By: Michael Gurian
Last week, on February 14, 2018, a teenage gunman slaughtered children and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a suburb northwest of Ft. Lauderdale. He killed twelve people inside the school walls, three outside, and two died on the way to the hospital. To ensure his kills, the gunman used the fire alarm as a weapon—forcing children and teachers out of the school so he could slaughter them freely.
Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Littleton, Jonesboro, Las Vegas, Springfield…well-reported tragedies over the last two decades perpetrated by males are heartbreaking. Similarly, male suicides nationwide are in the tens of thousands per year. According to the FBI, reported suicides and murders are small compared to the daily male-driven tragedies in inner cities and throughout the culture which, over the decades, cast into the millions.
When we discuss these tragedies, rarely, if ever, do we direct our outrage at how our nation has systematically abandoned its sons. Instead, we tend to hear three repeated themes: “mentally ill males,” “get rid of guns,” “toxic masculinity.” All three have merit, and the first two especially apply to this case—this mentally ill male should not have had so much access to AR 15s, ammunition, and guns. As a nation, we simply must better legislate and enforce laws that protect our society from excessive gun use. But these themes are not enough. They hide an equally deep theme.
We have tacitly decided as a nation that helping boys thrive is somehow anathema to our national values, and we are paying the price. As millions of boys grow up on a depression-violence spectrum, we think we’ve figured out why—“toxic masculinity and patriarchal gender norms”—but those ideas are not primarily why boys do what they do; doggedly pursuing those ideas without bringing deeper science into the conversation will crush us as a nation. Where our boys go, we go—for better or worse.
Elizabeth Bruenig, a Washington Post reporter, wrote these powerful words on February 16, 2018, just days after the shooting.
“Nothing symbolizes the foreclosure of the future like the slaughter of a nation’s young. And it’s so routine now—there have been 18 school shootings in 2018, an average of one every 60 hours –that attention will quickly fade, as it does with subjects one doesn’t intend to do anything about. Another word for that bitter fatalism is defeat.”
These are stark and almost bitter words, but they ring true for me and many of us who advocate for boys, girls, and everyone on the gender spectrum. The initial Gurian Institute pilot was funded and founded at the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Center for Safe Schools as a response to the governor’s mandate that Missouri schools keep their children safe. It is now 20 years later and the crisis of American boyhood is, in some ways, getting worse. Our schools are generally very safe places to be; yet how can we not see the dangers our boys both experience and then put us, the public, into without our hearts breaking?
Our Boy Crisis
Bruenig’s reference to a national defeat is, at its root, I believe, our abandonment of males in nearly every social system. Some males climb to the top of organizations and do quite well, but millions of all races are not doing well. When I travel to communities to speak and lead training, people are often surprised to learn just how deep the boy crisis goes.
*America has the highest rate of male incarceration per capita of any country in the world. Among males 17 or younger, the boy-to-girl ratio in correctional institutions is 9:1. Among 18-21 year olds, the ratio grows to 14:1. Boys of color are systematically moved from neighborhoods to schools to prisons; meanwhile, prisons are populated mainly by white males, so this is an issue that includes race but goes beyond race, too—it goes to the heart of maleness in America.
*Suicide kills approximately 30,000 American boys and men per year, and males kill themselves at four times the rate of girls. Males of color are increasingly turning to suicide as a way out of despair, especially among returning veterans, and suicide among our males is now the second leading cause of death in America. But, again, minority race is not the only factor in this area of male distress: according to the National Academy of Sciences, more white males have died of suicide in the last three decades than of AIDS.
*Boys are twice as likely as girls to be victims of violence in America but in certain age groups, the ratio is 6:1. For instance, among adolescent children, six males die from violence for every one female. Boys of color in the inner city are considered “highly likely” to die from violent causes by or about age 25—the end of male adolescence.
*Boys receive two-thirds of the D’s and F’s in our schools but less than 40 percent of the A’s. Some boys, of course, test very well and are doing quite well, but overall, in every racial or ethnic group, we find girls doing better than boys in overall markers. The well-known female gap in math/science, for instance, is a 3-point gap while the male gap in literacy is a 10-point gap, leaving males 1 and ½ years behind females in literacy skills, and skewing aggregate scores toward much higher female and lower male performance.
*Boys are twice as likely as girls to be labeled “emotionally disturbed” and twice as likely to be diagnosed with a behavioral or learning disorder. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just reported that 20% of children 3 to 17 “have, in any given year, a mental or emotional illness” and, they report depression among children and teens worsening.
*One in eleven Americans, most of them boys, are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Our Gurian Institute research in 2,000 schools show that at least one-third of schoolboys diagnosed with ADD/ADHD are misdiagnosed. While some boys do need medication, millions of males are being medicated unnecessarily, with severe consequences for motivation and growth. Given that 80 percent of the world’s Ritalin is used in the U.S., we have a particularly American problem.
