My concern about media’s influence isn’t so much for children in supportive families,” said developmental psychologist Carla Seal-Wanner, “but for those who lack other mediating influences. For them, media can have a more powerful, even dominant socializing role.”
There’s a lot to inspire concern in the media that young people love, especially to those of us raised on less harsh, less confrontational styles. On top of the quantity and intensity of violence, a trend in some ways even more distressing is the rage that has been increasingly shaping youth entertainment over the past two decades. It’s in the rappers, the rockers, the games, the movies, even the cartoons and comic books kids love. Action heroes don’t step up stoically to fight the bad guy but snarl, “This time it’s personal!” Video game martial artists stomp on their fallen foes and turn to the player with a sadistic sneer. Eminem acts as though he’s conciliating his critics for his anti-gay slurs by performing at the Grammies with Elton John, and then concludes by giving the world the finger. A gay teenager in one of my workshops loved Eminem for blasting the hypocritical adult world with his anger, even when the anger seemed directed at young men like himself. Then he flung himself back into his funny but angry story about a prostitute setting up a hypocritical cop for a fall. When I asked another kid, a smart, academically successful kid who never got in trouble, why he adopted the gangster-imitating “whigga” style of clothing, he said, “because it scares people.”
Even in the mild, dorky world of comic books, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by the rise of the snarling hero. The blithely grinning Superman, the hyperrational Batman, the tormented but mild Spider-Man, were nudged aside by the bestial Wolverine with his slashing metal claws. To keep the old heroes popular, writers and artists had to keep pace with their audience’s growing taste for rampant passion. Stories and dialogue got meaner. The art grew more jagged, more “in your face,” heavier with black ink. Superman, the first and corniest of superheroes, was killed and brought back as a snarling, sweating, fist-clenching, eye-blazing embodiment of righteous rage. Even the kids who want the simplest dramas of good and evil also want their heroes to express a baseline of anger.
It’s natural to respond to anger with a defensive anger of our own or a fear of where it will lead. We respond more effectively, however, when we first ask, why are kids so angry?
In her nationwide surveys of violent youth, Dr. Helen Smith said she found “a tremendous number of young people who compare school to prison.” She read me quote after quote from kids who feel they’re being held captive, controlled, not cared about, not protected from the bullying of other kids. Many feel that home is just a different cell in the prison, especially if they have performance-driven parents who keep them under constant scrutiny. They look ahead to adult society and the work world and can only imagine more of the same, and they conclude, “I don’t see how real prison could be any worse than this.”
Most of them feel that they can’t change their circumstances because adults won’t acknowledge that there’s a problem. “They feel anger and alienation from what they perceive as the hypocrisy of the adult world,” Smith said. Parents and teachers are preoccupied with violence but don’t like to acknowledge young people’s rage. Kids feel that complaining in school only gets them viewed as the problem, while their parents either don’t care or side with the school in clamping down tighter on them. They feel that no one knows they’re there, no one understands their feelings, no one cares. “Attacks on the school or the world as a whole,” said Smith, “from vandalism to threats to actually bringing weapons are often presaged by specific complaints about being dismissed. Sometimes they just keep escalating their negative actions until they think they’ve finally been noticed.”
Forensic psychologist James McGee, an authority on classroom violence, studied all the videotaped rants and Web postings left by the Columbine shooters and said one thread ran through nearly every minute and page of them: the demand to be seen. They drew attention to themselves with Gothic makeup and costumes, made offensively violent movies for class, posted to hate-mongering Web sites under their own names. They not only played the violent video game Doom but–much more importantly, in McGee’s view–they proclaimed their love of the game and its violence loudly at a time when such games were drawing fire from parents, psychologists, and legislators for contributing to teen violence. When their parents and the authorities didn’t respond as strongly as they wanted, their frustration increased. Their parents seemed unable or unwilling to notice even that they were filling their homes with guns and bombs. Finally, wanting attention more than life itself, the boys created a horrific scenario that would leave the world no choice but to notice them.
The late Dr. Rachel Lauer, chief psychologist of the New York City Schools, spoke of the adult world’s inability, or unwillingness, to see the problem:“Doesn’t the adult population cherish its young–do everything possible to turn kids into well behaved, attractive, skillful, productive citizens responsible for each other, for the fate of the world? Indeed we do. We cherish our young so much that when our determined ministrations are resisted we exercise a long repertoire of ‘remedies.’We ‘attack’ the problem and ‘handle’ it by rewarding, punishing, requiring, mandating, directing, expecting, teasing, threatening, ridiculing, failing, jailing, beating, restricting, insulting, advising, ministering, assessing. Our young are our favorite objects for our manipulative skills–all for their own good, of course. As parents and educators we measure our own power and worth according to our success in producing youths who have learned what they’re supposed to and how willing they are to learn it quickly, well, now, and better than someone else’s kids.”
