killed are men. Although no crime was involved, no weapons, no malice of intent, Michael Kennedy was, in effect, a victim of violence.

  And of course one of the most tragic manifestations of male violence is self-mutilation and suicide. As we discussed earlier, in the United States the suicide rate among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds tripled between 1950 and 1990, and suicide is now the third leading cause of death within this age group. Among Americans of all ages, the rate of suicide among males is about four times the rate among females.

  Indeed our boys and young men are at risk from all kinds of violence—from fighting and accidents, violent crime, murder, and suicide. “The major causes of mortality and morbidity among teenagers have shifted from infectious to behavioral etiologies,” writes Dr. C. Wayne Sells, a specialist with the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California. In other words, young people have more to fear from their own behavior than they do from disease. Here are a few statistics:

  • 78 percent of all unintentional deaths of youth result from motor vehicle accidents; 75 percent of those are young men.

  • About one third of all victims of violent crime are twelve to nineteen years of age.

  • Homicides are the second leading cause of death among adolescents, accounting for 22 percent of all deaths among youths fourteen to twenty-five in 1991. Males are more than 400 percent likely to be murdered than are females.

  • Between 1979 and 1991, almost 40,000 kids aged fourteen to nineteen died from firearms. The firearms death rate among male teenagers, aged fifteen to nineteen, more than doubled from 1985 to 1994, reaching 49.2 deaths per 100,000—the highest level ever.

  • As stated above, suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged fifteen to twenty-four and the rate of suicide within this age group has tripled from 1950 to 1990. Suicide among the very young, from age ten to nineteen, has also increased significantly. The rate of suicide for males of all ages is four times that of the female rate.

  These facts demonstrate that young people have become increasingly involved in and vulnerable to violent crime, and that the young people most at risk are boys. Boys begin their involvement with violence very early. In fact, research shows that after the age of two, boys get injured up to four times more often than girls. Parents simply come to expect their boys to use up more Band-Aids and make more trips to the emergency room than their girls.

  Yet, curiously, boys themselves take a rather blithe attitude toward injury. A Canadian study shows that boys tend to blame injury on bad luck rather than on any correctable circumstance, such as their own behavior. This tendency of boys to blame injury on external factors is also borne out by an intriguing study recently conducted by the Gillette Company that investigated the shaving habits of male and female adults. When a man cuts or nicks himself shaving, the study found, he generally blames the razor. When a woman draws blood, she tends to blame herself.

  But, even if a boy never gets entangled in violent crime directly as a perpetrator or a victim—as he probably won’t—he still must find his way to healthy manhood in an environment that is replete with violence.

  IT CAN START WITH THE BULLY

  For many boys, the earliest and most vivid experience with violence is provided by the school bully. Charlie is a child whose whole first-grade year was made utterly miserable by a bully named Ben. Ben was a thoroughly modern bully. The bullies of the 1990s must operate differently from those of the 1950s. Overt and obvious physical aggression is not tolerated on many American playgrounds today. The child who pushes or slaps or kicks or punches is swiftly dealt with; the child who bites, in this age of AIDS, is considered a dangerous potential health hazard. Today’s bullies have developed a subtler set of strategies that include ridicule, shaming, making others feel inadequate.

  So, rather than physical violence, Ben used primarily verbal weapons—the insult, the taunt, the jeer—but was skillful enough in wielding them that they caused Charlie great distress, even though he himself was seldom the victim of Ben’s aggression. Seeing his classmates abused caused Charlie to develop a chronic stomachache that sometimes kept him out of school or sent him home early. Charlie’s mother identified Ben as the principal cause of Charlie’s woes and resulting stomachaches, and alerted the classroom teacher. The teacher, however, was in her first year on the job and did not have enough experience to deal effectively with the problem. As a result, she downplayed Charlie’s stomachaches and implied that he just needed to “tough it out.”

