by Diane Dietz of The Register-Guard
Once boys become violent, nobody knows for sure how to make them change. Decades of programs have failed them.
The 5 percent of boys who commit most of the serious violent crimes seem to be on a tragic trajectory that ends only when they do something terrible.
“The force is not to be underestimated,” said Terrie Moffitt, a University of Wisconsin professor who was among the first to outline their lives.
About two-thirds of the most promising mental health and corrections programs would disappear if they had to prove their effectiveness to continue getting public money. That’s the conclusion of Delbert Elliott, chairman of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado. He led a team that evaluated 450 programs across the United States.
Many programs are successful at getting kids to change their behavior while they’re in the program, but the changes don’t endure, he said. “(They) are quickly lost when the youth returns home to his or her family, neighborhood and old friends.”
The first thing to fail violent kids? Exactly the kind of insight-oriented psychotherapy a panicked parent would turn to, experts on violence say.
Weekly, one-hour trips to a therapist’s office do little good for violent kids. “It isn’t going to be systematic enough. It isn’t going to be intense enough,” said Daniel Flannery, a criminal justice professor at Kent State University.
Pre-eminent psychologist John Reid, director of the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, all but stopped giving individual therapy sessions because he became convinced they were useless. Parents and peers provide powerful supports for violent and aggressive behavior, and the old-style individual counseling sessions don’t address them, he said. “The wrong people are in the room,” Reid said.
With talk therapy failing, some put their hopes in a chemical cure for violence. In the past decade, genetic researchers have fanned the hope with discoveries about connections between brain chemistry and behavior. The scientists found specific genes related to anxiety, negativity, drug addiction and thrill-seeking. “We know more about the mechanisms (of aggression),” Flannery said, “which is going to lead to medications to control it.”
The question is: When?
There’s no magic pill among the latest drugs, said Michael George, a former administrator at Lane School. The Lane School kids are on a pharmacopeia of pills. At any one time, about 10 are on Ritalin. A student or two is on a powerful antipsychotic or mood-altering drug such as Risperdal or lithium. Several kids take anti-depressants such as Prozac or its cousin Zoloft. Yet none of the drugs quell their anger or aggression sufficiently to allow their return to regular schools.
To counter campus violence, regular schools frequently train kids in conflict resolution. The training, however, doesn’t seem to touch a kid on a trajectory to violence. “The time required to overcome the negative influences of disadvantaged neighborhoods, dysfunctional families, poor school adjustment and performance, and delinquent gangs or peer networks is measured in years, not days or hours,” Elliott said in a study.
“The idea that we can address these long-term influences with 10 hours of passive conflict resolution training in the classroom is naive,” he said.
So teachers, school counselors and juvenile justice counselors try to zero in on how angry and aggressive kids are thinking. One vein of research has shown that criminal kids don’t think the way that other people do.
They assume any wrong requires a payback, for instance. They are unable to generate alternative solutions to their social problems. They accept violence as the norm. Further, they attribute an ambiguous act by another person – such as a bump in a hallway – as a hostile act.
They don’t know about empathy. They don’t know how to consider a situation from another person’s point of view. They have little experience with moral reasoning.
So researchers have devised methodical ways to correct their thinking errors and teach them new ways of responding – called cognitive therapy and social skills training. Teachers and counselors are using these techniques in programs all across Lane County.
The trouble is, when kids leave the programs they don’t always act on what they know. “In many situations, the problem is not ‘knowing how to do it,’ but ‘doing it when required,'” researcher Jeff Sprague wrote in an evaluation of Lane School.
For cognitive therapy and social skills training to work, teachers and counselors first must find a way to get kids’ behavior under control, Reid said. The most common method for regulating out-of-control behavior is a “level” and “point card” system. These sorts of behavior modification systems allow kids to earn rewards – food, money, free time – with their good behavior.
The teachers, therapists or parents operating the systems closely monitor a student’s behavior and assign points at regular intervals, usually every hour. They gush with praise at movement the student makes toward the desired behavior. Once a kid earns a targeted number of points, he can move up to a new level, which offers greater rewards and privileges.
The strategy is high effective. “A lot of these kids are very smart,” said Patricia Chamberlain, who oversees a Eugene program for violent and delinquent youths. “They get it right away.”
The trouble? “They (eventually) go back to their old environment,” Flannery said, “and it doesn’t have point systems.” One final reason these programs don’t work for the violent and aggressive: They may not be enrolled, Moffitt said.
Most anti-violence programs have about a 5 percent dropout rate, the exact proportion of teenagers on the fast-track to violence.
“We may not be getting to the kids who need it the most,” she said.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1998, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.