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Youth violence, town and country
Thursday, August 05, 1999 By Monica Haynes
No one ever dreamed it could happen there.
That's been the reaction of people living in communities rocked by school violence, such as Paducah, Ky.; Springfield, Ore.; Moses Lake, Wash.; and Littleton, Colo. These incidences of multiple killings had at least two things in common -- they were committed by young white males and they occurred in rural or suburban majority-white school districts.
Violence in urban school districts has seemingly become expected and does not draw much, if any, national attention.
What is the difference between violence among youth in the city and among those in the suburbs?
"Inner city violence, as much as it shouldn't be this way, has been endemic in a culture of poverty and culture where there's very little resources," said Dr. William Pollack, a psychologist, Harvard Medical School assistant professor and author of "Real Boys, Rescuing Our Sons from the Myth of Boyhood." "Violence [in the city] is self-protective and businesslike ... You don't see gangs of people just going out there and shooting some girls they don't like.
Generally, the suburban teens who resort to violence, said Pollack, are depressed, misunderstood and can't tolerate their pain any longer.
Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist and also a Harvard Medical School professor, said society's tendency to look the other way at inner city violence is an indicator that "still in America a black kid's life is not worth the same as a white kid's life."
"They tend to see black kids killing as some kind of lack of being civilized and they're not as prone to put those labels on white middle-class kids," he said.
Whether it's a boy in pain in the suburbs or in the city, society is at a crossroads, Pollack said. "We're at a point of crisis and opportunity. The crisis is obvious. The opportunity is, do we seize upon this and do we change the way we bring boys up? Or do we just become more punitive, do we just have more gun detectors, more rules and regulations? If that's the approach we take, then we'd better start building more prisons."
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