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Teenage experiences in a violent society
ffournal of .4dolescence x98x, 4, 285-294
Teenage experiences in a violent society PETER MeLACHLANt This is an account of some of the factors which contribute to adolescent violence in Northern Ireland. Editor. INTRODUCTION I sometimes think that the~Spartans were kind in their treatment of young children. Compare the exposure of a babe on a Greek mountainside with what we do to our young. In Sparta the child who survived the physical ordeal had a clear road to full citizenship: Our youngsters in the inner city are allowed to develop through a long schooling process which leads them to expect the dignity and status of employment at the end. When they reach the stage where they can reasonably expect fulfilment of society's promise to them, if they live in Liverpool 8 or Belfast I2 more than half of them find no employment available--or at best a "Mickey Mouse" alternative on offer. Their self esteem suffers a shattering blow and this can be the moment at which the slide into antisocial behaviour begins. And this is not all. The adult world which has organized or acquiesced in this deception is itself locked in grave conflict about economic or ethnic power and busily manufactures petrol bombs or polishes guns. Where does this leave any adolescent, let alone an emotionally disturbed one? Being neither a psychiatrist nor a professional youth worker, my observations will necessarily be somewhat anecdotal and subjective. I shall be discussing Northern Ireland but with a continual eye on those elements in our experience which may prove to have relevance in the new inner city situation on this side of the Irish sea. Let me begin with a rough sketch of the context in which we are working in Northern Ireland. Unemployment is now i8 per cent overall (23 per cent for males) and rising. We have long since stopped thinking of an unemployed person as in some sense sick or inadequate--our unemployed are skilled, *Text of lecture given at the x6th A.P.S.A. Conference at North Staffordshlre Polytechnic, July.x98x. tSecretary, Belfast Voluntary Welfare Society, Belfast, Northern Ireland. ox4o-x97x/Sx/o40285 + to $oz.oo/o
~) x98x The Association for tho Psychiatric Study of Adolescents 285
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well educated and keen to work. Large areas of Belfast are derelict, partly as a result of communal strife, but rather more because of massive urban decay which was tackled initially under a policy of swathe redevelopment which destroyed far more than buildings. Whole communities were rooted up and whole neighbourhoods were allowed to decay . . . . We have a deep conflict whose roots go back centuries. It erupted into open violence in 1969, not at a time of particularly high unemployment but I think significantly at a time when the Catholic minority were enjoying a much better standard of education than before and expecting a degree of fulfilment in their local community which was denied them by the rigid social structures which had remained static for 5~ years. The cry of the civil rights movement in i969 was for votes, housing and jobs and in my opinion it was the frustration of aspirations created by society which started the slide into the abyss of violence in which we now find ourselves. Ten years on, the original thrust of the riots and campaigning has been forgotten. We have high unemployment, bad housing, poverty, debt, a growing number of one parent families and broken homes, all continuing to fuel the deeper ethnic conflict which has been brought to life. Our politics are totally jammed, with no means of working together apparent. In this situation our young arc exposed to a society with endemic violence. What does endemic violence actually mean? Let me give an example. Four summers ago my wife and I were helping to run a week's holiday for families from inner Belfast at the Corrymeela Community Centre at Ballycastle on the north Antrim coast. The families were mixed Catholic and Protestant but, away from the tribal pressures of Belfast, none of the violence I am going to describe had anything to do with sectarianism. It was all a "normal" reaction to day to day situations. Within minutes of the families arriving, a group of 15] 16-year-old teenagers, who probably had been brought against their will to some degree, had totally wrecked four small dormitories, throwing the bedding out onto the grass. Four girls who were to the fore in this operation then disappeared into the town a mile away and were not seen again until the middle of the night. Meanwhile, two groups of Catholic I2]I3-year-olds from different parts of west Belfast were quickly staging a fight with penknives, presumably to establish who "owned the territory." I just caught the two "champions" as they were about to engage in deadly combat, egged on by the "gangs" of two or three supporters which had formed among complete strangers within two hours. The week went on from crisis to crisis, punctuated by the screams of a 2-year-old whose mother was in a mcntal hospital and father a recluse, until on the last day when all the families were on the minibuses ready for departing, it was discovered that some money was missing. We had to