*Boys are four times as likely as girls to be suspended or expelled from early childhood and K – 12 learning environments. Our Gurian Institute research shows America’s schools, from Pre-K through college, struggling in these academic and behavioral markers in large part because teachers and staff have not received training in male/female learning and behavior difference. Graduate schools don’t teach a Boys and Girls Learn Differently class to future teachers, often because they don’t find it to be politically correct. But without this training, these hard-working teachers are often unable to manage and grow male energy and acumen most effectively.
*The latest PISA study (Programme for International Student Assessment) from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows boys behind girls in most developmental, behavioral, academic, and social markers in all industrialized countries. Weekly and sometimes daily, I receive an email from a parent or professional in China, Japan, Qatar, Nigeria, Brazil, Vietnam, Australia, and many other countries asking, “What can we do to help our failing boys?” The boy crisis is a worldwide problem.
In 2015, the World Health Organization published a major study of men’s and boys’ health worldwide. In it the study’s authors—from Europe, the U.S. and Asia—provided statistics and analysis from all continents, including the most comprehensive health study worldwide to date, the Global Burden of Disease Study led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. This study corroborates the OECD’s PISA study referred to above but takes it even further, into health markers.
The study concludes that in most of the world, girls and women are doing better than boys and men in both physical and mental health indicators. Even when statistics regarding female depression, eating disorders, and violence-against-females such as rape and genital mutilation are included, males are doing statistically worse. Perhaps most surprising to people is the study’s wide reach: the health and wellness gender gap favoring females exists in all 72 industrialized countries, including countries like China or Oman that we have tended to believe are ‘still patriarchal,’ and thus should be harder on females than males.
The WHO study asks us to see our hundreds of millions of invisible boys. “In most parts of the world, health outcomes among boys and men continue to be substantially worse than among girls and women,” the study authors write. “Yet this gender-based disparity in health has received little national, regional or global acknowledgement or attention from health policy-makers or health-care providers.”
The study concludes: “Including both women and men in efforts to reduce gender inequalities in health as part of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda would improve everyone’s health and well-being.”
(For detailed references, please see Saving Our Sons, Chapter 1, Endnotes)
The Paralysis of the First Theme
I believe we have abandoned male development at its core but don’t realize how completely we are defeating ourselves. I began to see this back in the 1990s when asked both in Missouri and in the national media to discuss causes of the first major school shootings–in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield, Oregon, and Littleton, Colorado. “It’s the male role, isn’t it?” reporters asked in various ways. “It’s privileged males not wanting to give up dominance and power, males being told they have to be stoic, don’t share feelings and hurts, look to dominate, and when they can’t take it anymore, they hurt people.”
This “masculine role” and “masculinity” theme was the first and easy theme of that time, and to some extent, it still is. In a USA Today article on February 15, 2018, two days after the recent shooting, it was enunciated. “Not only do traditional notions of masculinity prevent men from seeking counseling or other forms of help they need, help which may prevent these mass shootings, but violence is also inculcated as a more masculine alternative than help-seeking.”
The sociologists and reporter continued: “Men are forced to be tough and unemotional. It’s an example of toxic masculinity, the stereotypical and historically harmful definition of what it means to be a man….as women have gained greater power and opportunity in the last century, men have lost some of what they were taught made them ‘real men,’ including, in many cases, being the breadwinner. Men who think they’re falling short of traditional gender norms are more likely to engage in ‘stereotypically masculine behaviors,’ like violence.”
This is the dominant and popular social theory, yet violence is a disease, not a stereotype. The AMA began to treat violence as a disease almost three decades ago. Males do not become psychotic, sociopathic, and/or violently depressed because they 1) do not cry or talk about their feelings as much as others; and 2) have been faced with no longer being bread-winners. Few or none of the violent boys and men perpetrating school shootings have shown a proclivity for thinking about lost male roles as they prepare to kill children. Many, if not most, of the adult men who kill and hurt others are breadwinners.
Meanwhile, the “not talking about feelings causes violence” argument is epidemiologically unproven. Some people talk about their feelings, others don’t; some men are stoic, others gush. Most stoic people are never violent. Some emotionally expressive people are violent. Some men repress too much of what they feel—every mental health counselor, including me, tries to help them open up–but they do not kill people because they have trouble discussing feelings.
We should remember, too: a hundred years ago, a thousand, boys did not cry or discuss feelings as much as they do now and certainly not as much as girls, but they did not become so depressed and ill as to slaughter innocents–including children–in their schools.
