To Raise a Boy by Emma Brown

Author:Emma Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Adverse childhood experiences are an epidemic across social and demographic groups. The Kaiser/CDC study conducted in the 1990s surveyed seventeen thousand mostly white and well-educated Californians. It found that two-thirds of subjects reported having had at least one adverse experience, and 12.6 percent reported having had four or more. But Black children accumulate significantly more adverse experiences than white children—not because of the color of their skin, but because of the social realities they live in, realities shaped by discrimination and racism that have historically fenced their families off from economic and educational opportunities.

John Rich, a physician and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, interviewed young male victims of violence in Boston in an effort to better understand how to help them heal. Some had been caught in random crossfire, while others had been living aggressive lives as a form of survival in neighborhoods where shrinking from a fight just puts a bigger target on your back.

One seventeen-year-old gunshot victim, Jimmy, explained that in his community, young men shoot and fight to build reputations as men to be feared. Jimmy said that’s what he had done, and that’s why other guys usually didn’t mess with him. They knew who he was. “Violence worked in his world to accomplish something that all of us wanted—to be somebody—but that Jimmy could not find any other way to do,” Rich wrote, in Wrong Place, Wrong Time (2011).

Jimmy and each of the other victims Rich interviewed were grappling with the trauma of their injuries on top of unaddressed childhood trauma that they had been carrying for years. Yet they did not have words for the symptoms they experienced—the jumpiness, the sleeplessness, the tendency toward rage. Rich came to believe that the trauma they experienced was particularly harmful in combination with the social norms that told them that, as men, they could not cry or show weakness or vulnerability. All of their feelings were channeled into the narrow groove of rage, which too often had nowhere to spill out except in acts of aggression against other people—against other men in the street or against lovers at home.

Rich told me his critics sometimes argue that he uses men’s trauma to try to justify violent behavior that can’t be justified. What he is offering, though, is not an excuse but an explanation for why violence is so hard to uproot. And that explanation has led him to help develop efforts to steer young male victims of gun violence toward a different life. Now a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Rich helps run Healing Hurt People, an effort to reach young men before they leave the hospital to reduce their risk of further violence. Social workers help them connect with therapy to deal with their trauma and get the help they need—whether housing, job training, or treatment for alcohol or drug addiction—to navigate a constructive path forward.

“Ultimately, I believe that if we want to make ourselves safe, if we want to end the high levels of

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