The Roots of Violence

Dave Weissbard

UU Rockford

October 17, 1999

[Little Girl Lost]

Two weeks ago, Patti Franklin passed me a book which she suggested I needed to read. She had found it troubling and wanted to talk about it. Last week she asked if I had gotten into it yet, and I confessed I hadn't. She assured me it was a "quick read." I looked for it and couldn't find it. Friday she called, having read in the Kairos what I was preaching on, and told me that it was directly applicable to my subject. I searched again and this time found it the book, read it, and she was, of course, right.

The book is Little Girl Lost by Joan Merriam, which is one of those true crime books. It's the story of a senseless crime you may remember hearing about back in 1983 in which two young teenage girls (Shirley Katherine Wolf, 14; and Cindy Lee Collier, 15) knocked on the door of a condo and asked Anna Bracket, an eighty-five- year-old woman for a glass of water and to use the phone. They had tried a couple of other units, but she was the first who let them in and was alone. They brutally stabbed her twenty-eight times, first with a paring knife, which bent, and then with a butcher knife. They wanted her car for a ride, although they didn't have what you would call any clear plan of what they would do with it. In fact, they took the wrong keys and just left when they couldn't start the car. One of them wrote in her diary, "Today Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun." The girls had been seen and were arrested that night. There was absolutely no detectable remorse. One tried to lie about it for a while, but the other confessed immediately.

The author spent eight years researching the book in which she tried to help us understand that which is fundamentally incomprehensible: how two children could do anything like that. But when you read the details of their lives, how they had been systematically dehumanized through almost constant abuse, their act becomes less of a surprise - not less shocking, but less of a surprise. They had survived their brutal lives thus far by disconnecting their feelings. It is not that the author turns them into sympathetic characters - understanding does not excuse what they did in any way. It becomes, a however, a tragedy in which they proceed inexorably toward the terrible conclusion.

Perhaps the worst thing about the story of Shirley and Cindy and their victim is that it does not shock us more than it does. It's a step beyond what we might expect, given that we don't associate such violence with girls, but in this time and in this nation, senseless, brutal violence has almost ceased to shock us.

[Violence]

I was, in a sense, prepared for that story by the book I have referred to in two sermons in recent months. From time to time, there are books which pull together many strands of what is happening in a society and through the genius of the author, put important issues into context, and give us insight into how to deal with them. This is one of those.

A ministerial colleague stumbled on the book Violence by James Gilligan, M.D., and recommended it to friends. I received that recommendation just as I was working on my sermon last June in which I was addressing Ken Rogers, our member who is incarcerated in Dixon. Gilligan gave me some insight into Ken's situation and I referenced the book at that time and said I would come back to it. I also referred to it in my recent sermon on racism, and again said I would come back to it.

Gilligan's book is so important and so insightful that one might wonder why it hasn't received more attention [it was published in hardcover in '96 and in paper in '97]. The problem, I fear, is that it persuasively presents a case that most people do not want to hear. It would require too radical a reorientation and many would rather pay the price of the problem than the price of the solution - at least the people in power.

Gilligan is not an ivory-tower academic. He worked in the Massachusetts prison system for 25 years. He was Medical Director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and was director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system. Gilligan is no naive Pollyanna. The problem is that virtually everything he says on the basis of his experience runs directly counter to the current policy trends in our society. He asks us to look at who is being served by the way things are going, and that is not a comfortable process, particularly for those in charge.

Among the quotations at the opening of the book is one from C. Everett Koop, the brilliant and courageous US Surgeon General whose appointment was so vigorously opposed by Liberals. Dr. Koop said:

Violence is every bit as much a public health issue for me and my successors in this century as smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis were for my predecessors in the last two centuries.

