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At kitchen tables in many communities in the U.S., following the Charlottesville hate rally, there were chagrined families, worrying about their sons’ fascination with the white supremacy movement. (This movement is so heavily dominated by males that I focus only on boys in this entry.) How, they wonder, could their kind and caring sons be attracted to such activities? And what are they, as parents, to do? As a researcher studying kids at risk of recruitment to violent groups, and a clinician who has done a great deal of work with court-involved youth, I have pondered and researched similar questions for a long time. And the answers, while complex, are not exotic or weird. They have nothing much to do with religion or ideology, and a great deal to do with normal adolescent development gone off-track. Kids who are attracted to such groups are usually expressing a misguided, but powerful, passion for justice, a level playing field, respect, and a shared identity. They are not kids who do not care, but kids who care deeply, and have been wrongly convinced that the way to help their families and communities is through violence. The way to prevent kids from being recruited to violent groups is to offer a real alternative, a nonviolent, but powerful, way to make an impact.
My neighbors were devastated when a young man who was extraordinarily well-liked, kind, and had a “heart of gold,” who had grown up with their children and visited their homes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, joined with his brother to bomb the Boston marathon. I felt duty-bound to combine my research-based knowledge about youth attracted to violent groups with personal stories and public accounts of the bombers and others like them around the world. How, their families, friends, and teachers asked, could a genuinely good kid resort to violence against civilians? What I learned was that the stories of kids recruited to violent groups of many kinds, in many parts of the world, have parallels. The stories are best understood as problematic expressions of normal development—in many cases the problems that begin the derailment of normal adolescent development are entrenched social problems—problems that cause economic and social inequality on a massive scale. When young people with a personal sense that their families and communities are not being given a fair chance, that those families and communities are without a voice, and are without the power to change these unjust circumstances by their own actions, the youth are at risk of being recruited to groups advocating violence for what they wrongly convince the youth is a good cause.
Like most youth and young adults, those who are attracted to groups that use intimidation and/or violence are passionate about justice. They want to right what they believe is wrong with society. They want to see their families respected. They want to help insure that their parents—often particularly their fathers—are able to hold their heads up in their communities and not be seen as less than others. They want to make an impact. They want to be seen and heard. They want to level an uneven playing field. They want to follow in the footsteps of people with power who are fighting what they believe to be injustice. And while they are often deeply and terribly misguided, the level of their passion alone (as opposed to any violent actions or provocations they take), does not constitute grounds for punitive actions by law enforcement.
In Charlottesville, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, and members of the alt right movement—enjoying the national spotlight, exuded an air of toughness, pride in their paleness and what they define as their manliness. Heavily armed, they had become the center of attention for the most powerful country in the world. There is no doubt that they had studied the patterns of twentieth century white supremacists and Nazis and were emulating them. Their demonstration looked repulsive to the majority of Americans. But how might it have looked to a young white teenager who believes that white men in their communities have been losing jobs, respect, and the ability to care for their families, for reasons that are not of their own making? Here were strong looking men suggesting that they knew why white men were losing power, and they could fix it. How would this rally look to a white youth who, like many teenagers, is seeking a way to make an impact on the world? A real impact. Now.
Make no mistake: The white men rallying were themselves misguided in assessing where the threat to their livelihoods comes from. But the youth who are fascinated by these men are looking to them for explanations. And they all—men and boys—have been hoodwinked by the “captains” of the military-industrial-financial complex into thinking that the real threat comes from non-white Americans and from immigrants. The real threat, in fact, comes from today’s tycoons and politicians who use a divide-and-conquer approach to maintaining their power and wealth. But those tycoons have the money to spread false narratives, and they use sophisticated psychological and sociological principles to fool people into fighting one another instead of uniting to fight the real sources of entrenched inequality.
The lives of many of young people attracted to violence may well include personal trauma, disappointment, loss, and resentment. But trauma, disappointment, loss, and resentment do not cause young people to join militia. To assume that people who have trauma, disappointment, loss, and resentment are going to become violent is false and it is a travesty. At the same time, recruiters to violent causes target kids who have experienced such difficulties, seeing them as vulnerable to recruitment, especially if they have no effective, strong, active, nonviolent mentors. Recruiters to violence target them with fake kindness and care. They prop them up with a sense of importance and a sense that they will help them and their families regain pride. They become, in extremely perverse ways, false mentors to youth who desperately need real mentors. And then they use the kids to prop up the numbers in their violent groups. They instruct them to kill—or at least be ready to kill—and, when the kids kill and die, or get hurt, or sent to prison, they abandon them and move on to other vulnerable youth to recruit them.
Youth who have grievances—often justifiable grievances, seek strong, tough, and effective mentors. What each community must do is to be sure there are mentors available who can teach youth to make an impact in a strong, effective, active, nonviolent manner. Mentors must be confident about methods to right wrongs, address grievances, act on the resentments, and—by so doing—come out triumphant. And those mentors must be supported by communities invested in American values of justice, equality, and fairness. Real mentors must be willing to challenge the false mentoring that comes from violent groups.
In an unjust society, or in a devastated community, where only one set of mentors exist, and those mentors are inviting youth to false and dangerous ideas about the causes of injustice in society and how to fix them, we are at risk of having more youth recruited to violent groups. When adults in communities and society in general are truly committed to a just and equitable society, and not afraid to say so or to act accordingly, and when these adults are confident mentors, ready to welcome youth to direct, nonviolent, pro-active approaches to solving real social problems, we will have done a great deal to reduce the risk of kids becoming violent.
