The Boys are Alright..with Violence
If my last post was hard, this week it is even more so. A few days ago my son got attacked on his way home from school by older masked up youths, hit and ordered to run. I found him shaking on the doorstep and now the bruise on his cheek is turning different autumnal colours.
I keep going out to check for the teenage boys who did it, I’m full of rage and also fearful of them being near. I’m feeling full of rage toward their ethnicity, toward their age, toward their gender, toward bad haircuts, toward skinny legs. I have to run all this emotional irrational instinctive and immediate response through my slower rational brain to regulate, which is exhausting. I want to humiliate them in front of their mates, laugh at them, I want to scare them, hurt them, take away any residue of power they have. I have to run all this through my rational brain too.
When I think about how hard this is for me to be reasonable, I’m surprised at my son’s response. He is shrugging it off now as something that happens to most boys his age. He’s had stories shared at school and by my friends, by men who’ve survived this, how it’s just about being in the wrong place at the wrong time which is basically anywhere on the street. Just as intimate partners are the place most females experience violence, the streets are the danger for boys. Stranger violence is hugely more likely for boys and men.
That boys are the more likely to be the victims of violence gets swept aside in the equally true knowledge that boys are most likely to be the perpetrators of violence. There are key elements of course; good parenting is a hugely protective factor as is not living in a deprived area. I’ve managed to do one but not the other for him. But the biggest factor of who commits anti social crime at 15 is being the victim of one at 12. This should be of zero surprise to anyone, that vulnerability and culpability are interrelated, that there is not a world of a neat divide between “innocent” and “guilty”.
My son says if anything he feels sorry for them because they probably have shit lives, that the same thing and worse happens to them. He reaches a point of regulation, of stepping down away from the anger, more easily than me.
Without attempting to get into an exploration of hormones and neuroscience that is way over my head, we know that teenagers are primed for immediacy and for risk, for short term decision making over long. It’s why it works for the ruling classes to send our disposable working class sons to war when they’re of the ideal age. We know that castration to decrease testosterone chills out your pets, stops them fighting, and that testosterone for years has been assumed to be a critical player in violent behaviour. My son’s is rising and significantly higher than my steadily falling levels, so we can’t put it down to that, which isn’t to say the young men who hit him weren’t powered on by theirs. And certainly, when one swaggered up the street a half hour after, shouting homophobic abuse at my neighbour, it was probably assisted by a surge of testosterone from the triumph of getting one over on someone else, even if that someone else was just a school child.
Testosterone gets the blame for violence but we now understand more that one of it’s key roles is to amplify and protect any challenge to status. The perpetrators of this attack, whose worth and status is so incredibly precarious, may well have had both the initial action and their later feeling of victory connected to testosterone levels and feelings of power. My son, who not only ran when told to, but has absolutely no shame in doing so, has not that connection. His worth, his status, is bound up somewhere else, somewhere more consistent and more tangible.
Which may explain why I am the one struggling more with this regulation. Like most girls, it was home that was my biggest threat of violence, but occasionally it was strangers. When I was a teenager, a year younger than him, I got attacked on my way home from school by 3 girls who beat me. I fought back, terrified, weaker, ferocious, and for the school photos the next day my face was a bit of a mess. My parents never asked me why I came home bleeding. Nor did school. I would never have shared. I just had some photos of me in my uniform, trying to smile through a cut up face.
For my son, his experience meant he got surrounded by love and care not just from me and my partner but by a wider circle of neighbours and friends who checked in on him and validated his experiences, shared theirs, brought him chocolate which he shared with me, cuddled up watching comedy.
When I compare his to mine perhaps it’s not a surprise that it’s me who is struggling to manage the feelings of powerlessness and the threat of violence more. And I imagine for those boys their life experiences to date were closer to mine. And if I feel all this confusion of feelings, with all my training and my words and all the love I now have, then I can imagine how overwhelming and scary it is for teenage boys today, in deprived areas where gangs carry weapons, with little parental care, with a confusion of pubescent changes in mind and body. I imagine what a difference could have been made with earlier intervention, with a bit of care. And that is the compassion I can find amidst my learned responses and my maternal anger.
That is the weapon I can carry.