The New Year’s Eve fatal stabbing in London of 16-year-old Harry Pitman shocked people internationally and highlighted, far from the first time, the agonising question of youth violence.
The trend is not restricted to the UK. Only a few weeks earlier, eight high school students were arrested on murder charges in Nevada after a 17-year-old boy was beaten to death. In Toronto, Canada, last year, a group of teenage girls were arrested following the stabbing to death of a homeless man; the two oldest among them were 16, the two youngest only 13 years of age. These are not isolated examples.
What drives such aggression? The easy assumptions are that it’s a matter of “bad kids”, poor parenting, lax punishments, all in a culture of permissiveness. Or, perhaps, some people are genetically programmed to be violent. While such beliefs may be easy to digest or may satisfy our sense of moral outrage, they have nothing to do with reality. As with any living creatures, humans develop in the context of an environment. To understand what is driving youth aggression and, more generally, the rising tide of youth mental health and behavioural problems, it is the context we must examine. We must face the fact that in today’s world, many children and adolescents grow up and function in a traumatising environment, one that wounds them — wound being the root meaning of the word trauma. Such wounding can occur if children are hurt in their families of origin, by parents who were themselves hurt when young, or bullied at school, or have come too much under the influence of culturally accepted and even celebrated violent examples.
Too often, today’s parents do struggle to provide for their own children both emotionally and physically
Less obviously but scarcely less detrimentally, children can be hurt in perfectly “normal” families by loving mothers and fathers who, owing to their own stresses — personal, relational, social, economic, political — are unable to meet their kids’ needs for healthy and consistent emotional nurturing. Too often, today’s parents struggle to provide for their children emotionally and physically while increasingly isolated from the traditional supports of extended family and community.
With children spending less and less time in the presence of nurturing adults and more and more in another’s company, they fall under peer influence — that is, under the influence of fellow creatures who can only model immaturity and who, with the best of good will, cannot meet a young person’s needs for affection and loving acceptance, these being the most fundamental requirements for healthy development. The unmet needs of young creatures can lead to deep emotional frustration. This is crucial. “Frustration is the engine of aggression,” the Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld has said,
Are there “aggression genes”? Yes and no. There are certain genes that may increase the predisposition to aggressive behaviours. But a predisposition is not the same as predetermination. As studies in both humans and other primates have shown, the effect of such genes is completely neutralised by nurturing parenting — in fact, given emotionally warm environments, people with such genes can even be less aggressive than their peers who do not carry these DNA markers. Among monkeys, the differences in aggressivity were decided by whether or not the young were reared by their mothers, or purely among their peers. As two French scientists pointed out, we humans are “genetically determined not to be genetically determined”.
The effects of more overt trauma on fostering mental challenges and behavioural dysfunctions such as violent proclivities are beyond doubt from a scientific perspective, even if most teachers, legal personnel, and medical practitioners are deprived of such information. Lamentably, their training by and large ignores the developmental sources of human problems. “The evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer,” the eminent British psychologist Richard Bentall has written. And not only statistically. Traumatic experiences even affect the structure and neurobiology of the developing brain, as multiple studies have proven. This, again, is information that eludes the training of most professionals who deal with troubled youth. They are then left to try to correct behaviours — through, say, rewards and punishments in schools. Or, in the case of physicians, by prescribing medications that may, to some degree, control symptoms (if they work, which is far from always, and if they do not have noxious repercussions, which is far from rare). Whether or not such measures work, they do not address the fundamental causes and, hence, cannot promote healthy development. All such dynamics play out in a world of increasing social inequality which itself is a driver of poor health, mental and physical, and of aggression. Inequality has inexorably imposed itself globally, and saliently in Britain. In the words of two leading British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, “understanding inequality means recognising that it increases school shootings, bullying, anxiety levels, mental illness and consumerism because it threatens feelings of self-worth”.
To address the crisis of our youth an understanding of trauma and rethinking of how in today’s fractured culture we rear and educate children would be necessary.
Gabor Maté is a retired Canadian physician, pubic speaker, and the author, most recently, of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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