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conduct a search. The money was not in the suitcases but most of the rest of Corrymeela's equipment was--light bulbs, toilet rolls, tools, cutlery, crockery and so on. As we asked the familiesto leave the vans for the search, two cight-year-oldswhipped out of thebus and stooped to the ground to pick up two handfuls of gravel with the shout "Let's have a riot". More recently, a Dutch organization, which took a group of Belfast children to Holland for a holiday found they rejected all suggestions for activities like sea bathing, visiting museums, even football but responded when an old bus was brought into the camp for them to stone. A few days ago I watched two small boys on a piece of waste land playing a game which involved bin-lids as shields while they threw stones at each other. During a holiday camp in Norway two summers ago, youngsters, who came from Derry and Belfast, daubed slogans on the roads, vandalized gardens, stole from each other and fought each other viciously. In other words, violence has become a normal means of communication and a normal mode of play. Every child can learn how to make a petrol bomb if they watch TV. I was momentarily stunned this week to find my six-yearold nephew in Derby quite nonchalantly talking about making them with his friend in fantasy play. If children see adults employing violence it becomes an accepted form of play and from there when deep and divisive issues arise, as they do with us, it is easy transition into much more serious use of violence. Any event that takes place in the Northern Ireland conflict is likely to be perceived in different ways by community leaders and press in each community. The young only have the received version of their own community and when they meet the other view, they are likely to react emotionally and in the end violently. In my experience, if authority reacts toughly when events have reached this stage, the result is usually to tie the knot tighter and build up the likelihood of an even more violent counter reaction. For a few moments I want to consider some of the factors which have acted as stimuli to young people to become violent in Northern Ireland. While it is important to understand the underlying causes of conflict, it is also vital to comprehend the processes which actually trigger individuals to acts of violence. There is little doubt in my mind that our politicians must bear some of the responsibility. In a fraught situation, politicians have a remarkable "knack of awakening ever more extreme sentiment without putting themselves on the wrong side of the law. So when they speak of "certain circumstances" in which it will be necessary to "shoot to kill" or "liquidate the enemy", as happened with us in the early seventies, they will protest that they did not actually tell people to do it. They hedged their words around with safeguards for themselves. Yet when you visit the young xnen in prison who
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have shot to kill and tried to liquidate the enemy they will tell you that they thought they were doing what the political leaders were telling them to do[ It is probably true that in a non-violent setting when people are unaffected to any great degree by whatever disturbance is current, these words of politicians arc understood metaphorically and are not acted on. However, some situations arise where individuals are actually suffering themselves-which the politicians rarely do---and then the sufferers ]tear what is being said and act on it. If this is a correct analysis, it becomesimmensely important to alert community leaders and politicians to the times when their words could lead straight to action, and to make them answerable for the consequences. A second trigger of violence is undoubtedly the frustration and suffering caused by environmental conditions, I remember talking to a paramilitary leader in the mid-seventies who acknowledged that at the back of his involvement with the IRA was the anger he felt at the housing and employment conditions in which he grew up. When planners roll in the J.C.B.'s to change the face of the inner city, they run the risk of being seen as adult vandals destroying a way of life. When they build acres of new housing without creating a community, and when they erect tower blocks of flats which are as alien to the local culture as they proved to be in Belfast, they may unwittingly be creating the conditions in which a generation of young will turn against the society in which they live. A third trigger of violence is to be found in unemployment. The loss of self esteem in a society which values man by his job and his possessions can lead, through depression and frustration, to anger and violence. When such feelings are fuelled by adults highly motivated in some political direction who are offering the excitement of a cause and employing violent methods, the temptation to join a paramilitary group can be overwhelming. The fourth source is the media. While we still have much to learn about the precise effects of television, there are some points which I think can be stated with a fair degree of confidence. I was alarmed recently to watch News at Ten on ITV. At the beginning of the programme, the newscaster said there were groups of youths assembling in Fulham and Manchester, Moss Side. Half an hour later, at the end of the bulletin, he confirmed that crowds were gathering at these places--increased, I have no doubt, by some who had been watching the bulletin at the beginning and who had gone out to see what was happening. Instant reporting of gathering trouble can certainly help to advertise it. At the death of Bobby Sands, it was estimated that there were Iooo journalists in Belfast and almost Ioo television crews from all over the world. As these people roamed the streets anxious to get good copy and film to help sell their papers and justify their travel expenses, of course there were