Some fight back or drop out, but even kids who try to live by the rules may feel they’re in a coercive society.“Like all hostages or slaves who comply with their oppressors, they build a rage inside,” said Lauer.“Some identify with their oppressors and learn to act the same domineering way toward others. Sometimes they rage against themselves and become depressed. They constantly focus attention upon ‘doing what you’re supposed to do.’ It means constantly attuning to external signals of what to do every moment of the day. Externally oriented, they live virtually in a state of, ‘O.K. now I’ve done that, what do I have to do next?’ By giving up so much authorship of their own lives, they lose the feeling of being alive or real.”
They may feel that their lives are meaningless. Dr. William Damon of the Stanford Center on Adolescence has argued that everyone needs something to believe in, some greater cause to belong to in order to make our lives feel worthwhile, and that modern American society provides little of that for young people. We fear kids, we try to control them, we nervously track their scores on statistical tests, or we bring ourselves down to their level and try to win their favor, but we don’t demand that they meet higher moral, social, and civic expectations. Damon has described the frustration and lonely anxiety of young people who aren’t given a purpose–much like the feelings described by the “prisoners” of Helen Smith’s survey, who feel that they are confined in adult institutions but never given a good reason to be there.
“If kids don’t feel that society has anything meaningful to give them,” Damon said, “then they’ll find meaning wherever they can. That’s likely to be the media. If they are particularly angry with society, they may come to identify with the media’s most antisocial models. That’s when they can be influenced by hate sites on the Web or a movie like Natural Born Killers.”
There have been young people like Barry Loukaitis of Moses Lake, Washington, rejected by his parents, picked on in high school, never very good at anything, who became obsessed with Natural Born Killers and a Pearl Jam video showing a teenager shooting classmates. Those quick-cut, Technicolor, grunge-rock revenge fantasies gave him the feeling of meaning he’d lacked. He started making pronouncements like, “Murder is pure–people make it impure.” Then he took a gun to school and became America’s first widely publicized school shooter.
There have been a lot of young people like Ruben Diaz, too. “I was the stereotype of the kid you’re supposed to be afraid of,” he said. He grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx during the 1980s with no father and a working mother who couldn’t be around much. Afraid at school and on the street, he spent his teen years in his apartment watching TV, listening to rap music, and reading comic books. He wasn’t shown much by a negligent government, a decimated educational establishment, or a crime-obsessed news media to make him think that society had much use for a nonwhite, low-income teenager. He found his most meaningful models in gangster rappers and superheroes. In their very different ways, both demonstrated how individual anger could be channeled into the power to confront corruption and change the world. And both, Diaz realized, were created by commercial storytellers in not-quite-respectable fields who were willing to say what kids were really thinking and fantasizing.
Diaz discovered comic book fandom, a social group that helped channel his interests into a life direction. He got a job as an editorial assistant at DC Comics, then worked his way up to full editorship. I worked with him on a few projects–we’d come from very different worlds to the same place through a form of entertainment that had been able to speak powerfully to both of us in adolescence. He believed in comics like X-Men that excited young readers with combat, rage, and melodrama but also made them think about the way the world worked. He enjoyed contact with his young readers, and he discovered that he had something to say to them. After a few years, he left the business, went back to college for a teaching credential, and took a job as an English teacher at a middle school in his old neighborhood in the Bronx.
“It was entertainment media that told me there were stories in me worth telling,” Diaz said, “and that the world could be different from what we’d been handed. So I don’t have a lot of patience for people from sheltered backgrounds saying that poor kids and kids without parental supervision need to be protected from the media.”
When young people feel that the official world is hostile, indifferent, or irrelevant, the feelings of recognition and belonging that entertainment brings them can be transformative. Music historian Ricky Vincent has argued that gangster rap helped inner-city youths during the gang wars of the 1980s make sense of a fragmented society and take more control of their lives. This is the power of mirroring again. We speak of rap “glamorizing” gang violence, but more importantly it tells its audience that their reality has been seen, and so it helps them feel important enough to make more of themselves. The quieting of the gang wars in the 1990s was no doubt due in part to intervention programs, new school policies, and other official remedies. But it owed at least as much to the efforts of the gang leaders who finally said, “enough,” and to those of the rappers who used their positions as trusted spokesmen for the community to spread the message.
