Why are adolescents violent?

Pediatrics for Parents, March, 2008 by James Garbarino

Why are adolescents violent? The simplest answer is this: they are violent because as children they did not learn non-violent strategies to meet their needs and respond to emotions like anger, frustration and fear. Of course most adolescents--indeed most human beings of any age--are capable of violent behavior. The success of military training in producing soldiers who are capable of lethal violence "on command" is evidence of that. But the main story when it comes to adolescent violence starts in childhood.

Virtually all children express aggressive behavior in infancy and early childhood, so the real issue is not "how do children become aggressive?" but rather "why do some children continue to be aggressive and thus set the stage for becoming violent teenagers?" Research reveals that the two principal processes that control the developmental pathway for aggression in childhood are the ideas a child learns about aggression ("cognitive structuring") and the experiences a child has in situations where aggressive behavior is modeled and reinforced ("behavioral rehearsal").

Some children receive consistent messages that reduce the legitimacy of aggression ("don't hit"), while others receive messages that legitimatize aggression ("fight back when attacked" and "aggression is successful"). Similarly, some children observe parents, siblings and peers resolving conflict non-aggressively while others observe abuse and fighting. Just mapping patterns of cognitive structuring and behavioral rehearsal helps explain why some kids arrive at adolescence with a high level of aggressive behavior while others don't. We must always remember that virtually everyone who commits an act of violence believes it is justified--at least at the time the act is committed. All this helps explain why boys have traditionally engaged in more physical aggression than girls.

Girls have been taught "girls don't hit" and have been generally excluded from situations where they could practice being physically aggressive, whereas boys have been taught "boys do hit--it's just a matter of learning who, when and where to hit" and have been welcomed into situations where physical aggression is normal (most notably competitive sports). And these same processes help explain why the gap between boys and girls in the matter of physical aggression is narrowing as girls are told and shown that "girls do hit" and have a chance to participate in settings where they can practice being physically aggressive.

The ratio of girls' to boys' participation in high school sports in the past 30 years has changed from 1:32 to 1:1.5. This statistic may help explain why the ratio of male-to-female arrests for assaults changed in the last 20 years from 10:1 to 4:1, and research on the effects of televised violence on aggressive behavior in children shows that in the 1960s girls were immune to the effect but now show the same effects as boys.

The kids most at risk of bringing a pattern of serious childhood aggression into adolescence are those who have developed a chronic pattern of bad behavior and violating the rights of others, kids who might be described as meeting the criteria for what mental health professionals call "conduct disorder." Research on the links between "risky thinking" reveals that the odds that a child will develop conduct disorder reflect the intersection of being abused and having lower levels of social information processing (being hypersensitive to negative social information and oblivious to positive social information, as well as having very limited ideas of alternatives to physical aggression as a social tactic and carrying around the belief that aggression is a successful social tactic).

Knowing all this, what conclusions can parents draw? The first of these conclusions is that no matter how effective, motivated, and attentive any of us is as a parent, our children go to school with kids who are prone to behavior violently--some of whom have access to lethal weapons. There are kids--mostly boys--in every school who have developed a pattern of aggressive behavior, who have established an internal state in which they see themselves as victimized by peers and society, and whose emotions and moral judgements have become harnessed to their aggressive rage. These youths can make the transition to murder readily if weapons are available and they reach a crisis state. Knowing how these kids reach this point and what we can do reclaim them empowers us to reduce the odds that they will commit acts of lethal violence. Thus, violence prevention is everybody's business.

My second conclusion is that the problem of lethal youth violence usually starts from a combination of early difficulties in relationships that are linked to a combination of difficult "temperament" and negative experience. Every parent who knows children knows that children come equipped with different temperaments. Some are sunny and easy; others are stormy and difficult. Some children are easy to parent; others are very challenging. Some children are so difficult that no "normal, average" parent will be able to succeed without expert professional advice and support. When it comes to developing patterns of aggression, some of the difficulties lie in being impulsive, emotionally insensitive, having a high activity level, being of less-than-average intelligence, and being relatively fearless.