Does the “masculine role causes problems in society” hypothesis have merit? Of course, it does. Social roles can affect various people in various ways. But we have to look carefully at the idea that “shifting male roles” and “gender stereotypes” cause boys to become violent. If we don’t re-think our popular concepts around this, we will not fix the actual causes of the carnage.
Boys and men become violent because their brain chemistry and brain development gradually experience the disease of violence. The disease is generally a part of a male depression spectrum. Millions of American males, starting quite young, live on that depression spectrum, which manifests at its mildest in undermotivation and anhedonia, and at its most severe in despair that can become psychosis, rage, hatred, and violence. We must track it better and understand it more deeply if we are going to save our children and our society.
The Provable Causes of Male Violence
The psychologist Gregory Jantz, author of Raising Boys by Design, and Founding Director of the mental health agency, The Center, A Place of Hope, discussed it this way on a podcast last week.
“These violent boys are deeply wounded and depressed. They have experienced significant trauma and loss; they have been betrayed and they feel betrayed. Their lives feel meaningless to them and so the lives of others become meaningless. Gradually they focus their internal struggle on plotting and planning revenge and when they feel well prepared, they commence the violent taking of others’ lives and/or their own. The wounded-ness in these boys–their despair, their depression, and their violence–become most of what they are. This is a disease of our culture we must treat as a disease.”
Dr. Jantz has captured these boys well. My research corroborates his findings. There are three primary causes for male violence–three reasons boys live on the depression-violence spectrum.
First Cause: Environmental neurotoxins attack our son’s genes and development. Neurotoxins such as air pollution, lead and aluminum in homes, BPH in plastics, artificial sweeteners, red dye, and monosodium glutamate in food, endocrine disruptors in fertilizer…all have been proven to negatively affecting gene expression. This direct and cellular cause of male violence remains relatively under-studied or expressed in our social literature yet is wreaking havoc on our society as a whole because it attacks our children’s genes and our own at a cellular level. Two boys may experience the same trauma in their lives but one of those boys kills people and the other does no. Why? Internal genetics and specific gene damage from environmental toxins to those genes collaborate at one reason.
Second Cause: Nurture-trauma received and experienced by boys between birth and young adulthood. These traumas include physical and sexual abuse, poverty, repeatedly witnessing violence, repetitive and dangerous bullying, head injury and repeated concussions, substance abuse, and other continuing negative stressors in social-emotional growth. To become violent, generally, males will have experienced significant and repeated trauma to brain development at some point in their first decade and a half of life.
Third Cause: Under-nurture of essential components of male development by nuclear, extended, and communal families. Our society began breaking down neuro-developmentally essential scaffolding for male development around fifty years ago. This included depleting males of father-attachment and attacking as dangerous and/or removing healthy masculine development. Without fully realizing how profoundly this multi-faceted under-nurturance will cripple male maturity and psychological health, our families and child-supportive institutions still, often, dramatically under-nurture males.
One of these causes of the depression spectrum among males may be enough to then cause him to become enraged and/or violent. Any of the three causes can be the wounded-ness Dr. Jantz described; two or more or all three at once significantly increase the likelihood that he and others like him will try to destroy what he can when he can.
Correlation: Cultural stereotypes and gender norms. I do not find conclusive evidence that “gender stereotypes” and “gender norms of masculinity” cause violent depression. There is a correlation, however.
The hero of a recent Marvel movie, Black Panther, discussed his cousin who was traumatized as a child by his uncle, the king, and then became the enemy of the people: “We created our own monster.”
Indeed, a society creates its monsters through the three causes, but the monster will tend to wear the mask of the correlation. The monster-mask a school shooter often wears is one of armor, guns blaze indiscriminately, the soldier shows no empathy, and dominance is the game. While this is not masculinity–masculinity teaches moral values that disallow this kind of behavior–it is nonetheless true that, for some people, masculine norms do involve the pride of gun ownership and a lack of empathy for prey.
Abandoned Boys and Men
The masks are real things; certain people’s masculine norms and the concept of toxic masculinity are real things. But they do not create or cause the monster. They are only a mask.
If we won’t see past the correlation of the mask to the causes, we will have difficulty even thinking about altering our culture to help boys thrive. We will continue to put all our social capital into “boys and men have it all except that they won’t give up old social norms” or “boys kill people because of toxic masculinity,” leaving millions of males abandoned in their trauma, their shame, their vulnerability, and their depression.
Joy Moses, policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, pointed out in 2014 a subtle but comprehensive way we abandon males in need in America. “Funding for both government and nonprofit programs to help males has been scarce. A recent survey shows the top two ways that nonprofit service providers connect with males is through parole and child support enforcement programs. As a low-income man, you have to get in trouble to get help.” Her research was confirmed by Jacquelyn Boggess, co-director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice, a Wisconsin-based think tank, who wrote in The Atlantic, “The majority of United States anti-poverty programs almost exclusively serve women and children.”