Ice-T recorded a rap in 1993 called “Gotta Lotta Love,” in which he described as “the most beautiful thing I’d seen in years,” two guys settling their differences in a public park with “just a straight-up fistfight, one on one, nobody jumping in, nobody pulling a gun.” It wasn’t a sentiment that any school district could fit into its conflict-resolution program, but to an angry kid in a violent world, that punched-out, sentimental valorization of keeping rage within conscious bounds was a meaningful affirmation of personal power.
Ice-T’s words had power because he’d proven that he could speak for the most alienated young people. On the same album with “Gotta Lotta Love” was “That’s How I’m Livin’,” Ice-T’s story of how he became a street criminal in his teens and how creating raps lifted him out of crime by giving him purpose and perspective. Both of those raps would have been fairly easy for a parent or teacher to endorse–but the title track of the same album was “Home Invasion.” That track opened with the sounds of a gang of armed thugs smashing their way into a house, threatening to kill the owners, screaming, “All we want are the motherfuckin’ kids!” Ice-T then boasted to parents about his power to steal the minds of their children: “I might get ’em up under my fuckin’ spell, they might start givin’ you fuckin’ hell . . . might start callin’ you a fool, tellin’ you why they hate school . . . .” It wasn’t an easy rap for even the hippest adult to embrace as an ally in the work of socializing young people. But for many kids, who had been given so few symbols and so few outlets to express their rage at a controlling but uncomprehending adult world, it was powerfully liberating and emboldening–and not only for kids of Ice-T’s social background.
I know a woman named Sarah who was fifteen when Home Invasion came out. Her parents were attorneys, she grew up in a luxury condo far from the ghetto, and she attended a top-ranked private school where she excelled academically. She was also alone a great deal while her parents worked, and when they were home they were often preoccupied with their own stresses and marital conflicts. Sarah felt they didn’t spend much time trying to understand what she was going through, but they swooped down on her with anger and restrictions when she misbehaved. Ice-T, she said, “came through the door like my personal savior. From the first twenty seconds of ‘Home Invasion’ I felt like here was somebody who was going to fight for me, who wasn’t afraid of parents and teachers, and wasn’t going to tell the polite lies that we were always supposed to uphold.” She clung to confrontational rap and rock music through a turbulent adolescence and bonded with other angry kids who shared her passions. She has credited the music with helping her channel her rage into politics and writing instead of the pointless, self-destructive rebellions that some of her peers fell into. In graduate school, she decided to become a schoolteacher and children’s rights advocate.
Mary Cotter, whom I quoted earlier about the role of slasher movies in her adolescence, has stressed the power of entertainment to inspire the building of social groups and provide a feeling of belonging for young people who feel cast off or misunderstood by the world. She grew up feeling constricted by the limited options presented by her conservative, Catholic, working-class community. She was a bookish girl who didn’t fit into the three or four cliques available to her in school, and her peers made her suffer for it. When she discovered the punk rock community, she found it “full of kids who wore pissed-off attitudes and bonded around revenge-fantasy songs like ‘Under My Wheels’ and ‘Debaser’ but who were in fact a very accepting community–much more accepting than the mainstream I knew.”
After the death of her father during her fifteenth year, Mary turned angry and self-destructive. “My mother tried to send me to priests, psychiatrists, and so on, but they all felt very oppressive and untruthful to me. They didn’t recognize the intensity and the value of my negative feelings. But extreme entertainment did recognize them. The kids who were into it with me came from a whole range of backgrounds, income levels, races, sexual orientations, everything, but nearly all of them had suffered some kind of trauma or mistreatment that the music or movies or underground comics spoke to. Because of that we were able to develop a real empathy for each other’s pain and anger. We were able to make differences in each other’s lives in a way that the rest of the world couldn’t.” That was part of the process that led Cotter to her work with the Soros Foundation, researching the criminal justice system, studying the uses of higher education in prison, helping convicts reconnect to society.
“I cannot say strongly enough how important violent entertainment was to making me who I am,” she has said. “Or what a valuable role I’ve seen it play in the lives of many, many young people in difficult situations. It lets them go to scary places in imagination that help them understand what’s happening to them and see the kinds of pain that other people have gone through. It helps them connect with someone, no matter how severe their pain or rage is. Ultimately, it’s about not being so alone.”
