Amid the chaos, social worker Larry Watkins searches for the victims everyone else has missed – the children who’ve watched this scene unfold. They may not bleed, but Watkins, who heads up Washington’s year-old Youth Trauma Service Team, knows they’re hurt. “They see so much violence on a daily basis,” he says. “There’s no way to know how this will affect them years from now.” A woman nudges her 10-year-old into his path. “My girl is so quiet now. Maybe something’s wrong,” says the woman, whose boyfriend died in that night’s gunfire.
“Did you see anything?” Watkins asks gently, suspecting the answer. But the child clings silently to her mother, so he settles for a phone number, hoping that on a follow-up visit he can coax the girl into counseling. She’ll need it, Watkins thinks – badly.
Violence begets more violence. Seeing it, living with it, being a target of it – those are the biggest predictors of whether a child will one day turn to violence. Studies have shown that children who grow up amid blood and bullets become emotionally deadened to the horrors. Just as frightening, they assume that force is the way to resolve even small conflicts. But the cycle is not inevitable. A growing number of researchers believe that violence can be short-circuited by attacking it at its roots. Of course, the idea of going after poverty, racism, single parenthood, child abuse and neglect has been around for decades, but it lost favor in the ’80s, as the nation’s mood grew more conservative and its crime agenda shifted to more prisons and stricter laws. But the tough approach didn’t work either. Now another generation of policymakers – armed with more research and even more hope – has given root-causers new life. “If we’re ever going to stop violence in America, we’re going to have to stop it in the home,” Attorney General Janet Reno said earlier this year. “Today’s violence is the legacy of three decades of neglect of our children.”
Lessons in aggression sometimes start as the umbilical cord is cut. By the time they’re 4, many kids can recite the bloody lexicon of rap; by 8 or 9, some psychologists say, patterns of violence may be too entrenched to alter – though others hold out hope even for teenagers. Can these children be reclaimed? Yes, experts agree. But there’s little time to waste; eventually, there is a point of no return. “Every year that a child has to become a failure in school, to develop low self-esteem, to feel generally like he has no control over his life, it makes it that much more difficult to turn him around,” says Cathy Spatz Widom, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany, who has studied the effects of child abuse and neglect.
Forget broad-brush solutions. Increasingly, the focus is on small, grass-roots efforts that target teenagers, adolescents and even toddlers. James Garbarino, director of Cornell University’s Family Life Development Center, says effective programs help a child to form an emotional bond with an adult; to change his ideas about us-ing violence as a solution, and to give him different responses to stress, and help him practice them.
Not all kids who grow up in urban war zones become killers, so finding those who need help is sometimes the trickiest part. That’s how Washing-ton’s Youth Trauma Service Team – a rare partnership between mental-health profes-sionals and city police – was born. When violence erupts, the team becomes the psychological equivalent of paramedics. But on most 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrols, they cruise the streets of Southeast, hoping to connect with kids who know only mistrust. They start with “ice-breakers” – T shirts and hats with the trauma-team logo; lollipops, condoms, even CDs. “Here’s some opera. Ever listen to opera?” Watkins asks. “The singer is Kathleen Battle – she’s black.” What the team really hopes is to become a reliable presence in a community in which even basic support systems are in tatters. “We need to help them develop a sense of security,” says psychologist Hope Hill, who heads Howard University’s Violence Prevention Project and helped found the youth trauma unit. “Kids see 4-year-olds become victims of gun violence, and the message is “Nowhere is safe’.”
Ideally, at-risk children would be targeted as soon as they’re born. Despite concern about what kids see on the street, family violence can be more damaging. In a 1992 National Institute of Justice study, Widom found that being abused or neglected as a child increased the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by 53 percent and as an adult by 38 percent; it increased the chances of arrest for a violent crime by 38 percent. Widom says the “fundamental disregard” of a child’s needs can foster a rage that explodes into violence. “It’s an anger of “Why should I care about anyone else?’ "
An innovative program called Hawaii Healthy Start tries to head off that explosion by offering support to parents at high risk for abuse or neglect – parents like Saumaleato Mataituli. Back in her native Samoa, Mataituli wasn’t rich, but she always felt secure. She worked two jobs – dispensing school lunches during the day and packing in a tuna company at night – while her mother looked after her five children. But she left behind her support system three years ago when she moved her family to Hawaii’s Palolo Valley. Island life is expensive, and minimum wage didn’t even cover the basics. By the time her sixth child was born, 18 months ago, her husband had left and the stresses were overwhelming. When Mataituli was offered help from Hawaii Health Start, she jumped at the chance. “I need help – somebody who can tell me if I’m doing the right thing,” says Mataituli, 31.