Dr. Gilligan's book is subtitled "Reflections on a National Epidemic." He agrees that violence cannot constructively be viewed as a series of isolated acts, but to be understood must be seen as an epidemic - an issue of public health. We need to be clear: the kind of violence we in the United States face is not a world-wide phenomenon. We have, by far, the largest percentage of our population imprisoned of any democracy in the world, and we beat most dictatorships too. (It used to be that South Africa and the Soviet Union were right up there, but we are ahead of them now.) And the more prisons we build, the more prisons we need. Gilligan finds this no surprise.

The theory of violence under which we operate is what Gilligan refers to as the "rational self-interest" theory. The basis of that theory is the assumption that if we make it sufficiently clear that those who are violent will be punished by imprisonment or execution, then they will think twice and stop doing what they are doing. The more certain the punishment, the less likely the violation. Gilligan says:

There are only four things wrong with this theory: It is totally incorrect, hopelessly naive, dangerously misleading, and based on complete and utter ignorance of what violent people are actually like.

The worst thing about this theory, according to Gilligan, is that it places the emphasis on punishment instead of prevention, and the reality is that the punishment only increases the problem.

The murder rate in the United States is 5-20 times higher than it is in any other industrialized democracy, even though we imprison proportionally 5-20 times more people than any other country on earth except Russia and despite (or because of) the fact that we are the only Western democracy that still practices capital punishment (another respect in which we are like Russia.)

Shame

On the basis of his experience, Gilligan has come to the conclusion that shame is the primary cause of violence. Violence is a way in which those who have felt ashamed can feel pride. The reason why I read the biblical story of Cain and Abel is Gilligan points out that the first recorded murder was the result of Cain having been "dis'ed" by God. "The Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: But unto Cain . . . he had not respect."

Gilligan says:

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this "loss of face" - no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death. For we misunderstand these men at our peril if we do not realize they mean it literally when they say they would rather kill or mutilate others, be killed or mutilated themselves, than live without pride, dignity and self-respect.

Gilligan contends that even common property crimes are more a matter of shame than of greed. Our society humiliates those who are poor by confronting them daily with "the life styles of the rich and famous." We have the greatest gap between rich and poor of any nation, and it is our theory that anyone could be rich if they weren't lazy. We continually blame the victims, which is a shaming process. Since they know they aren't guilty of being lazy, they feel ashamed. The way to feel better, they decide, is to have the signs of success, even if they are stolen.

Prisons

But the real crime comes when our society subjects people who are ashamed to an even more thorough shaming process which we call prison. People who may have never been violent before come out of the prison system so shamed and demeaned that they become violent. The prison system takes people with low self regard and steals away what little pride they had.

Gilligan points out that the process begins with the semi-public homosexual rape of the prisoner by the guards who require them to drop their pants and take a position of submission known throughout the animal world, and submit to digital anal rape which we call rectal searches. He reports that no one expects to find anything in such a search. It is designed solely to humiliate. Then the prisoner is thrown into an environment where homosexual rape is ubiquitous: men become sexual slaves of others. And the system condones this because it helps to maintain peace in the prison.

We were at a point where some reason was being applied to the penal system and educational opportunities were being provided that would enable prisoners to earn some pride and skills, but these have increasingly become seen as "coddling" prisoners and are being greatly restricted, partly at the insistence of guards who did not have such opportunities. In the Illinois system, prisoners are now being denied musical instruments and many of the art supplies that were previously therapeutic. The name of the game is humiliation. Even property that was sold to them by the prison system is being taken away and everything must fit in a little box. Guards keep pressing to restrict contact between prisoners and families, ostensibly because of contraband brought in by visitors, when it is known that guards are the major suppliers of drugs to prisoners.

What Gilligan wants us to see is that the prison system is, in itself, violent. Guards, who it is safe to say are not drawn from the cream of society, which is to say who have themselves been shamed, are given the opportunity to work their shame off by being violent (psychologically if not physically) to those who are imprisoned. The prisoners leave prison with lower self-regard than that with which they entered the system, and it is not surprising that they return to the system having become violent.