  Charlie and his parents worked on a number of strategies for dealing with the “Ben issue,” but the problem remained until summer finally came, and Charlie escaped the bully for the beach. In fact, that was no solution at all—it merely provided a temporary escape. The fact is that the disruptive effect of the chronic bully can be a difficult p
roblem for everyone involved in the situation—students, teachers, and parents, including the parents of the bully himself—but it can be alleviated and even solved, as we’ll discuss later in this chapter.

  Bullies like Ben can cast a pall over an entire classroom and playground, and bullies remain a fixture on playgrounds throughout the world. In fact, the National Association of School Psychologists estimates that, in the United States, some 160,000 children miss school every day for fear of being bullied. One colleague told of a mother whose child was being tormented by a playground bully, but could get no action from the school authorities. So concerned was she for her child, she began hiding behind a shed on the school grounds, hoping to catch the bully in the commission of one of his crimes.

  But what causes a boy to bully or to allow himself to be bullied? Is a bully a “naturally” violent boy—or is he a boy desperate for connection who is only able to express his need through violent action?

  Is IT ACTION OR VIOLENCE?

  When thinking about boys and violence, it’s essential to make a distinction between violent behavior and action behavior. Although most boys aren’t violent, they often love physically vigorous activities, intense games, loud play, rough play. For the most part, however, that inclination to action does not cross over the line into violence. Most roughhousing ends abruptly when one of the participants gets hurt—a bump on the head, a twisted arm, or an elbow in the gut—and so does not escalate into a fistfight. Most teasing and joshing trails off without crossing over into physical violence. Most intense activities, such as sports, conclude with the participants exhausted and the players shaking hands rather than in a melee. In fact, sports, as I’ve emphasized, generally bring boys closer to one another.

  So what makes for the difference between an active boy and a violent one? In my opinion, there are virtually always important psychological factors that come into play. It’s rarely just chance that escalates a boy’s natural craving for action into an unnatural one for violence. In the case of Ben, Charlie’s bully, the boy’s parents had recently gone through a difficult divorce. Ben felt disconnected from his parents, the family he had once been part of, his friends, and his community. Ben also suffered from a learning disorder. He felt inadequate and ashamed. And he had just moved to the town and knew few people. He felt alone and powerless and still more disconnected. Because his mother now had to work full-time and his father wasn’t around, Ben got little help with these difficult emotions. Left on his own, trying to appear stoic, he channeled all his fears into anger and aimed it at his classmates. Interestingly enough, however, Charlie was, in fact, an unusually empathic child; he liked Ben—when he wasn’t in his bully mode—and even accepted invitations to his house to play. Perhaps, in some way, Ben was asking for connection and empathy and recognized Charlie as a boy who might be able to give it to him. As explained above, in some cases boys like Ben perpetrate violence not because they want to injure others, but rather because they believe it will somehow win them friendship and approval from others. And sometimes the person they most especially desire to win over is not a co-aggressor but instead their victim.

  Of course, a bully may be more likely to meet with retaliation by his victim than with friendship. Gordon, a seven-year-old African American, was a frequent target of Leonard, the bully of his second-grade class. “Leonard is really mean to everybody,” Gordon said. “He pulls girls’ hair, he hits boys, and he spits on you. I hate him!”

  When their class finished a unit on the history of African Americans, Leonard used what he had learned to add shaming to his bullying. When he encountered Gordon on the playground, he took to calling him “slave.” “At first I wanted to punch him,” Gordon told me. “But I was afraid I’d get in trouble. I was going to tell on him, but I was scared he would get even worse to me after that.”

  Gordon did not punch Leonard, nor did he go to his teacher with his problem. Instead, he endured the insults for several days—“like a man”—and then decided to confide in his mother. She listened, with steadily growing fury, and then made her recommendation. “I told Gordon it was OK to slug Leonard,” she admits. “There are some things that just aren’t acceptable.”

  So, the next time Leonard called him a slave, Gordon punched him. Both boys were promptly hauled off to the principal’s office, where the principal counseled Gordon that he should “not use fists to solve problems.” Leonard’s parents were summoned. After a lengthy meeting, both Gordon and Leonard were sent home for the day.