Such inward-turned peer cultures have their dangers, however. There was a sixteen-year-old named Scott in one of my workshops who also called himself Raven–his identity in the Gothic scene. I always like working with “Goth” kids. Their symbolism is disturbing, the icons of death and fetishism, the corpse-white facial makeup, the black clothes, the numbing music with its funereal lyrics, the pervading depressiveness. And yet, in its cultivation of introspective melancholy, the Gothic culture encourages aesthetic sensibilities and a reverence for storytelling, peaceful social selves, and a sweet vulnerability. There is a superficiality and an affectedness to Goth kids, but I’ve seen them display great empathy, tolerance, and mutual support. In talking to them, it becomes clear that the Goth community plucked many of them from the brink of suicidal despair and gave them an identity to make sense of their obsessive thoughts of death and desires to hurt themselves. Goth is an articulation of anger turned inward, of the violence of profound depression. For many kids who feel not only powerless but incapable of seizing power, even undeserving of power, it’s a way to take control of themselves, to subdue their pains and fears into a poetically pleasing whole. As one of the characters in Scott’s story said, “I tried to kill myself once, but now I live with death, so why should I have to?”
But through Scott I saw the power of a subculture to pull kids in deep and away from others. He loved the workshop, drew extravagantly detailed pictures of red roses and reposed faces, made artfully disturbing comments about death when I tried to draw him out, but otherwise would not engage with the world around him. When the classroom discussion swept every other student up in its contentious energy, Scott floated off into a calm pool of his own. That he was shy and depressed I could see, but the social energy lifted other shy and depressed kids up with it. Scott’s artful Gothic pose kept him remote from it. One of the other kids, a sort of den mother to the class, looked at his work later and said to me, “Scott’s so talented. I always used to look forward to whatever he did, until he became a Goth. Now everything is about being the most Gothic Goth of all his Goth friends. It’s like Scott’s gone.”
I’ve known many kids who maintained a Gothic style in the context of friendships with other sorts of kids, many who cycled through an intensely Gothic phase and came out more sure of themselves and more at peace with their scariest emotions. But I’ve also known of a few who made themselves disappear utterly, who followed the Gothic glamorization of death to its literal extreme and committed suicide. One difference between the two outcomes seems to be the intensity of the individual’s pain and depression. Another seems to be the presence of any sort of support group, any sort of recognition or approval, from outside the subculture. Scott, I gathered from his friends, had depressed and indifferent parents and drifted through his adolescent depression with little notice from teachers or other adults. When the Goth world empathized with him and gave him the feeling of being seen, he identified powerfully, he overidentified, with it.
When we try to make children banish or ignore their rage, they often respond by identifying themselves completely with it. When violent storytelling isn’t allowed to serve its function, or is connected in young people’s minds with transgression and self-destruction, it can begin to churn obsessively inside without catharsis or resolution. When children feel unsafe sharing their fantasies with us, or feel that the most powerful parts of themselves are not seen or acknowledged, then the hidden realm of violent stories can begin to feel like a reality in itself–a reality standing in irreconcilable opposition to the world of adults. Like the child of fundamentalists who labels himself “bad” when he cannot repress his desire for sex or alcohol or other tools of the Devil, the child of a controlling, violence-fearing society may feel ashamed and afraid of the visceral kick he gets from Natural Born Killers or the gunshots in a Wu-Tang song or the blood-lipped vampiress in a Goth comic book. Like the “fallen” fundamentalist, he may be unable to visualize any personal scripts other than dissociation from a powerful component of his own psyche–or overidenti-fication with it.
“The question, then, isn’t,‘Is violent media good or bad?’” said Dr. Roben Torosyan, who teaches critical thinking and leadership at New School University. “But rather, how can an educator empower a youth to neither dissociate from a powerful component of his own psyche, nor overidentify with it? How can youth benefit from rage and its enactment, and what kind of education can help youth to engage their rage in a constructive manner?”
Torosyan believes that children should be taught basic skills for managing conflict from their early school years: to get in touch with their emotions, learn to delay reactions, use the delay to choose responses more consciously, listen to and acknowledge each other. But in the process of teaching those skills, he says, we must avoid giving them the message that their feelings don’t have power and legitimacy–that they shouldn’t have rage or enjoy it in any way.“I believe that for youth to overcome powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of their own rageful stories,” he said, “they need to make a whole developmental shift in meaning making. This entails a shift from the either-or dualism of ‘rage is bad,’ to a highly transcendent capacity to hold the tension of paradoxes and think ‘I have rage, and I have empathy–how can I engage and yet “disidentify” from both these realities?’”
