Michael Gurian is Cofounder of the Gurian Institute, which trains education professionals in gender difference and brain-based learning. He is the author of The Wonder of Boys (Tarcher/Putnam, 1997) and The Wonder of Girls (Atria, 2003) and coauthor of Boys and Girls Learn Differently! (Jossey-Bass/John Wiley, 2001). Kathy Stevens is Director of the Gurian Institute Training Division and the Women's Resource Agency, both located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She coordinates the InterCept Teen Mentoring Program for Girls. The authors may be contacted at www.gurianinstitute.com.

Michael Gurian is a psychotherapist, educator and author of seven books including the critically acclaimed national bestsellers:

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Michael has served as a consultant to families, therapists, school districts, community agencies, churches, criminal justice professionals and policy makers.Traveling to approximately twenty-five cities a year, Michael leads seminars, consults and is a key note speaker at conferences. He has lectured at the New York Open Center, the Naropa Institute, and the Harvard Gender Issues Forum. His training videos for parents and volunteers are used by Big Brothers and Big Sisters agencies in the United States and Canada.

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Difficult, Violent Boys

by Michael Gurian

A final window in our list of facts is one of the reasons we’re so exhausted: we keep putting more and more of these violent and criminal males in jail, but we feel less and less safe. In the last ten years, the number of federal and state inmates has doubled to almost a million. The local jail population has risen nearly three times to almost 500,000. In individual states, like Washington, where I live, we have seen a 79 percent increase in our jail populations an 86 percent in prison capacity, and yet our state population has only grown 18 percent! Said Governor Mike Lowry: "At this rate, everyone in Washington State will be working in—or in—prison by 2056!"

Males, especially in the hormone-driven teen years, are wired for increased aggressiveness. Cultures have known this since the beginning of time. Tribal cultures have made sure males were guided through these years with constant initiation and elder male attention. Even our own ancestral cultures knew that one of the society’s most difficult and important jobs is to train male aggression toward socially useful functions and away from antisocial functions. Studies of other primates indicate similar social strategies among animals around us.

Things have changed. Writes Miller Newton, author of Adolescence, "Adolescence has become increasingly dangerous for a growing minority of teens. Unlike the ritual ordeals of primitive societies, which presented youths with challenges that enabled them to prove themselves and join adult society, today's rituals have become purposeless, dangerous, and threatening."

Young males need training and channeling. If they don't get it, a large minority of them will train and channel themselves to use aggression antisocially. Over the last few years, researchers in both the U.S. and Canada have been measuring testosterone levels among violent male criminals. The average testosterone level of the violent criminal is higher than the average testosterone level of a citizen without a criminal record.

War was once a socially acceptable way of channeling male aggression. War training "kept men in line" and "channeled their natural aggression against the enemy." Most boys do not go to war as this millennium ends. Most do not join the military.

Sports is certainly the most obvious aggression-channeling venue in male culture today. In fact, studies indicate that boys who play organized sports have a lower frequency of involvement in drugs and violent crime than boys who do not. Martial arts is one of the best places for boys to get a holistic sense of the physical, mental emotional, and spiritual challenges of boyhood. Many boys, however, don’t choose to play organized sports or get involved in martial arts, lacking the self-confidence, the resources, the encouragement, or the interest. Moreover, a minority of boys who do play sports or engage in martial arts can become more aggressive, uncompassionate, and violent. Despite this, I have never seen a study that leads me to believe the risks of getting more midnight basketball, more organized soccer, more martial arts training into the inner cities outweighs the benefits. The more we help our at-risk youth use sports to find camaraderie discipline, self-image, bonding, personal challenge and a second and third family, the better off we will be at channeling their aggression toward structures they can grow in.

Many boys will act out—as they always have, in aggressive behavior—the shadow side of the culture that raises them. They will mirror with gangly and violent and destructive bodies, the awkwardness they sense in adult life, the violence they feel and absorb, the self-destructiveness of the adult culture as a whole. This is what a frightening minority of our teenage boys are doing today, in gangs, violence, crime. If they do not learn a dance of aggression through some organized activity from male culture that loves, nurtures, and trains their aggression into a disciplined dance, they will be more likely to take their loss of this training, their grief, their anger that they have not received it out on the world around them.

As I've suggested throughout this chapter, I also believe the key to stopping male violence lies in rethinking discipline to mean "a discipline system," following our rethinking of family to include a stable first family, an active second family, a welcoming third family, and constant discourse among the three families in order to achieve consistent application of the discipline system. Are we ready for this kind of solution ?

I think we're closer to being ready than we were, say, five years ago. People who have kids are thinking twice again about getting divorced. More and more teens are abstaining from promiscuous and unprotected sex. The word "mentor" is back in the national vocabulary, especially in inner cities where boys are at risk. Churches are reaching out again. Even the media is listening to calls for more kid-responsible programming.

We live in a wonderful and challenging time. Young boys are awakening and stretching their testosterone levels, but we now have the resources to train and nurture them into whatever kind of man we want them to be.

Michael Gurian

Michael Gurian is Cofounder of the Gurian Institute, which trains education professionals in gender difference and brain-based learning. He is the author of The Wonder of Boys (Tarcher/Putnam, 1997) and The Wonder of Girls (Atria, 2003) and coauthor of Boys and Girls Learn Differently! (Jossey-Bass/John Wiley, 2001). Kathy Stevens is Director of the Gurian Institute Training Division and the Women's Resource Agency, both located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She coordinates the InterCept Teen Mentoring Program for Girls. The authors may be contacted at www.gurianinstitute.com.