On weekly visits, Mataituli’s family-support worker helps her to set limits for her children and diffuse the anger when they don’t listen. She also helps bridge the culture gap. In Samoa, Mataituli says, “it’s all right to hit your kids. But over here, no can.” Instead, support worker Brenda Parker shows her other discipline methods, like sending the kids to their rooms. Parker also urges Mataituli to be more involved in taking care of her babies even though, in Samoa, it’s routine for older children to tend to the younger ones.
Hawaii’s idea isn’t new. “In the progressive era, Jane Addams spent a lot of time doing home visits,” says Deborah Daro, research director of the National Center for Prevention of Child Abuse, which is evaluating the six-year-old project. Daro says the program, which costs about $3,000 per family per year and screens about half the women who give birth in Hawaii, is being tried in a dozen other states. The bottom line, she says, looks promising: less than 1 percent of the 2,800 families in the Hawaii program have had reported child abuse.
Solutions don’t have to be expensive. Garbarino, who has worked with children in war zones, last year developed a $4 workbook, “Let’s Talk About Living in a World With Violence,” that’s aimed at 7-to 12-year-olds in urban America. Using storytelling, the book, which he wrote while president of the Erikson Institute in Chicago, helps kids talk about their experiences – and fears. If you ask a child about the morality of stealing, you won’t get much of an answer, Garbarino says. But if you say, “This is my story about being afraid; now tell me your story about being afraid,” chances are they’ll open up. The goal: to generate a discussion, which encourages the child to think about new ways of dealing with violence, like walking away.
Some of the jottings illustrate how frightening violence is to children. Asked to finish the sentence “Violence is . . .” one Chicago third-grade girl said “painful,” and wrote about a cousin killed by boys on a street corner: “They are playing with a gun and the gun went off and it shot my cousin in the head.” Under the heading “The Story About My Neighborhood,” a 10-year-old boy recalled “people selling drugs or either killing other and crazy walking the streets.” When the cops show up, he wrote, “they run in the alleys and hide, and when they kill people they take the body and the gun in the alley and throw them in a dumpster.”
Is it ever too late to try to salvage these children? Jean Thomases, associate executive director of New York’s Good Shepherd Services, says, “You can’t say 16 is too late when you have 50 percent of kids dropping out of school in urban areas. Are you going to write off half a generation?” Thomases doesn’t have to look far to see how tough those odds are. She works in one of the bleakest spots in New York City, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. Good Shepherd runs a community center out of PS 15, a school that might have been ignored, except for the fact that its much-loved principal, Patrick Daley, was killed 21/2 years ago when he walked into a gunfight between two teens.
Although the Red Hook Community Center predates Daley’s death, his murder gives its mission – to offer an oasis amid the violence – a stronger sense of urgency. On a typical afternoon, the youngest children are rushing to listen to a story or to shape this month’s issue of the center’s news magazine. For adolescents, there are sports – usually, ultimate Frisbee. But, just as important, parents are also welcome. One measure of how well the three-year-old center has succeeded came last Thanksgiving, when 350 parents and kids crowded in for a community feast.
The kids themselves sense they’re getting stronger. “I’m no angel,” says Earl Garmon, who, at 20, has had a drug conviction and fathered a child. But the center gave him a “clean slate” – a chance to work as an activities aide and the encouragement to start college. Even he sometimes has trouble believing he’s the same person. “There was a time parents said, “We don’t want to know you, Earl’,” he laughs. “Now I get invited to their houses.” Of course, that doesn’t mean Earl is home free; violence has been known to consume more than good intentions. But Michele Cahill, vice president of the Fund for the City of New York, says there is promise in programs like Red Hook. “Something has to reweave the fabric of the community,” she says. And something has to offer a future to its children.