  The next day Leonard the bully had backed off. “He’s still mean to me and everybody,” Gordon said, “but he doesn’t call me slave anymore.” And Gordon pointed out that he had gotten a half day off from school to boot!

  The mother’s recommendation worked, but it didn’t help to solve the long-term problem of either the bully or his victim. Plus, Gordon ended up with a confusing set of mixed messages. On the one hand, the principal delivered the message that violence is neither acceptable nor the “best” way to solve problems. On the other hand, Gordon gathered some overwhelming empirical data that, in fact, a solid slug at the right moment can sometimes provide a short-term solution to the problem.

  One thoughtful researcher into men’s and women’s anger, Jean Baker Miller, believes that this kind of violent behavior stems from fear. Boys are “made to fear not being aggressive,” she writes, “lest they be found wanting, be beaten out by another, or (worst of all) be like a girl. All of these constitute terrible threats to a core part of what is made to be men’s sense of identity—which has been called masculinity.” The phenomenon of which Miller speaks, in my opinion, affects boys in at least two central ways. First, it makes the potential instigator of violence more likely to leap into action. Rather than risk an affront to his honor or a blow to his sense of “masculine” self-esteem, the boy defends himself by going on the offensive, by lashing out at others. Second, this same fragility—the trepidation a boy feels about being shamed, about being considered less that a “man”—may lead the victim of other boys’ violence to take the beatings in silence, even to smile and attempt to shrug them off. So if he does not tattle or retaliate (as, for example, Gordon did), he may instead try to bear the violence quietly, to cover any outward signs that he is the victim, that he is too scared to take on the bully. As I’ve learned in my years of counseling men, many adult males would rather die than be shamed. So I suppose it should be little surprise that many boys feel similarly.

  In my view, today’s boy bully is often, but not always, tomorrow’s adult violent offender. Sometimes the high school bully learns to control his anger along the way to manhood, and former classmates, cautiously greeting him at their twenty-year reunion, are stunned to find the young tormentor has turned into a charming and engaging adult. On the other hand, sometimes the quiet victim, the shy loner, or the troubled bystander suddenly turns violent in an unexpected eruption of rage, either in later boyhood or as an adult. This might explain the case of the mild fourteen-year-old Kentucky high school student who, in 1997, killed three fellow students with a rifle, much to the disbelief and incomprehension of his parents, teachers, and classmates. The question on everybody’s lips at the time was “Why?” The boy had shown no signs of violent behavior; he was no bully. But, clearly, something caused him to “snap”; such violent acts do not just “happen.” I believe that among other things it is shame that makes a boy like this snap. When enough shame collects inside of him—when he feels disconnected, unpopular, less than “masculine,” maybe even hated—the boy tries to master his feelings and reconnect with others through violence.

  The good news is that we now know a great deal about how shame fuels anger, what can trigger it to turn into rage and violence, and how to think about and behave with boys differently, so they can feel better about their genuine selves, turn away from anger, avoid violent behavior, and still retain the qualities and pursue the activities that are more positively “boy”—the vigorous action, the productive intensit
y, the boldness of individual endeavor, the empathy found in group play and team sports.

  WHAT CAN WE DO?

  First, we can understand why boys may harbor anger and why their inclination for action and rough play may turn that anger into rage or violence. In Chapter 3, I talked about the biology of boys. I argued that many people base their thinking about boys on the myth that “testosterone = aggressiveness = boys,” but that nothing in the research, mine included, proves that equation to be true. We now see the old “nature vs. nurture” debate as outdated and simplistic, and have come to understand that the behavior of boys results from a combination of biological and environmental factors. All boys are not biologically destined to be more aggressive than girls. Biology creates tendencies for boys and girls to behave differently, but it is not an absolute. In fact, all the behavioral qualities that we traditionally associate with girls—such as empathy, sensitivity, and compassion—are also basic male traits. Research shows that boys begin their lives with a natural sense of empathy, which is antithetical to violence. Boys as young as twenty-one months display a well-developed, natural, “hard-wired” ability to feel empathy, including a wish to help other people who are in pain.