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others willing to oblige, especially if it helped to further their cause. Violence is spectacular--explosions, death and fire--and if the media are available to pick it up, there will tend to be more of it--all of which provides a great attraction to the teenager looking for excitement. Another way in which the media can help to spread violence is through the exchange of ideas. Whether in news bulletins or drama, an idea for tackling a frustration can be picked up from the screen; the recent spread of rioting in British cities almost certainly owes something to this process. I would not argue that the media is a prime cause of violence erupting but see its contribution mainly as one of escalating the scale. In Northern Ireland and now in Britain as a whole, a fifth trigger of violence is the lack of adequate channels for registering legitimate ideas and getting a response. The lack of democratic political channels for most of the past ten years in Northern Ireland is well documented. But it is interesting to note a number of people now saying that the political parties in Britain are failing to channel the aspirations of minority groups especially in the inner city. For in the urban setting, individual worth can often only be expressed by belonging to a significant minority group which cannot operate through umbrella political parties such as we have had traditionally. Or to put the problem in another stark context, the present level of unemployment demands that a percentage of our M.P.s should be unemployed people, to represent the interests of that group. At present the unemployed are totally unrepresented. One final source of triggers to violence is the security forces themselves. In Northern Ireland young men of x8 who are sometimes quite violently handled by young men of i8 wearing an army uniform, feel the experience gives them a licence to strike back. It is probably no coincidence, that police handling of the early riots in Derry and Belfast led to increasing, rather than decreasing, violence as has happened in some riot situations in Britain. Police can only exercise forcible restraint where the community backs those restraints. Where the community at large sees justification for the frustration which leads to the violence, the use of "violent" policing runs the grave risk of increasing the level of violence. In the section which follows I now want to turn to consider some of the detailed processes which young people experience in a society which has the context I have described and the triggers to violence just outlined. First let us look at the experience of a school leaver in a ghetto where violence occurs. There is no employment. The environment is poor and the provisions for youth are either non existent, too expensive, or alien. A group of young people hang around together--they share the values of the local community, including its frustration. One becomes interested in the "political" angle. A local political organizer spots him. He does "security", that is watching
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while the adults meet. He is asked to pass a weapon from one place to another. He is asked to conceal a weapon. By this time he is bringing other members of his peer group with him. Soon he is selected for training and the journey to becoming a full blooded paramilitary has begun. At around the age of I6, he comes to the notice of the police or arrdy. He is picked up. His arrest and questioning may be a pretty alienating process and he may be left with a phrase like "we'll get you next time" ringing in Iris ears. Then, one day the local community is having a festivalmsomething quite within the law--but at the end a fracas breaks out and turns into violent confrontation with stones, bottles and worse. The whole community goes into reverse and there is loose talk about violence. The teenager feeling and seeing the injustice is blooded for action. He is caught with stones or a petrol bomb and undergoes his first interrogation. It just so happens that a policeman has been seriously injured that day. Understandably, however well disciplined the police, they feel different when they are looking for the person who attacked one of their own colleagues. It would demand almost superhuman control not be that little bit tougher to catch the guilty party. Such pressure is exerted that the inexperienced youngster signs a statement which in Northern Ireland can be used as sole evidence for a conviction. The statement may be true or it may not. Over the past ten years, I have seen young people who have been reduced to incoherence and who have been physically abused in interrogation. It is an inevitable part of the brutalizing process which goes on in a violent conflict. As a result of all this, the youngster comes to court. There are a number of charges and an awful lot of eases going through the court because of the community trouble. The solicitor cannot get to the court and it is a junior barrister who takes the ease at short notice. There is plea bargaining which the youngster does not understand and he is sentenced to a first custodial sentence. By this stage, his concept of the police is of an enemy. (I discovered just how sharp this perspective is on one continental youth camp when a youth was going to a host family and discovered the father was a policeman. He was terrified and did not expect to survive the two days stay. When he returned the policemen had taken him to see the whole local police operation and his comment was that he never realized policing could be like that.) Our teenager is now in prison and may be doing time for someone else-there is great loyalty among those who feel a shared sense of injustice. Even if he was guilty the plea bargaining and the court procedure may have left him with a very warped view of the justice system and he is left wrestling with the fact that society has imprisoned him, yet his peers and many of his immediate circle of acquaintances feel his actions were justified. I remember
