Issues in Education: Violence
Taming
Baby Rage: Why Are Some Kids So Angry?
New research indicates babies are born
with violent tendencies that most learn to control
Scientific American online, October 16, 2007
"It's a natural behavior and it's surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant," says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression. "Clearly youth were violent before television appeared."
Tremblay's previous results have suggested that children on average reach a peak of violent behavior (biting, scratching, screaming, hitting…) around 18 months of age. The level of aggression begins to taper between the ages of two and five as they begin to learn other, more sophisticated ways of communicating their needs and wants.
Tremblay on Wednesday is set to present preliminary study results showing a genetic signature consistent with chronic violent behavior at a meeting of The Royal Society, the U.K.'s academy of science, in London.
"We're looking at to what extent the
chronically aggressive individuals show differences in terms of gene expressions
compared to those on the normal trajectory," he told ScientificAmerican.com.
"The individuals that are chronically aggressive have…more genes that are
not expressed." The fact that a gene can be silenced or the level of
protein it encodes reduced, he added, "is an indication that the problem is
at a very basic level."
E-mail from Kathy Stevens,
executive director of the Gurian Institute Training Division,
posted to the Boys Project listserv
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:52:19 -0700
Subject: [BoysProject-L] Post from Kathy Stevens: "Gender and the
Colleagues:
The two most recent posts discussing the issues about boys and the VTech tragedy make my heart heavy. (Being a transplant from VA to CO in 1992, I still have many friends there and some have kids attending VTech.) I get a lot of emails from moms (mostly) who are so worried about their boys and don't know what to do. They are very often single moms who lament the lack of positive male role models for their sons--relating years of fathers who are unavailable for a plethora of reasons, and they want to know where to go to find men that their sons can interact with, who will give them a little time and help them learn some things about becoming men. These are moms who care deeply for their sons and are doing a good job of parenting, but who know they cannot give them everything they need no matter how great a mom they are. They worry about their sons futures, and often as adolescents they see them become more and more disengaged and seemingly lost. I'm not saying I believe these boys are like the VTech shooter, ready to do heinous crimes to their peer, but I do believe that many of them will never fulfill their potential without something different happening in their lives. They are like most adolescent boys; they need male mentors and role models to show them their path to manhood?
I'm not a gun fan, never have been; but I agree that the guns are not the problem in this equation. We have to do more to help our boys find their way and encourage good men to be willing to make an investment in the young men who will follow their lead.
So, men, how do we do that? How do we engage men in this mission? We haven't been successful at it in any big way and a big way is what we need.
I know it's not good to complain about a problem without offering a solution; I know the solution is more men in the lives of our boys, but darn if I know how to make it happen!
Kathy
American psycho
When Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech,
the horrific slaughter revealed not only the poisons
lurking in popular culture
but the crisis of young males in a feminised society.
Article in the Sunday Times Online (United
Kingdom), April 22, 2007
Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.
High on his list were his classmates from
Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without
bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend
Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college
girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to
mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning....
A Culture of Passivity
"Protecting" our
"children" at Virginia Tech
Article by Mark Steyn, National Review online,
April 18, 2007
I
haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world,
it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on.
But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked
about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage..
... On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept
that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be
“protected.”
Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were
grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be
regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted,
we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are
“children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but
grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President
Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit
fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising
them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect
yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you
have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on
us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only
an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the
obligation to act.
The Violent Brain
Article by Daniel Strueber, Monika Lueck and Gerhard Roth, Scientific
American Mind, December, 2006
"On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill walked into the cafeteria at Dawson College in Montreal and, without apparent motive, shot 21 people, injuring 19 and killing two, including himself. The same day a judge in West Virginia sent a woman to jail for, among other atrocities, forcing her six children and stepchildren to gorge themselves on food and then eat their own vomit. Also on the 13th, a court in New York sentenced a man for killing his girlfriend by setting her on fire--in front of her 10-year-old son. There was nothing special about that Wednesday. From around the world we hear reports of murder, manslaughter, cruelty and abuse every day. Violence is ubiquitous..."