When children become violent or cruel, what are the reasons?

 

By Maria Elena Baca
Star Tribune

 

A 13-year-old Fergus Falls boy is charged with killing a 2-year-old girl. Three North Branch boys, two of them age 6, one age 8, are accused of beating a puppy to death.

 

Those cases last month follow those of the 17-year-old charged in the shooting death and robbery of tourist in Uptown and a Chaska teen charged with killing his mother in a plot to claim an early inheritance. And still fresh in our minds is the image of 16-year-old Jeff Weise, who shot nine people at Red Lake High School last year before killing himself.

 

So what is it with boys?

 

For the most part, violent crime among boys younger than 18 is down substantially in Minnesota and nationwide. When they happen, the crimes are high-profile and chilling. But while boys do account for the majority of juvenile violent crime, researchers are hesitant to assign one ready reason for the imbalance.

 

"Being male is definitely a risk factor," said Dr. Iris Borowsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. But girls are perpetrators of violence as well. "We've tried to look at things like testosterone or the Y chromosome, but nothing's been found conclusively," Borowsky said.

 

Some of the answers might be in the way boys and girls are parented, said Ross Macmillan, a University of Minnesota sociology professor who has studied the link between psychology and criminal behavior among children.

 

"We pay much closer attention to the behavior of girls than to the behavior of boys," he said. "We give boys a lot more rope. We also interpret behavior differently depending on whether it's a male or female. Boys acting out is seen as more normal behavior than girls acting out."

 

Yet cultural differences don't go far enough to explain why boys turn violent, said Dr. Robert Sege, professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

 

"Daring each other to do things is a boy thing," he said. "Being somewhat more risky, that sort of thing, is more common in boys, for sure, but being cruel to a defenseless puppy, that's not a 'boys will be boys' thing. It's outside the normal realm and people know that."

 

Sege suggested that as women's roles change in the rest of society, it's natural to expect that girls' behavior will change, too.

 

Indeed, while girls are implicated in violent incidents much less often, arrests of girls are on the upswing nationally. Over the past 10 years, the number of killings attributed to boys younger than 18 has dropped by about two-thirds, and assaults have gone down slightly. In the same period, the number of killings attributed to girls has gone down by about half, while assaults are up by about 25 percent.

 

Serious matter

 

Researchers who study violence among children and teens agree that acts of cruelty and violence toward humans and animals -- even far short of homicide -- are a serious matter.

 

They present an opportunity to intervene and maybe prevent more serious trouble later.

 

Still, conclusions and root causes remain mushy, they say. There are risk factors, but no fail-safe predictors, Borowsky said. Risk factors in society include neighborhood violence, social prejudice, economic deprivation and access to guns. In families, there might be violent conflict, substance abuse and a lack of connectedness and caring. In schools: a feeling of danger, lack of achievement, sense of failure, a lack of connectedness.

 

Turn any of those around, and the protective factors can offset the risks, Borowsky said. "The more risk factors you have, the more at risk you are," she said. "But the good news is, the protective factors add up, too."

 

When you consider all of the kids with multiple risk factors, it's amazing that more kids aren't violent, she said: "It really shows you the power of protection."

 

Still, Sege warned that even kids in the most stable environments can be put at risk by violence in media.

 

"There is a clearly established link between media violence in general and violent behavior in children," he said. "Children are exposed to an extraordinary amount of media violence. ... Kids learn from what they observe, and what they observe includes what they see on TV."

 

Many young children, he added, have yet to learn to differentiate "pretend" TV violence from the real thing.

 

Parents are not the only influences on kids' behavior, the researchers said, but they are the most important, whether the child has shown violent behavior or not.

 

"Parents play such an important role in protecting their kids from violence involvement," Borowsky said. "One of the most important things is having parent-family caring and connectedness. That means you know your parents are crazy about you. You feel close to them, you have fun with your family. That concept is so protective."

 

It's dangerous to draw conclusions from incidents that make the news, about the children involved or kids in general, Macmillan and others warned. Reflecting on the North Branch kids, he said the situation is worrisome, but not a life sentence.

 

"What's going through their heads? Probably not all that much," he said. "There's a good reason we don't execute 6-year-olds, because they don't think a lot about the consequences of their actions. The goal is to make sure they stop, to make sure they don't go on at age 10 or age 14 and so on."

 

And children who are showing violent behavior need help right away.

 

"If parents are concerned their child may be aggressive, or if they're told by the school their child is a bully, or hear about or see a child being cruel to an animal, they need to take that seriously," Sege said, "and talk to a pediatrician to find out what they need to do to get their child some help, because these are real warning signs."