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hearing a clergyman talk of going to comfort the father of a boy who had just been given life imprisonment for murder, only to discover the father had been the commanding officer of the local paramilitary who had sent the boy out to kill! While this process is underway, another one has started. A section of the wider community is saying that all those who are involved in riot and violent crime should be put away or shot. The law should be strengthened to enable this to be done. The law becomes a hostage to the conflict seen by some groups as a system of unjust oppression and by others as a defensive bulwark which must be made ever stronger--and probably therefore more unjust. Meanwhile our teenager in prison is maturing. He sees his family and girl friend regularly subjected to undignified search and waiting procedures to make sure they bring him nothing dangerous or subversive. He does not think himself a criminal and becomes more political in his outlook. This is communicated to his family especially to the younger members who begin to look on him as some kind of hero. Prison visiting becomes one of the trigger points for other young people to become involved in paramilitary activity. Eventually the young man is released. More than likely he will have great difficulty to get a job and if he does wish to break with his former associates, he will have a very tough time achieving it because they are the only group able to provide him with money and support. So he is trapped for as long as the community is in violent conflict. Only when he becomes too old for active service will he be "allowed" out. If he does try to "escape" he will be treated like a criminal by his own community, sometimes being shot and sometimes pursued far beyond the shores of Northern Ireland. Bearing in mind that this is the process which occurs for the ordinary youngster from the ghetto, it is not difficult to envisage what happens to the "ordinary criminal" or "disturbed" adolescent who does not conform to the wishes of the paramilitary. Provided a lad does not step out of line he may survive, but if he is suspected of informing or random criminal activity which disturbs others and may be blamed on the paramilitary, he will be dealt with by the paramilitary in a straight and violent kangaroo court justice--with kneecapping a frequent consequence. I heard two teenagers talking recently about a kneecapping which had taken place in their street. One said they thought it was terrible. The other argued it was absolutely on a par with what the soldiers did when they found a young hoodlum and roughed him up except that perhaps the army were a bit softer! Reviewing all these small processes which have developed in our society in the past ten years I can only hope they will not be repeated in the riot cities of Great Britain. The danger that they will be exists where the numbers
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going before the courts is large and the feeling of injustice among a section of the community is great. Next, may I turn from the teenager engaged in the violent society to consider somc of those who are on the fringe and how they are affected. My wife was teaching a young lad the violin one day and he was making good progress. M y wife asked him if there was music in his family and he said that his father used to play the violin. Unthinkingly, my wife asked if the father had given up playing. After a pause the boy simply said " M y daddy was a policeman". There are now hundreds of children who can say that and the deprivation and bitterness which they have experienced is another frightening aspect of the violent situation. The headmaster of a school near my home has had the experience of seeing one of his youngsters after she was killed by a plastic bullet, despite the warnings he gave that they should all keep clear of trouble. But warnings become meaningless when you find the army outside the school gate at the end of school each day--I8-year-old soldiers watching the gate and I7-yearold pupils coming through it--a recipe for trouble. When the Provisional IRA call a day of mourning it becomes a heroic act even to go to school. Because the places of entertainment have become less accessible, we see a mounting problem of teenage drinking, teenage valium taking, glue sniffing and other similar escape activities. Teenagers whose parents try to keep them uninvolved are sometimes compelled to virtually imprison youngsters in their homes with the T V and stereo as their only outlets. The limiting effects of this kind of protection do not need describing. Where political crime is taking place, ordinary crime becomes licensed as seen in the looting of shops in the recent disturbances in England. We have the joyriders who find they can take ears with impunity--as many as 20 a week per person--and get away with it. We also find that the disturbed child can very easily write himself or herself large in the community with acts of bravado which are unchecked. The absence of career motivation and the feeling of purposelessness in the educational system leads quickly to involvement in petty crime, the statistics for which have increased alarmingly throughout the period of our violent troubles. Robbery with Violence is among the most frequently recorded crimes. While the ethnic conflict is continuing violently, one may be forgiven for saying that there is very little that can be done to change the small processes which I have described and yet I profoundly believe that it is only at the level of the small processes that the foundations can be laid which enable the ethnic conflict to be conducted without violence. So finally I want to outline some of the things which are happening in Northern Ireland which could contribute to a long-term change in the situation.