[Social C lass]

What some people would like to do is to explain it all by saying that there are some people who are simply born violent. What an easy out. "There's nothing we can do, they were born that way." You know that there are people who maintain that the prison population is disproportionately black because African Americans are just more violent than white folks. It is a classic case of blaming the victims. Look at the ways that our society shames people of color, denying them shoes and then telling them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Would many white folk maintain pride in the circumstances those of color encounter daily?

Gilligan's stress is on the societal and particularly the social class dimensions of shaming, but he does illustrate his points, throughout the book, with the stories of individuals he encountered. Even still, focusing on the large picture, he does not go into much detail on how the shame is transmitted to individuals. The larger and smaller pictures are not mutually exclusive - it is a matter of the power of magnification one is using. It is easier for us to throw our hands up in despair if we remain only on the macro plane.

The two girls, Shirley and Cindy, were the victims of social class in the larger sense, their parents and the people who shaped their lives were also victims. They were people who carried huge amounts of shame which deadened them to what they were doing to those children. Having no pride themselves, the parents destroyed any pride the kids might have had. People who feel good about themselves do not need to humiliate others.

[Breaking the Cycle of Shame]

It isn't always so clear, however. Sometimes people who ought to know better and should be in control of themselves, nonetheless engage in the shaming of their children. Some of the violent outbursts in our society come from relatively privileged kids who were, nonetheless shamed by their families and their peers. It has begun to be clear what an effective shaming system was in effect at Columbine High School. I told the children Sid Simon's ILAC story to help them see how important our principle of respecting the worth and dignity of every person is. The thing about the cycle of shame is that it can be broken.

But what about a parent who is working hard at two jobs and still cannot earn enough to house, feed and clothe their family? How much shame does that parent feel? What are the chances that that parent will be able to instill pride in his or her children if he or she is ashamed?

Teachers, of whom we have many, are sometimes in a position to make a critical difference in the life of a child who is shamed elsewhere. Many are the stories of those who have broken out of shame who attribute their success to a teacher who saw in them something which they had not yet seen.

[Marxism?]

The reason why I believe Gilligan's book was not more popular is that there is a clear Marxist dimension to his analysis, which does not make it wrong only unpopular!. When he looks at what is happening in terms of our response to violence, and how it keeps on happening in spite of the fact that we know how ineffective it is, he comes to the logical conclusion that the present system is serving someone's interest. It is Gilligan's conclusion that the richest among us are served by the status quo because the poor are distracted by intra-class warfare. Most of the crime we pay attention to is crime by the poor against the poor, (We only slap the patties of those who steal big from the rich and send them to country-club prisons, if any.) That focus on petty crime and on welfare queens who exploit the system, tend to distract attention from those who are being paid obscene amounts and are living opulent life styles. So the present system works for those on the top, even if, or even because, it fails to reduce crime.

[Prevention]

It is a matter of fact, not theory, that those nations to which we refer demeaningly as "welfare states" have far lower levels of violence than does our nation. People in those countries in which there is less of a gap between rich and poor, need not worry about having decent housing or food or education for their children. Those at the bottom rung are not shamed for their failures, and that, he contends, is why those nations experience less violence.

We could have less violence too, if we were willing to look dispassionately at the causes of violence in our society and put our resources into prevention instead of punishment. But are we prepared to do that? Are we prepared to provide genuine safety nets and some measure of pride for those on the bottom rungs. Au contraire - we are shaming them even more.

We are encouraged to believe that the answer to our problem with violence lies in stricter enforcement, longer sentences, more abusive prisons. Gilligan warns us that the evidence abounds that such a policy leads inexorably to more prisons and more violence.

When we face a public health problem, an epidemic that is killing thousands of people, we rally our forces and do what is needed to eliminate the problem. The time has come for us to acknowledge that violence in our society is an issue that can be and must be addressed, and that it is not by preaching against the evil of violence, any more than by preaching against cancer, that the problem will be cured. It requires the willingness to look realistically at what we know, and to commit to doing what is necessary.

That may require more courage than we can easily find.