At the Harvard Club: Causes and Consequences of Violent Behavior
by Irma S. Jarcho
"Protecting Our Children: the Causes and Consequences of Violent Behavior" was the focus of a presentation on 7 May 1997 sponsored by the staff of the Harvard School of Public Health at the Harvard Club in New York City. New York Times correspondent Fox Butterfield spoke about his personal investigations, chiefly of Willy Bosket, now published in All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (Knopf, New York, 1995); and Felton J. Earls, M.D., Professor of Human Behavior and Development at the School, discussed the work of the Project on Human Development in Chicago.
Butterfield pointed out that for Willy Bosket violence was something to be proud of. In second grade he was expelled for violent behavior and sent to Bellevue. Before he was 15 he had been sent to more than 20 institutions but nowhere did he stay long -- nobody wanted him. Then he murdered two men on the subway. He is now in solitary confinement for life; and because he has stabbed and beat guards, he is also behind glass.
The question which motivated Butterfield's investigations was "What made Willy so violent -- and so unrepentant about it?" Butterfield was able to gain Bosket's confidence and embarked on a study not only of Bosket himself but also of his background and parentage. He found that Willy's father had also murdered before he was 15 and was also subject to long incarceration. Indeed, he was the only man who ever graduated from college Phi Bate Kappa while at Leavenworth.
Butterfield's studies carried him to Edgefield county in South Carolina, the single most violent county in the U.S. He pointed out that violence in the U.S. was not a recent phenomenon and not a product of cities, poverty, or race. You did not go to court to settle disputes; you settled them yourself. Last year 42% of all murders were in the South. Violence was something to be proud of -- and the pattern of violence in Willy Bosket's case could be traced back several generations -- to his great-grandfather. Butterfield's last reminder to his audience was the sobering fact that one and a half million children in the U.S. have mothers or fathers who are in prison.
The Project on Human Development in Chicago discussed by Dr. Earls is an initiative of the Office of Justice Program of the National Institute of Justice (U.S. Department of Justice). The eight year program will attempt to determine how individual personalities, family relationships, school environment, and type of community interact to contribute to delinquency and criminal behavior. Dr. Earls reported on aggressive antisocial behavior in a small group since kindergarten. There is a distinct age/crime curve in which antisocial behavior peaks in mid-adolescence, he pointed out. Post-traumatic stress disorder is also a factor: 40% of the children have witnessed violence; in the Chicago neighborhood studied, 25% of the children had seen someone stabbed or killed. Acute stress included fear, hopelessness, and resignation. Chronic stress included rage, sadness, dissociation, and borderline "spacing out." In the neighborhoods studied some 30-40% of the children studied live below the standards of living considered adequate for physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development -- a devastating indictment of an urban environment.
This program was one in a continuing series in which the Harvard School of Public Health is celebrating its 75th anniversary.
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