Why Are American Boys So Aggressive

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by James DeMeo PhD.

In a cross-cultural study of affection and aggression done at McDonald's playgrounds, pre-schoolers in France playfully touched each other twice as much US children did, but while the French children acted aggressively only 1 percent of the time, the US youth did so 29 percent of the time.

Anthropologists have long known that cultures that shower physical affection on young children have little adult violence, dating back to Margaret Mead's studies in New Guinea.

But the study in McDonald's playgrounds in France and the United States, along with other new evidence, suggests that it's time for America to take another look at how it raises its children, particularly boys, to stop the crisis of violence, researchers said at the nation's largest annual psychological association meeting.

"There's got to be some relationship between a lack of touching and violence," said Tiffany Field, MD of the University of Miami Medical School, who conducted the study at the McDonald's playgrounds especially since international statistics have consistently shown that France has the lowest homicide rate of developed nations, while the United States has the highest.

Dr. Field said she fears there will be even less physical affection toward children in our society as a result of teachers and day care providers worrying about accusations of sexual abuse

She joined several other researchers in presenting their recent findings about the root causes of anger, isolation and violence in boys, during a news conference Friday, August 20, 1999 at the annual American Psychological Association meeting in Boston, MA. (similar article in APA monitor)

While they agreed that the inability to express affection and other constructive emotions may play a role in violence, they cautioned that there are other factors as well, and that it is difficult to prove cause and effect.

But with headlines about schoolyard shootings and hate crimes perpetrated by boys and men, the need to understand the root causes are more important than ever, the researchers said.

For Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon, the problem is "we give boys an emotional mis- education."

Society tells boys "you can punch each other, but you can't have any kind of affectionate touch," said Dr. Kindlon, an assistant professor at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health.

Boys grow up unable to talk about their emotions or to be aware of others' feelings, and they have fewer constructive ways of dealing with stress, said Kindlon, co-author of a book on the topic entitled Raising Cain. "Because of a lack of adaptive response, too many boys act out in violence and anger," Kindlon said.

Harvard and McLean Hospital psychologist William S. Pollack, author of the book Real Boys, said "we have a national crisis of boyhood in America" at the same time that there is a national crisis of violence.

In a study of 200 boys from ages 12 through 17, who were considered well- adjusted, normal boys, Pollack found much angst, depression and sadness. He linked these to their feeling they had to live up to the old myths about boys being boys and boys not crying, while on the other hand feeling they had to live up to new demands of being more sensitive and egalitarian toward girls.

This kind of turmoil and conflict may lead some boys to violence, Pollack said.

Other studies on presented at the conference touched upon such issues as schoolyard bullying and prevention of violence through negotiation.

Postscript:

Why should US boys be more violent than French boys? The above article gives some suggestions, but we can add to those suggestions:

* About 60% of American boys are genitally mutilated in infancy, while French boys are overwhelmingly not.

* American hospital births are more traumatic and damaging, even aside from circumcision: the USA rate of Cesarean section birth is currently at around 25%, which is 24.5% higher than it should be. Cesarean birth rates are a general indicator for the presence of other highly traumatic and invasive procedures which work a damage upon the maternal-infant bond, even when a laboring mother does not have a Cesarean. A high percentage of French births are delivered by midwives, often in out-of-hospital clinics; in the USA, only a low percentage of births are so delivered.

* AIDS hysteria and sex-repressive ideology are much more widespread in the USA than in France or Europe. "Abstinence education" is a main-stay of USA public school education, whereas schools in Western Europe emphasize contraceptive methods without the sex-negative ideology.

* "Don't Touch" phobias appear more predominant in the USA, where children are more and more brought up in environments where hugging and kissing and touching are increasingly taboo. USA children have been expelled from school for innocently kissing, for example, and teachers have been threatened or actually fired for hugging students. Among USA males, homophobia is also extreme, such that a boy who hugs another boy will certainly be ridiculed as being "queer", etc.

* Breast-feeding phobias are still abundant in the USA, to the point where state legislatures recently were forced to enact laws to end a spate of jailings and police harassment of mothers who had breast-fed their infants in public. The rates of breast-feeding in France are not available, but are believed to be higher than in the USA.

* "Statutory Rape" laws in the USA (originally formulated to prevent the recruitment of young girls into prostitution) currently are used to put adolescent and teen boys into youth detention centers and prisons for very natural and consensual sexual expression with consenting adolescent and teen girls, whereas in France and most of Europe, such laws are appropriately applied only when forcible rape occurs.

California and several other USA states now have Special Prosecutors whose sole job is to seek out and prosecute youth "statutory rape" cases, as part of the new "population control" regimen passed by Congress. If a state does not employ such Orwellian anti-sex prosecution of young males for healthy sexual expression, the State loses money ear-marked for contraceptive programs.

* American parents and teachers may be more dogmatic and authori- tarian, and less demonstrably physically affectionate towards their kids than French parents and teachers, with a higher percentage of hidden sadists, reflective of a more violent background population.

* American television and movies are demonstrably very violent, even for programs developed for youth. Many cartoons for boys are nothing more than mass-advertising for violent-type "action figures" modeled on the most violent adult-content movies (compare "Rambo" to "GI Joe").

Karate-type, wrestling and shoot-em-up police-criminal-violence programs occur during all hours of television, and young boys in the USA are often seen to mimic such media violence in their interactions.

* The same hypocritical President who authored and signed into law the above "Special Sex-Prosecutors for Kids" laws, also fired Jocelyn Elders, former Surgeon General, for openly saying that masturbation was OK for youth.

Americans were not detectably bothered by these extremely sex-repressive actions of the President, but many were extremely bothered to learn the President had a consensual extra-marital affair, to the point of demanding his resignation and/or impeachment. This suggests that many/most Americans generally agree that adolescent sexual expression of any kind is a very bad thing sometimes requiring hard jail time, and that Public Health officials who dare to publicly favor adolescent sexual pleasure should also be strongly punished -- and that extra-marital sex should also be punished. What are French attitudes towards masturbation?

The above factors, and general knowledge of French openness towards physical nudity on beaches, in magazine advertisements, and towards sexual matters in general, suggest they view adolescent sexual expression more positively than do Americans.

Obviously many of the above points require additional cross-cultural examination, but for the most part they are already demonstrated in various cross-cultural studies.

See my book Saharasia for more details, and extensive citations for similar cross-cultural studies demonstrating sex-repressive factors underlying youth violence and social violence in general.

James DeMeo, Ph.D., Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, Greensprings Research and Educational Center, PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA, http://www.orgonelab.org demeo@mind.net