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My wife and I started fostering young offenders in our home some ten years ago and we quickly learnt that there were some basic principles which underlay the help we might give. First, we had to learn to communicate with the youngster and this only became possible when trust had been built up. In our experience it was often one of our baby daughters who built the trust relationship first and because they trusted us, the teenager came to do likewise. When it came to communication, some of our youngsters only understood physical admonition at first and most of them had very short "intake" times. It was pointless talking with them--one had to work and play with them to build communication. After that it was important to stand by them in a crisis as this was tile best practical expression of love. Finally, it helped enormously when they found a constructive activity on which to base their self esteem. All of these principles have application in helping the teenagers in our conflict situation to handle themselves without violence and it is only when a generation has been created that can handle conflict without violence that we have the hope of a happier future in Northern Ireland. A great deal of work is therefore being done in the field of residential opportunities for young people on holiday and on courses. Research published by the King George Jubilee Trust several years ago showed that periods spent in residence with new teachers by disturbed youngsters moving to secondary school could do much to prevent the development of antisocial behaviour patterns. Many organizations in Northern Ireland, and not a few outside, are running residential experiences aiming at improving communication between the two ethnic traditions. The effects of this work will be slow but profound. In addition, much attention is being given to intervening in the family which is not functioning well, so that harm to children can be minimized. The use of the surrogate mum is one of the experiments being tried by my own agency. Another range of projects clusters around developing new leadership patterns in the areas from which violence has traditionally flared. This is done by helping peer groups to establish constructive objectives and achieve them. Already it is possible to see some of those who have benefited from this type of experience emerging to important roles in the community. Both in the employment field and in the educational field, there are now pilot projects experimenting with new forms of motivation. One youth and community workshop bases its programme on encouraging the participants to decide at every stage the direction they are going to take and sticking to it. Again, in one inner city flats complex, previously unbiddable teenagers are involved in a highly motivated learning project where they decide what they want to achieve.
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Another way in which the teenager can be helped out of the military process is that of establishing a caring, respectful relationship outside the normal peer circle. Adults with time have a considerable role here if they can strike a bargain with a young offender and use that as the basis for a guarantee to the court. Quite a lot of this type of w ~ k is being done. In the policing field too, considerable progress has been made. We have a very highly developed community relations division whose activities involve, for instance, young people going on mountain rambles with policemen even of the very highest ranks. This helps to change the relationship between the young and the police substantially, and it is by no means a one-way process. We live in a disturbed and disturbing society. Those of us who have insights into the behaviour of disturbed people have a responsibility to try and see how those insights might be relevant to our society as a whole. The world we grew up in has failed to deliver the goals which it set for the next generation. Given the frustration this creates, it is easy for the young to move into violent forms of communication--it brings attention, it brings about changes, though maybe not the ones sought, it brings the satisfaction of revenge on those who may be thought to bear some of the guilt for the situation. The responses of Government and police are predictable and they tend to lead to more frustration and an escalation of violence. If we understand these processes we must begin to seek ways of changing them. In Belfast today there is emerging a new dynamic; a section of those who are unemployed, unable to live without purpose, are seeking one in voluntary work.
