James Garbarino, "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them." New York: The Free Press, 1999. 

OVERVIEW

James Garbarino's "Lost Boys" is an extremely thorough answer to the question of why boys engage in violence: what their motivations are, their hopes, fears, goals and ethics, and what happens to violent youth to make them different from non-violent ones. For any concerned person who has ever wondered how a child could turn from small and innocent to ruthless killer in such a short time, Garbarino offers the collected knowledge of various fields of the academic world, filtered through his own personal experience of decades spent counseling troubled youth. He brings these disparate perspectives together in a manner that is both accessible and reasonable: the book is designed to appeal equally to liberal and conservative, adult and youth. His analysis comes across as both academically sound as well as down-to-earth and human. 

Garbarino discusses the factors that lead to violence as universal principles, applicable to both urban violence as well as suburban violence. He argues that parental abuse and neglect are the main proximate causes of violence, though there are other social and economic influences that are correlated with both abuse and violence. He therefore begins his explanation with a person's needs in early childhood, and the harm that results from parental abuse and neglect.

It is fairly easy to see how parental abuse can lead to violence in an adolescent. Children, Garbarino explains, will naturally imitate the behavior they see around them: if a parent responds to conflicts and emotional troubles by lashing out at the nearest person who is weaker than they, then the child will assume that such behavior is natural. 

Not only does parental abuse give children an expectation for violence, it also gives them a personal reason to be violent: abuse teaches the child that the world is against him, that the world is a place where nothing is given and everything must be taken. 

The boys Garbarino worked with reported having felt this way for as long as they could remember, and Garbarino argues they even picked up threat of violence as infants. Even a baby crying in its crib, he argues, will conclude the world is a cruel place since no one ever comes to comfort him. He cites studies showing that when babies are given positive reinforcement for smiling—a smile in return, perhaps—they will smile more in response; but if they get no reinforcement they will soon stop smiling altogether.

Other studies have found that the more responsive a mother is to her child's needs—the sooner she comes to him when he starts to cry, for example—the more responsive the child will be to the mother's discipline a year later. Violent youth generally have a hard time connecting emotionally with the people around them, which is what enables them to cause harm so easily. And an abusive family tends to retard emotional development. The mind's standard reaction to trauma it cannot escape is to shut down: emotions will make a person fight or flee when attacked, and if neither is possible then emotions will either die or go into hibernation. 

Boys who tend to become violent are those who were never taught to smile or to respond positively, but were for the most part left to fend for themselves, or received abuse as their primary form of interaction. Such children enter the wider world with low feelings of self-worth and negative expectations, which often leads them to perform poorly in school and in social settings, leading to even worse self-image. Abused children tend to be hypersensitive to negative social cues, imagining slights and put-downs where none exist, and are oblivious to positive social cues. 

Adolescence, when it comes, creates radical changes in these children's lives. Garbarino says these changes are fairly easy to predict if you know what to look for: "hurt little boys become aggressive big boys". An abused child may become suddenly violent as soon as they reach middle school, but the seeds of their violence were planted long ago. This is why Garbarino urges adults to "see the child inside the killer", because the motivations for their killing almost always arise from the situation of their childhood. Most youths who assault their parents were once children assaulted by their parents.

Boys have the best odds of avoiding abuse, Garbarino says, when his parents are married and both of them are present. While plenty of kids have been abused by their biological fathers, a mother's boyfriend, as the primary adult male in the family, has much less incentive to care for the children and is more likely to abuse. Single-mother families can also be risky, in cases where the mother cannot protect the family and the son feels he must provide the needed protection. Garbarino sees such role reversal as damaging. Boys should be cared for by their mothers, and a boy who sees his mother as needy rather than as a source of help will often grow to resent her. 

With this understanding of emotional development as a background, Garbarino addresses the moral perspectives of violent youth; why they make the decisions they do. 

Outside observers often feel young killers have simply lost their moral compass, that they have no sense of right and wrong at all. Garbarino has not found this to be the case. He occasionally comes across people who literally lack morality, but they are very, very rare; they tend to be serial killers rather than gangsters or school shooters. Most violent youth have a very strong sense of morality. To explain this, Garbarino offers the concept of the "moral circle". Almost everyone finds some level of violence acceptable: if we consider it OK to use violence against a given person, that person can be considered outside of our moral circle. Many people would say that an enemy in wartime is outside of their moral circle, as is a person who attacks them, as are the cows and chickens we kill to eat—most people will justify violence against groups like these. Violent youth, Garbarino explains, simply have a very small moral circle. An average person will accept killing an enemy in wartime, but a gang member feels that he is at war with the kids in the other gang. A youth who feels that the world hates him, in turn, will say that he is at war with the whole world: any human being is outside of his moral circle. These youth often feel that their actions are morally justifiable, and will in fact use many of the arguments that nations use in defending wars.

