Why children turn violent

Movies, videogames, loose guns, alienation-there's no one reason lads кill but there are warning signs.

We’re used to seeing greed, jealousy and dashed hopes turn adults into murderers. But why would boys of 11 and 13 spray bullets into a crowd of their peers? How could such young hearts turn that cold? Any psychologist can recite a litany of good hints. It's clear that kids who grow up surrounded by violence - on the street, in the home, on the tube, in electronic games -become less sensitive to it. And there's no question that when children have ready access to firearms the odds of a tragedy rise. But how do these factors com­bine to transform individ­ual kids into mass killers? "There's not one answer," says Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center in Washington, D.C. "Anyone who says there's a single cause, or a single remedy, is ignoring the complexity of this problem."

Over the past two years, boys as young as 14 have mowed down classmates or teachers in Paducah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss.; Moses Lake, Wash., and Bemel, Alaska. But like adult homicide, the number of killings by kids 17 or younger has actually de­clined by nearly a third since the early 1990s. And a new report from the U.S. Department of Education suggests that violence is still mercifully rare in the nation's schools. Among the 1,234 elementary and secondary schools sur­veyed for the report, 43 percent reported no crimes at all during the 1996-97 school year—and most of the offenses cataloged were only minor incidents, such as theft, vandalism or fights without weapons.

Yet for all the encourag­ing trends, juvenile homi­cide is twice as common today as it was in the mid-1980s. Who's most likely to start shooting? The perpe­trators are overwhelmingly male, and many seem driven by feelings of powerlessness. When adults suffer a setback or humilia­tion, says Harvard psychia­trist James Gilligan, they can draw on past successes to salvage self-esteem. Adolescents don't have that luxury. Passing slights can be devastating, and where­as girls tend to internalize their pain, boys may relieve it by lashing out. "Violence can be a transcending expe­rience," says psychologist Michael Flynn of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "One feels omnipotent." Until last fall, the kids in Pearl, Miss., taunted 16-year-old Luke Woodham as a chub­by, bespectacled nerd. But on Oct. 2, he shed that im­age by stabbing his mother to death and shooting nine of his classmates, killing two. "I killed because people like me are mistreated every day," he explained in a letter. "Murder is not weak slow-witted, murder is gutsy and daring."

Small-town shooting sprees attract a lot of at­tention, but individual hits in the inner city are the most routine kid-on-kid murders. Urban poverty fosters power-lessness, and the rage that goes with it. The juvenile murder rate among blacks, who are more likely to be poor, is typically nine times high­er than the rate among whites. Urban black males make up slightly more than 1 percent of the population, yet they commit 30 percent of all homicides. Princeton criminologist John Di-Julio Jr. believes the real curse of life in the inner city is "growing up without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong" or, worse yet, "growing up surrounded by delinquent and crimi­nal adults... [in settings] where self-respecting young men literally aspire to get away with murder”. In a 1991 survey of inner-city kids under the age of 19, researchers at the University of Alabama found that four in 10 had actually witnessed a homicide.

“Moral poverty” isn’t confined to urban ghettos. A lack of parental involvement places any child at risk – especially if the television is running all day. No one pretends that kids are doomed to re-enact or simulate every atrocity they see on TV or in videogames. But experts agree that a constant diet of mass entertainment can warp children's sense of the world. When violent action is all they see, says University of Michigan psychologist Leonard Eron, "the les­son they learn is that everybody does it and this is the way to be­have." When 14-year-old Michael Carneal coolly shot down eight of his classmates in Paducah, Ky., last December, he'd been watching actor Leonardo DiCaprio en­act the same fantasy in "The Basketball Diaries."

It's possible, of course, that young boys have always nurtured bizarre revenge fan­tasies but lacked the means to carry them out. "Without access to guns, these kids might break a couple of win­dows." says Geoffrey Canada, president of the

Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, in Harlem. "It would be a pain, but it wouldn't be mass murder." Un­fortunately, kids do have access to guns.

Americans own nearly 200 million of them, ac­cording to the National Institute of Justice. More than half of these guns are stored un­locked; 16 percent are stored unlocked and loaded. And though schoolyard shootings don't happen every day, a 1995 federal survey found that nearly 8 percent of high-school stu­dents had carried a gun during the past 30 days. Andrew Golden, the 11-year-old implicated in last week's assault, had long boasted to friends that he could get to his family's weapons any time he wanted. He wasn't kidding.

Short of banishing guns, can we hope to prevent such tragedies in the future? Experts say many kids could be diverted from killing if parents and teachers simply paid more atten­tion to what children say. "Many kids give clear indications," says University of Virginia psychologist Dewey Cornell, "but they aren't taken seriously. We need to take violence threats as seriously as we take threats of sui­cide." Caretakers and peers should intervene when they see a child withdrawing, or explod­ing in rage over everyday frustrations. Most important, experts say, we can teach children how to resolve conflicts peacefully. "When I ask kids how their dispute started, they tell me somebody dissed them", says Kathleen Heide, a University of South Florida criminologist who has worked with 100 young murderers. "I get them to see the dis­respect as being less about them and more about the guy showing it. And I stress commu­nicating feelings directly, with words like 'don't like' and 'don't want' — as in "I don't like it when you diss my girlfriend". Straight talk — a simple step toward solving a complex problem.

Geoffrey Cowley

With John McCormick.

Theodore Gideonse.

Adam Rogers,

Pat Wincert and

Anne Underwood

/Newsweek, april 16, 1998/