John Keats once wrote in a letter to a friend "I saw a stoat today. It had a sense of purpose. Its eyes were alive with it". I believe that a human being without purpose will perish. If young people grow up in a society where their purpose is a violent protest against society as they find it, society will perish. The hope for the future must lie with finding new concepts of living. Alongside the traditional work sector there will, I believe, emerge a vast non-work sector in which people will find fulfilment in self-development, education and travel, in creative arts, in physical skill and sport, and in service to the community.
Teenage experiences in a violent society PETER MeLACHLANt This is an account of some of the factors which contribute to adolescent violence in Northern Ireland. Editor. INTRODUCTION I sometimes think that the~Spartans were kind in their treatment of young children. Compare the exposure of a babe on a Greek mountainside with what we do to our young. In Sparta the child who survived the physical ordeal had a clear road to full citizenship: Our youngsters in the inner city are allowed to develop through a long schooling process which leads them to expect the dignity and status of employment at the end. When they reach the stage where they can reasonably expect fulfilment of society's promise to them, if they live in Liverpool 8 or Belfast I2 more than half of them find no employment available--or at best a "Mickey Mouse" alternative on offer. Their self esteem suffers a shattering blow and this can be the moment at which the slide into antisocial behaviour begins. And this is not all. The adult world which has organized or acquiesced in this deception is itself locked in grave conflict about economic or ethnic power and busily manufactures petrol bombs or polishes guns. Where does this leave any adolescent, let alone an emotionally disturbed one? Being neither a psychiatrist nor a professional youth worker, my observations will necessarily be somewhat anecdotal and subjective. I shall be discussing Northern Ireland but with a continual eye on those elements in our experience which may prove to have relevance in the new inner city situation on this side of the Irish sea. Let me begin with a rough sketch of the context in which we are working in Northern Ireland. Unemployment is now i8 per cent overall (23 per cent for males) and rising. We have long since stopped thinking of an unemployed person as in some sense sick or inadequate--our unemployed are skilled, *Text of lecture given at the x6th A.P.S.A. Conference at North Staffordshlre Polytechnic, July.x98x. tSecretary, Belfast Voluntary Welfare Society, Belfast, Northern Ireland. ox4o-x97x/Sx/o40285 + to $oz.oo/o
~) x98x The Association for tho Psychiatric Study of Adolescents 285
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well educated and keen to work. Large areas of Belfast are derelict, partly as a result of communal strife, but rather more because of massive urban decay which was tackled initially under a policy of swathe redevelopment which destroyed far more than buildings. Whole communities were rooted up and whole neighbourhoods were allowed to decay . . . . We have a deep conflict whose roots go back centuries. It erupted into open violence in 1969, not at a time of particularly high unemployment but I think significantly at a time when the Catholic minority were enjoying a much better standard of education than before and expecting a degree of fulfilment in their local community which was denied them by the rigid social structures which had remained static for 5~ years. The cry of the civil rights movement in i969 was for votes, housing and jobs and in my opinion it was the frustration of aspirations created by society which started the slide into the abyss of violence in which we now find ourselves. Ten years on, the original thrust of the riots and campaigning has been forgotten. We have high unemployment, bad housing, poverty, debt, a growing number of one parent families and broken homes, all continuing to fuel the deeper ethnic conflict which has been brought to life. Our politics are totally jammed, with no means of working together apparent. In this situation our young arc exposed to a society with endemic violence. What does endemic violence actually mean? Let me give an example. Four summers ago my wife and I were helping to run a week's holiday for families from inner Belfast at the Corrymeela Community Centre at Ballycastle on the north Antrim coast. The families were mixed Catholic and Protestant but, away from the tribal pressures of Belfast, none of the violence I am going to describe had anything to do with sectarianism. It was all a "normal" reaction to day to day situations. Within minutes of the families arriving, a group of 15] 16-year-old teenagers, who probably had been brought against their will to some degree, had totally wrecked four small dormitories, throwing the bedding out onto the grass. Four girls who were to the fore in this operation then disappeared into the town a mile away and were not seen again until the middle of the night. Meanwhile, two groups of Catholic I2]I3-year-olds from different parts of west Belfast were quickly staging a fight with penknives, presumably to establish who "owned the territory." I just caught the two "champions" as they were about to engage in deadly combat, egged on by the "gangs" of two or three supporters which had formed among complete strangers within two hours. The week went on from crisis to crisis, punctuated by the screams of a 2-year-old whose mother was in a mcntal hospital and father a recluse, until on the last day when all the families were on the minibuses ready for departing, it was discovered that some money was missing. We had to