Torosyan sees adults’ greatest tool for helping young people through that developmental shift as empathy.Young people who have suffered and perpetrated violence often respond remarkably well to adult empathy with their pains and struggles. Such empathy requires looking hard at what children’s lives today are truly like and imagining what it must feel like to be them. “There are times when rage must be reveled in without reflection,” he says. If the young are able to experience their rage fully, knowing that there’s someone with whom they can talk about it, they can learn that although they may not be able to control their feelings, they can control their responses. Torosyan said that we can help them with our empathy, “especially for feelings that are not typically countenanced as prosocial. Play the bloody video game with the young person. See what it feels like for the young person to succeed at the game, or to fail at it. Acknowledge without judgment what is said–empathize with the youth’s rage and its source.”
Mary Cotter reported that criminal justice annals are full of the transformative powers of simple empathy. “Sometimes just letting people know that you understand what they’ve been going through can open the door to communication and self-examination that helps them turn their lives around.” And she stressed that adults can use that power to help angry kids use popular culture more effectively. Sometimes it takes time, repetition, or a change of underlying conditions to make it effective. “But,” said Cotter, “there were many times I would have benefited hugely by an adult relative or a teacher just saying, ‘Are you as pissed off as that singer?’ Or ‘You really love that movie, don’t you? What do you love about it?’ And then just listening.”
Anger, however, is a difficult emotion with which to empathize–especially when it seems to be directed at us. This is where stories become so powerful. Listening to the angry stories helps to tear down the walls of defensiveness and allows empathy in. Psychotherapist Diane Stern told me about a young female client from a broken home and a chaotic home life. She had had to deal with violent male rage several times in her life and, with Stern, was working on strengthening her own sense of worth and potency. Once Stern made a comment about the climate of rage in our culture as embodied by people like Eminem, and her client snapped back, “Now, wait a minute. Eminem is the first person who’s ever gotten up there and told people what it was really like to be us–so-called ‘white trash.’ We put up with so much crap from our own lives, from what drugs and alcohol have done to our families, from having no money and nobody who’ll do anything to help us–and then people come down on us like we’re dirt, like we’re the one group of poor people it’s okay to hate and make fun of. And finally this rapper gets up and says this is what we’re angry about. People don’t want to hear it, but they have to hear it. And he makes them hear it.”
Stern said, “That brought home to me that all these songs, movies, and video games are stories. Made up or real, they’re the stories someone wants to tell and other people want to hear.” As a therapist she spends her life listening to stories, seeing how the telling of them strengthens her clients and how the hearing of them deepens and enriches her. Stories like her client’s, and like Eminem’s story as viewed through her client’s eyes, are reminders of the importance of letting people of all ages tell their stories and hear the stories they need.
We’ve been taught to fear stories. Popular articles, teacher training programs, handouts from pediatricians often list “an interest in violent stories or entertainment” as one of the warning signs that a child has the potential for violent behavior. And violent kids are interested in such things. But so are many of the kids who are trying mightily to take control of their feelings of anger and powerlessness without violence. If kids bully other kids, hit or verbally abuse their girlfriends or boyfriends, or explode over small slights; if they show cruelty to animals or boast of cruel deeds or plans; if they nurse long grudges, destroy property, or talk or write about specific revenge fantasies against real people; if they cut themselves or talk about suicide, then their fascination for violent stories may be part of a pattern that will escalate to real violence or self-violence. But the stories themselves are more likely to be the ways they speak their feelings and hope for us to listen.
Young people often haven’t learned how to see their anger from the outside even as they experience it. Powerful stories can lead them into their feelings but leave them spinning there. That’s where the adult ability to put emotions and fantasy in perspective can serve them well. The simplest displays of adult empathy can open the door for kids to engage with us, and the simplest applications of adult perspective can open doors within ourselves. In my workshops, I see kids’ relief at being able to talk to an adult stranger about their games, movies, songs, or comics. I get e-mails from kids who are being told by their schools and their parents and every other adult in their lives that the video games or rap music they love are turning them into monsters.“The games make me feel stronger,” wrote one. “I think me feeling stronger is what they don’t want.” I tell them that adults are afraid–of change and the future, and so of young people and new entertainment. And I tell them not to be afraid of themselves. Sometimes I point them toward Web sites or resources where intelligent people talk about these things in moderated forums, where they might get some modeling and mentoring. Mostly I just try to acknowledge what they’re saying. It’s like clutching your chest and falling down when you’re shot, or just looking at a child and smiling.