The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (99 page)
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Authors: Steven Pinker
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BOOK: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
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Another kind of violence that torments many children is the violence perpetrated against them by other children. Bullying has probably been around for as long as children have been around, because children, like many juvenile primates, strive for dominance in their social circle by demonstrating their mettle and strength. Many childhood memoirs include tales of cruelty at the hands of other children, and the knuckle-dragging bully is a staple of popular culture. The rogues’ gallery includes Butch and Woim in
Our Gang,
Biff Tannen in the
Back to the Future
trilogy, Nelson Muntz in
The Simpsons
, and Moe in
Calvin and Hobbes
(figure 7–21).
Our Gang,
Biff Tannen in the
Back to the Future
trilogy, Nelson Muntz in
The Simpsons
, and Moe in
Calvin and Hobbes
(figure 7–21).
Until recently, adults had written off bullying as one of the trials of childhood. “Boys will be boys,” they said, figuring that an ability to deal with intimidation in childhood was essential training for the ability to deal with it in adulthood. The victims, for their part, had nowhere to turn, because complaining to a teacher or parent would brand them as snitches and pantywaists and make their lives more hellish than ever.
But in another of those historical gestalt shifts in which a category of violence flips from inevitable to intolerable, bullying has been targeted for elimination. The movement emerged from the ball of confusion surrounding the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, as the media amplified one another’s rumors about the causes—Goth culture, jocks, antidepressants, video games, Internet use, violent movies, the rock singer Marilyn Manson—and one of them was bullying. As it turned out, the two assassins were not, as the media endlessly repeated, Goths who had been picked on by jocks.
193
But a popular understanding took hold that the massacre was an act of revenge, and childhood professionals parlayed the urban legend into a campaign against bullying. Fortunately, the theory—bully victim today, cafeteria sniper tomorrow—coexisted with more respectable rationales, such as that victims of bullies suffer from depression, impaired performance in school, and an elevated risk of suicide.
194
Currently forty-four states have laws that prohibit bullying in school, and many have mandatory curricula that denounce bullying, encourage empathy, and instruct children in how to resolve their conflicts constructively.
195
Organizations of pediatricians and child psychologists have issued statements calling for prevention efforts, and magazines, television programs, the Oprah Winfrey empire, and even the president of the United States have targeted it as well.
196
In another decade, the facetious treatment of bullying in the
Calvin and Hobbes
cartoon may become as offensive as the spank-the-wife coffee ads from the 1950s are to us today.
193
But a popular understanding took hold that the massacre was an act of revenge, and childhood professionals parlayed the urban legend into a campaign against bullying. Fortunately, the theory—bully victim today, cafeteria sniper tomorrow—coexisted with more respectable rationales, such as that victims of bullies suffer from depression, impaired performance in school, and an elevated risk of suicide.
194
Currently forty-four states have laws that prohibit bullying in school, and many have mandatory curricula that denounce bullying, encourage empathy, and instruct children in how to resolve their conflicts constructively.
195
Organizations of pediatricians and child psychologists have issued statements calling for prevention efforts, and magazines, television programs, the Oprah Winfrey empire, and even the president of the United States have targeted it as well.
196
In another decade, the facetious treatment of bullying in the
Calvin and Hobbes
cartoon may become as offensive as the spank-the-wife coffee ads from the 1950s are to us today.
FIGURE 7–21.
Another form of violence against children
Another form of violence against children
Psychological consequences aside, the moral case against bullying is ironclad. As Calvin observed, once you grow up, you can’t go beating people up for no reason. We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations, and social norms, and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other than laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view. The increased valuation of children, and the universalizing of moral viewpoints of which it is a part, made the campaign to protect children from violence by their peers inevitable. So too the effort to protect them from other depredations. Children and teenagers have long been victims of petty crimes like the theft of lunch money, vandalism of their possessions, and sexual groping, which fall in the cracks between school regulations and criminal law enforcement. Here too the interests of younger humans are increasingly being recognized.
Has it made a difference? It has begun to do so. In 2004 the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education issued a report on
Indicators of School Crime and Safety
that used victimization surveys and school and police statistics to document trends in violence against students from 1992 to 2003 .
197
The survey asked about bullying only in the last three years, but they tracked other kinds of violence for the entire period, and found that fighting, fear at school, and crimes such as theft, sexual assault, robbery, and assault all ramped downward, as figure 7–22 shows.
Indicators of School Crime and Safety
that used victimization surveys and school and police statistics to document trends in violence against students from 1992 to 2003 .
197
The survey asked about bullying only in the last three years, but they tracked other kinds of violence for the entire period, and found that fighting, fear at school, and crimes such as theft, sexual assault, robbery, and assault all ramped downward, as figure 7–22 shows.
And contrary to yet another scare that has recently been ginned up by the media, based on widely circulated YouTube videos of female teenagers pummeling one another, the nation’s girls have not gone wild. The rates of murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest level in forty years, and rates of weapon possession, fights, assaults, and violent injuries by and toward girls have been declining for a decade.
198
With the popularity of YouTube, we can expect more of these video-driven moral panics (sadist grannies? bloodthirsty toddlers? killer gerbils?) in the years to come.
198
With the popularity of YouTube, we can expect more of these video-driven moral panics (sadist grannies? bloodthirsty toddlers? killer gerbils?) in the years to come.
It is premature to say that the kids are all right, but they are certainly far better off than they used to be. Indeed, in some ways the effort to protect children against violence has begun to overshoot its target and is veering into the realm of sacrament and taboo.