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conduct a search. The money was not in the suitcases but most of the rest of Corrymeela's equipment was--light bulbs, toilet rolls, tools, cutlery, crockery and so on. As we asked the familiesto leave the vans for the search, two cight-year-oldswhipped out of thebus and stooped to the ground to pick up two handfuls of gravel with the shout "Let's have a riot". More recently, a Dutch organization, which took a group of Belfast children to Holland for a holiday found they rejected all suggestions for activities like sea bathing, visiting museums, even football but responded when an old bus was brought into the camp for them to stone. A few days ago I watched two small boys on a piece of waste land playing a game which involved bin-lids as shields while they threw stones at each other. During a holiday camp in Norway two summers ago, youngsters, who came from Derry and Belfast, daubed slogans on the roads, vandalized gardens, stole from each other and fought each other viciously. In other words, violence has become a normal means of communication and a normal mode of play. Every child can learn how to make a petrol bomb if they watch TV. I was momentarily stunned this week to find my six-yearold nephew in Derby quite nonchalantly talking about making them with his friend in fantasy play. If children see adults employing violence it becomes an accepted form of play and from there when deep and divisive issues arise, as they do with us, it is easy transition into much more serious use of violence. Any event that takes place in the Northern Ireland conflict is likely to be perceived in different ways by community leaders and press in each community. The young only have the received version of their own community and when they meet the other view, they are likely to react emotionally and in the end violently. In my experience, if authority reacts toughly when events have reached this stage, the result is usually to tie the knot tighter and build up the likelihood of an even more violent counter reaction. For a few moments I want to consider some of the factors which have acted as stimuli to young people to become violent in Northern Ireland. While it is important to understand the underlying causes of conflict, it is also vital to comprehend the processes which actually trigger individuals to acts of violence. There is little doubt in my mind that our politicians must bear some of the responsibility. In a fraught situation, politicians have a remarkable "knack of awakening ever more extreme sentiment without putting themselves on the wrong side of the law. So when they speak of "certain circumstances" in which it will be necessary to "shoot to kill" or "liquidate the enemy", as happened with us in the early seventies, they will protest that they did not actually tell people to do it. They hedged their words around with safeguards for themselves. Yet when you visit the young xnen in prison who
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have shot to kill and tried to liquidate the enemy they will tell you that they thought they were doing what the political leaders were telling them to do[ It is probably true that in a non-violent setting when people are unaffected to any great degree by whatever disturbance is current, these words of politicians arc understood metaphorically and are not acted on. However, some situations arise where individuals are actually suffering themselves-which the politicians rarely do---and then the sufferers ]tear what is being said and act on it. If this is a correct analysis, it becomesimmensely important to alert community leaders and politicians to the times when their words could lead straight to action, and to make them answerable for the consequences. A second trigger of violence is undoubtedly the frustration and suffering caused by environmental conditions, I remember talking to a paramilitary leader in the mid-seventies who acknowledged that at the back of his involvement with the IRA was the anger he felt at the housing and employment conditions in which he grew up. When planners roll in the J.C.B.'s to change the face of the inner city, they run the risk of being seen as adult vandals destroying a way of life. When they build acres of new housing without creating a community, and when they erect tower blocks of flats which are as alien to the local culture as they proved to be in Belfast, they may unwittingly be creating the conditions in which a generation of young will turn against the society in which they live. A third trigger of violence is to be found in unemployment. The loss of self esteem in a society which values man by his job and his possessions can lead, through depression and frustration, to anger and violence. When such feelings are fuelled by adults highly motivated in some political direction who are offering the excitement of a cause and employing violent methods, the temptation to join a paramilitary group can be overwhelming. The fourth source is the media. While we still have