Our assistance to women and children is sacred, but our blindness to male distress, and our lack of support for males, just increases our defeat as a society. Community by community, our sons are boys and men; as such, they need male-specific nurturing and help. Most people in their every day lives know this, I believe, but our society seems at war with itself when social policy gets made.
It Is Time to Help Boys Thrive – Systematically and in the Grass Roots
We cannot keep going on this way as a nation. No matter our party, creed, race, or faith, as we mourn the loss of children to violent boys and men, we must act. To act, we must see all the invisible boys of all races and creeds who have been abandoned. We must choose between continuing a gender war in which males and females both are losers and operating out of new cultural emphases on helping boys thrive. Yes, boys. I am a father of daughters saying that. It is time to help our boys with as much vigor as we help girls.
Very importantly: everything we do for boys will help girls. Parents of daughters know this instinctively, as do most girls and women themselves. Boys carry the loneliness and distress of a culture on their backs and in their hearts. When a culture is failing, boys will fail; when boys fail, they will often hurt themselves and others. Trauma and under-nurturance often affects the male brain and biochemistry differently than it does female–including increased physical violence in the male. This is a genetic and neural reality.
To systematically help boys thrive we should and will continue to talk about toxic masculinity and gender role pressure. I have enunciated these themes in my books, including Saving Our Sons, and my colleagues have, too—psychologist William Pollock (Real Boys), psychologist Michael Thompson (Raising Cain), political scientist Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis), as well as many others. These ideas are important.
At the same time, we will need to go beyond these themes, just like my colleagues and I have. All of us have pointed out longitudinal research proving that the lack of father attachment is actually causal of male distress. In The Boy Crisis, for instance, Warren Farrell presents the gender roles argument but then devotes even more time to lack of fathering. Quite often, a boy without a father is a depressed boy, he points out. Quite often, that boy can become violent. Part of the scaffolding that keep boys from falling into the depression-violence abyss are fathers and other males who teach boys how to be a good, empathetic men.
This is just one of the facts that will need to be better understood in our culture wars. Not less but more masculinity is needed to help our sons. Tim Wright, author of Searching for Tom Sawyer, put it this way: “Because the father pours masculinity into his son, the son can grow up whole.” Fathering, he notes, is often a unique blend of love, challenge, risk-practice, character development, and impulse-control.
We as a society are absolutely in a new world rising out of the old–we are replacing old ideas about female and male that needed to be replaced–but our rising is sputtering, it is failing, because we are trying to erase a necessary and beautiful part of the world: the strong, confident, well-loved, and successful man.
Science is Key to Helping Boys Thrive
We are in a cultural moment now. We can and must deepen our national paradigm of boyhood. Our Institute team is putting heart and soul into this effort and we hope you will join us. Five years ago, we developed the Helping Boys Thrive Initiatives, including the Helping Boys Thrive Summits. At these summits, the themes of male role pressure, masculinity, and toxic masculinity are discussed, and we go further, too, into the science of the male brain, looking at all three aspects of male and female development: nature, nurture, and culture.
This is one of our ways of trying to effect social change. I hope you will look at www.helpingboysthrive.org and consider doing a Summit in your community. Without Tim Wright, a tireless advocate for the deep conversation about boys’ development, many of our summits might not happen, and I want to thank Tim publicly. Everyone who is working toward this goal is giving of time and resources toward the deep dive into understanding how to help boys thrive in a time of sadness and fear.
If not a Thrive event or initiative where you are, I hope you will organize some other event or intervention. In Florida, teens are protesting gun violence in hopes of getting assault-type weapons out of the hands of the mentally disturbed, and off our streets. In Arizona, after 11 boys and 2 girls committed suicide in the greater Phoenix area within a period of the last few months, a group of moms is lobbying state legislators to introduce suicide prevention legislation for school training and funding. Bravo to all of them.
In “Furies and Sufferings,” the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “Ah, if we could only placate the world’s rage with a drop of poetry or a drop of love–but only struggle and the daring heart are capable of that.” We need daring hearts now.
We must come together to fight for those who cannot articulate the terror inside them, the woundedness that leads them to commit terrible acts of violence. While first helping their victims, we must then also join together on behalf of all of our desperate young men. As we fight to articulate what they need, we will save ourselves.
Ultimately, each time we live through a tragedy like the most recent in Florida, a desperate boy is saying to us, “There are multiple causes for the ‘monster’ I have become—look deeper into males than you have. I am a complex human being. You need to figure me out now with as much attention and acumen as you have figured out my sisters. If you don’t, I and others like me will defeat you.”
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