Such at-risk youth are often concerned about their safety and will claim they acted in self-defense, or to pre-empt an attack they knew was inevitable. Or, they kill for the sake of justice: when respect is in such short supply, any expression of disrespect becomes a towering insult. (Respect is such a significant factor, it would be good to turn to Elijah Anderson’s “Code of the Streets” at this point.)

When boys are on the verge of suicide they often feel that a simple insult really is a matter of life and death, and would kill rather than be dishonored. An observer may feel that murder or suicide are an extremely unconstructive ways of handling the situation. Of course, Garbarino replies, but executing the boy is equally unconstructive.

Garbarino finds that violent youth tend have about the same moral standards as most Americans when looking at other people's situations, but they have a hard time applying these standards to their own actions. Similarly, they will look down on people with smaller moral circles than their own, just as we look down on their smaller circles. These boys feel they themselves have acted justly, that they did what had to be done, that their victims deserved what they got; but they will readily condemn the killing of "innocent" people. (Anecdotal reports from those dealing with delinquent girls report something similar. Girls will condemn violence in workshops, until it comes to their own situations—even very petty threats to what they see as respect, expects a violent response on their part.)

Garbarino relates a surprising story from World War II. 80% of American infantrymen could not bring themselves to shoot at enemy soldiers; they would disguise this by intentionally missing their targets. This indicates a strong, natural human sensitivity preventing us from harming our fellow man, even under the adrenaline and danger of a battlefield. While this is good news for humanity, it was bad news for the military. In the Vietnam conflict, US soldiers received desensitizing training to accustom them to shooting at human targets. These trainings (often with video games) were successful: 90% of soldiers in Vietnam could make themselves shoot at the enemy. The reason Garbarino tells this story is to make a point about the desensitizing influence of violent media. Most kids, through video games in particular, have received the exact same training that soldiers received for Vietnam to make killing easier. This, he says, is one way today's youth function in a completely different environment from previous generations. (On a related note, the same World War II study found that 98% of soldiers were incapacitated from service at one time or another because of post-traumatic stress, and required, at least, a short rehabilitation. The remaining 2%, as Garbarino puts it, "were psychopaths".) 

The last factor Garbarino presents is that youth rapidly learn that adults cannot protect them; neither the police nor their parents nor anyone else. They feel the only way to protect themselves is to act on their own. This is known as "adolescent vigilantism". (And is also an effect of post-traumatic stress—on a family or community level.) 

If you take all of these factors together—youth have reason to hate the world, they have reason to feel physically threatened, they have a culture that tells them to use violence, they have access to weapons and no sensitivity or emotional support to prevent them, no one else to protect them, and little hope for the future—one can start to see how they begin to see violence as morally acceptable. All adolescents feel morally confused, says Garbarino; they are "trying to deal with competing and sometimes incompatible moral messages coming from inside and outside" their heads. He argues that 

"The confusion lost boys display is to some degree normal; it is the nature of the issues they face that is abnormal. It is one thing to be a fifteen-year-old confused about cheating on a math exam and quite another to be confused about killing someone who threatens you with violence. I can recall the first from my adolescence, but I had no experience with the latter. This is not a demonstration of my moral and developmental superiority but, rather, of the relative social health of my childhood environment." 

In the second half of the book, Garbarino discusses solutions to these problems, both on the personal level and on the programmatic level.

The first protective factor he discusses is youths' personal philosophy or worldview. Violent youth tend to have very negative outlooks on the world: that life is not really worth living, that very little is important, and that they will be dead soon anyway. Garbarino tells the story of a woman who was told she had six only months to live, so she went out and spent all her money on a mink coat and a sports car. Violent youth, in turn, are also in pursuit of the sports car and the mink coat, and also feel they do not have long to live. This is known as "terminal thinking": people make very different decisions when they do not have a lifetime to plan for, and most violent youth are committed practitioners of terminal thinking. Garbarino sees the solution to this, very specifically, as religion. He does not recommend a particular religion, but he says youth need some kind of transcendent or supernatural understanding of the world in order to bring meaning to their lives. He cites a study which found that youth engaged in "spirituality (in the form of non-punitive religion)" are less likely to think about or attempt suicide, less likely to be depressed, engage in casual sex or do drugs. And they respond better to trauma.

