The fatal New Year’s Eve stabbing in London of 16-year-old Harry Pitman shocked people internationally and, far from the first time, highlighted the painful issue of youth violence.
The trend is not limited to Britain. Just a few weeks earlier, eight high school students in Nevada were arrested on murder charges after a 17-year-old boy was beaten to death. In Toronto, Canada, a group of teenage girls were arrested last year after stabbing a homeless man to death; the two oldest among them were 16 years old, the two youngest only 13 years old. These are not isolated examples.
What drives such aggression? The easy assumptions are that it’s a matter of “bad kids,” bad parenting, lax punishment, all in a culture of permissiveness. Or maybe some people are genetically programmed to be violent. While such beliefs are easy to digest or may satisfy our sense of moral outrage, they have nothing to do with reality. Like all living things, humans develop in the context of an environment. To understand what drives aggression among young people and, more generally, the increasing number of mental health and behavioral problems among young people, this is the context we need to investigate. We must face the fact that in today’s world many children and adolescents grow up and function in a traumatizing environment, an environment that wounds them – wound is the root meaning of the word trauma. Such injuries can arise when children are injured in the family of origin, by parents who were themselves injured when they were young, or bullied at school, or who have come under too much influence from culturally accepted and even celebrated examples of violence .
Too often, today’s parents struggle to care for their own children both emotionally and physically
Less obvious, but hardly less detrimental, children in perfectly ‘normal’ families can be hurt by loving mothers and fathers who, due to their own stresses – personal, relational, social, economic, political – are unable to meet their children’s needs for healthy nutrition. and consistent emotional care. Too often, today’s parents struggle to care for their children emotionally and physically as they become increasingly isolated from the traditional support of the extended family and community.
As children spend less and less time in the presence of caring adults and more and more in the company of others, they fall under the influence of peers – that is, under the influence of fellow creatures who can only exemplify immaturity and who dear goodwill , cannot meet young people’s needs for affection and loving acceptance, as these are the most basic requirements for healthy development. The unmet needs of young beings can lead to deep emotional frustration. This is crucial. “Frustration is the engine of aggression,” Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld has said:
Are there ‘aggression genes’? Yes and no. There are certain genes that can increase the predisposition to aggressive behavior. But a predisposition is not the same as a predisposition. As studies in both humans and other primates have shown, the effect of such genes is completely neutralized by nurturing parenthood. In an emotionally warm environment, people with such genes may even be less aggressive than their peers who do not carry these DNA markers. . In monkeys, differences in aggressiveness were determined by whether or not the young were raised by their mothers, or purely among their peers. As two French scientists noted, we humans are “genetically determined not to be genetically determined.”
The effects of more overt trauma in promoting mental problems and behavioral disorders such as violent tendencies are unquestioned from a scientific perspective, even though most teachers, legal staff and doctors are deprived of such information. Unfortunately, their training broadly ignores the developmental causes of human problems. “The evidence for a link between childhood adversity and future psychiatric disorders is statistically about as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer,” has written the eminent British psychologist Richard Bentall. And not just statistically. Traumatic experiences even affect the structure and neurobiology of the developing brain, as several studies have proven. Once again, this is information that escapes the training of most professionals who deal with troubled youth. They should then try to correct the behavior, for example through rewards and punishments in schools. Or, in the case of doctors, by prescribing medications that can control symptoms to some extent (if they work, which is not always, and if they have no harmful effects, which is far from rare). Whether or not such measures work, they do not address the root causes and therefore cannot promote healthy development. All these dynamics play out in a world of increasing social inequality, which in itself is a driver of poor mental and physical health, and aggression. Inequality has inexorably made its way around the world and especially in Britain. In the words of two leading British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, “understanding inequality means recognizing that it increases school shootings, bullying, anxiety levels, mental illness and consumerism because it threatens feelings of self-worth.”
Addressing the crisis of our youth would require an understanding of trauma and a rethinking of how we raise and educate children in today’s fractured culture.
Gabor Maté is a retired Canadian physician, public speaker and author, most recently, of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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