FIGURE 7–22.
Violence against youths in the United States, 1992–2003
Violence against youths in the United States, 1992–2003
Source:
Data from DeVoe et al., 2004.
Data from DeVoe et al., 2004.
One of these taboos is what the psychologist Judith Harris calls the Nurture Assumption.
199
Locke and Rousseau helped set off a revolution in the conceptualization of child-rearing by rewriting the role of caregivers from beating bad behavior out of children to shaping the kind of people they would grow into. By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.
199
Locke and Rousseau helped set off a revolution in the conceptualization of child-rearing by rewriting the role of caregivers from beating bad behavior out of children to shaping the kind of people they would grow into. By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children’s intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. Despite these refutations, the Nurture Assumption developed a stranglehold on professional opinion, and mothers have been advised to turn themselves into round-the-clock parenting machines, charged with stimulating, socializing, and developing the characters of the little blank slates in their care.
Another sacrament is the campaign to quarantine children from the slightest shred of a trace of a hint of a reminder of violence. In Chicago in 2009, after twenty-five students aged eleven to fifteen took part in the age-old sport of a cafeteria food fight, they were rounded up by the police, handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon, photographed for mug shots, and charged with reckless conduct.
200
Zero-tolerance policies for weapons on school property led to a threat of reform school for a six-year-old Cub Scout who had packed an all-in-one camping utensil in his lunch box, the expulsion of a twelve-year-old girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project, and the suspension of an Eagle Scout who followed the motto “Be Prepared” by keeping a sleeping bag, drinking water, emergency food, and a two-inch pocketknife in his car.
201
Many schools have hired whistle-wielding “recess coaches” to steer children into constructive organized games, because left on their own they might run into one another, bicker over balls and jump ropes, or monopolize patches of playground.
202
200
Zero-tolerance policies for weapons on school property led to a threat of reform school for a six-year-old Cub Scout who had packed an all-in-one camping utensil in his lunch box, the expulsion of a twelve-year-old girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project, and the suspension of an Eagle Scout who followed the motto “Be Prepared” by keeping a sleeping bag, drinking water, emergency food, and a two-inch pocketknife in his car.
201
Many schools have hired whistle-wielding “recess coaches” to steer children into constructive organized games, because left on their own they might run into one another, bicker over balls and jump ropes, or monopolize patches of playground.
202
Adults have increasingly tried to keep depictions of violence out of children’s culture. In a climactic sequence of the 1982 movie
E.T.
, Elliott sneaks past a police roadblock with E.T. in the basket of his bicycle. When the film was rereleased in a 20th-anniversary version in 2002, Steven Spielberg had digitally disarmed the officers, using computer-generated imagery to replace their rifles with walkie-talkies.
203
Around Halloween, parents are now instructed to dress their children in “positive costumes” such as historical figures or items of food like carrots or pumpkins rather than zombies, vampires, or characters from slasher films.
204
A memo from a Los Angeles school carried the following costume advisory:
E.T.
, Elliott sneaks past a police roadblock with E.T. in the basket of his bicycle. When the film was rereleased in a 20th-anniversary version in 2002, Steven Spielberg had digitally disarmed the officers, using computer-generated imagery to replace their rifles with walkie-talkies.
203
Around Halloween, parents are now instructed to dress their children in “positive costumes” such as historical figures or items of food like carrots or pumpkins rather than zombies, vampires, or characters from slasher films.
204
A memo from a Los Angeles school carried the following costume advisory:
They should not depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary.
Masks are allowed only during the parade.
Costumes may not demean any race, religion, nationality, handicapped
condition, or gender.
No fake fingernails.
No weapons, even fake ones.
Elsewhere in California, a mother who thought that her children might be frightened by the Halloween tombstones and monsters in a neighbor’s yard called the police to report it as a hate crime.
205
205
The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase. Now that children are safe from being smothered on the day they are born, starved in foundling homes, poisoned by wet nurses, beaten to death by fathers, cooked in pies by stepmothers, worked to death in mines and mills, felled by infectious diseases, and beaten up by bullies, experts have racked their brains for ways to eke infinitesimal increments of safety from a curve of diminishing or even reversing returns. Children are not allowed to be outside in the middle of the day (skin cancer), to play in the grass (deer ticks), to buy lemonade from a stand (bacteria on lemon peel), or to lick cake batter off spoons (salmonella from uncooked eggs). Lawyer-vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber, their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height, and their seesaws removed altogether (so that the kid at the bottom can’t jump off and watch the kid at the top come hurtling to the ground—the most fun part of playing on a seesaw). When the producers of
Sesame Street
issued a set of DVDs containing classic programs from the first years of the series (1969–74), they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children!
206
The programs showed kids engaging in dangerous activities like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. Censored altogether was Monsterpiece Theater, because at the end of each episode the ascotted, smoking-jacketed host, Alistair Cookie (played by Cookie Monster), gobbled down his pipe, which glamorizes the use of tobacco products and depicts a choking hazard.
Sesame Street
issued a set of DVDs containing classic programs from the first years of the series (1969–74), they included a warning on the box that the shows were not suitable for children!
206
The programs showed kids engaging in dangerous activities like climbing on monkey bars, riding tricycles without helmets, wriggling through pipes, and accepting milk and cookies from kindly strangers. Censored altogether was Monsterpiece Theater, because at the end of each episode the ascotted, smoking-jacketed host, Alistair Cookie (played by Cookie Monster), gobbled down his pipe, which glamorizes the use of tobacco products and depicts a choking hazard.
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