Garbarino lists other major protective factors in quick succession. Youth need to have a least one person in the world who cares about them a great deal: "someone who is absolutely crazy about them", as he puts it. He cites that the majority of abused children never become involved in violence, generally because they have some other caring person in their life: perhaps a relative, coach, mentor or friend. Many youth find that having a child is the event that triggers them to begin caring about life, if only because their baby cares about them in a way that no one ever did before. 

Youth need to be able to actively cope with stress. Rather than by simply receiving the blows the world hits them with, youth need to take control of their lives and pursue tangible goals. Their lives need to be defined by their actions, not by the things happening to them.

Garbarino cites the language that youth use as an indicator of this. When asked to talk about their lives, do they talk primarily in the active voice ("I did this, then I did that") or in the passive ("This happened to me, and I was affected in this way")?

Youth who are intelligent are often better able to cope with their situations, as they can use reasoning to put their lives into perspective. Youth are at a disadvantage if they "make mistakes in assessing cause and consequences" and cannot "think about complex realities and make sense of the world". However, he adds that such intelligence is difficult to estimate. In his own work he finds that kids who do well on tests will give him "slow, simplistic answers", while high school dropouts often surprise him with their analyses. Additionally, intelligence also includes emotional intelligence—the capacity to observe and understand your own and other people's emotions—which is at least as important to handling trauma and abuse as academic intelligence.

Garbarino also discusses programs that are effective, and the diversity of circumstances they target. Evaluations have found effective anti-violence programs for every stage in a person's development, from before birth through to adulthood, and Garbarino discusses what makes each of these programs work in their given contexts. Before and just after birth, nurses can perform home visits for new mothers in difficult situations, where they can talk about the needs of being a mother and how to prepare for having a baby. Parent training programs come in after birth, where parents can learn effective methods of discipline and about the emotional and intellectual needs of young children. In a similar vein, Garbarino describes programs for successively older children: detachment intervention programs, early-childhood education, early violence intervention, community-level violence prevention programs, character education, and conflict-resolution programs.

Even after boys are involved with violence, there are effective and ineffective ways of handling them. Garbarino discusses these punitive and rehabilitative programs in terms of how effective they are at dissuading youth from future violence. For example, studies have found that traditional incarceration is largely ineffective. For traumatized youth, prison only adds to their trauma, gives them a more consistently negative peer group, and further convinces them that the world hates them. More effective, according to these evaluations, are community-based rehab programs that teach the sort of emotional and psychological skills that Garbarino describes earlier in the book. 

Garbarino describes the proper atmosphere for rehabilitation as more like a monastery than a boot camp: traumatized and violent youth need an environment that is soothing, one that "emphasizes contemplation, reflection, service, cooperation, meditation, and peace, instead of confrontation, dominance, and power assertion." A culture where poverty and chastity are the ideals might also be helpful. Garbarino says that when adults declare war on violent youth, they will only receive more violence in return. "Peace proceeds when adults practice peace with kids."

Garbarino also offers recommendations at the political level. These include stricter regulations on media violence, getting rid of handguns, instituting community-oriented policing, and making school smaller. However, he is aware that these recommendations are politically almost impossible: the reason, he says, is that Americans do not trust their government, and so we are unable to use government as a tool to prevent violence. He argues that this "incapacitating" distrust is contrary to the principles on which this nation was founded. The Declaration of Independence states that governments exist to secure the basic human rights of its citizens; therefore these public safety measures are practically necessary for this country if we want to live up to our founding values.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Have you found this to be a helpful discussion of youthful violence? Why or why not? What special comments, criticisms, or suggestions do you have?

2. Do you feel that Garbarino's portrayal of violent youth as children and victims makes them appear less culpable for their actions? Should youth be held responsible for behavior that stems from family or social abuse? If so, to what degree? If not, how is society to protect itself?

3. Do you think violent youth might take advantage of the kindness (and perhaps the leniency) that Garbarino advocates? If so, what would be a more effective approach? 

4. Garbarino seems to say that violent youth don't really want to be violent, that they really want to be peaceful and happy like everyone else. Do you think this is a realistic assertion? Do you know any youth who would turn down a peaceful opportunity if a realistic one were presented to them?

IMPLICATIONS 

1. Youthful violence is a troubling crisis in our country—and especially on urban streets. Many have allowed sensational media reports and image to grasp its reality. 

2. This was an unusually thorough summary of a book because we think it to be an important analysis of this perplexing problem.

3. For those concerned about youth and justice, who desire healthy development and true peace and shalom in the city, this book, along with Elijah Anderson’s “Code of the Streets,” Geoffrey Canada’s Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Pedro Noguera’sThe Trouble with Black Boys, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness are important books to study.

Peter Bass (with Dean Borgman) cCYS