much to learn about the precise effects of television, there are some points which I think can be stated with a fair degree of confidence. I was alarmed recently to watch News at Ten on ITV. At the beginning of the programme, the newscaster said there were groups of youths assembling in Fulham and Manchester, Moss Side. Half an hour later, at the end of the bulletin, he confirmed that crowds were gathering at these places--increased, I have no doubt, by some who had been watching the bulletin at the beginning and who had gone out to see what was happening. Instant reporting of gathering trouble can certainly help to advertise it. At the death of Bobby Sands, it was estimated that there were Iooo journalists in Belfast and almost Ioo television crews from all over the world. As these people roamed the streets anxious to get good copy and film to help sell their papers and justify their travel expenses, of course there were
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others willing to oblige, especially if it helped to further their cause. Violence is spectacular--explosions, death and fire--and if the media are available to pick it up, there will tend to be more of it--all of which provides a great attraction to the teenager looking for excitement. Another way in which the media can help to spread violence is through the exchange of ideas. Whether in news bulletins or drama, an idea for tackling a frustration can be picked up from the screen; the recent spread of rioting in British cities almost certainly owes something to this process. I would not argue that the media is a prime cause of violence erupting but see its contribution mainly as one of escalating the scale. In Northern Ireland and now in Britain as a whole, a fifth trigger of violence is the lack of adequate channels for registering legitimate ideas and getting a response. The lack of democratic political channels for most of the past ten years in Northern Ireland is well documented. But it is interesting to note a number of people now saying that the political parties in Britain are failing to channel the aspirations of minority groups especially in the inner city. For in the urban setting, individual worth can often only be expressed by belonging to a significant minority group which cannot operate through umbrella political parties such as we have had traditionally. Or to put the problem in another stark context, the present level of unemployment demands that a percentage of our M.P.s should be unemployed people, to represent the interests of that group. At present the unemployed are totally unrepresented. One final source of triggers to violence is the security forces themselves. In Northern Ireland young men of x8 who are sometimes quite violently handled by young men of i8 wearing an army uniform, feel the experience gives them a licence to strike back. It is probably no coincidence, that police handling of the early riots in Derry and Belfast led to increasing, rather than decreasing, violence as has happened in some riot situations in Britain. Police can only exercise forcible restraint where the community backs those restraints. Where the community at large sees justification for the frustration which leads to the violence, the use of "violent" policing runs the grave risk of increasing the level of violence. In the section which follows I now want to turn to consider some of the detailed processes which young people experience in a society which has the context I have described and the triggers to violence just outlined. First let us look at the experience of a school leaver in a ghetto where violence occurs. There is no employment. The environment is poor and the provisions for youth are either non existent, too expensive, or alien. A group of young people hang around together--they share the values of the local community, including its frustration. One becomes interested in the "political" angle. A local political organizer spots him. He does "security", that is watching
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while the adults meet. He is asked to pass a weapon from one place to another. He is asked to conceal a weapon. By this time he is bringing other members of his peer group with him. Soon he is selected for training and the journey to becoming a full blooded paramilitary has begun. At around the age of I6, he comes to the notice of the police or arrdy. He is picked up. His arrest and questioning may be a pretty alienating process and he may be left with a phrase like "we'll get you next time" ringing in Iris ears. Then, one day the local community is having a festivalmsomething quite within the law--but at the end a fracas breaks out and turns into violent confrontation with stones, bottles and worse. The whole community goes into reverse and there is loose talk about violence. The teenager feeling and seeing the injustice is blooded for action. He is caught with stones or a petrol bomb and undergoes his first interrogation. It just so happens that a policeman has been seriously injured that day. Understandably, however well disciplined the police, they feel different when they are looking for the person who attacked one of their own colleagues. It would demand almost superhuman control not be that little bit tougher to catch the guilty party. Such pressure is exerted that the inexperienced youngster signs a statement which in Northern Ireland can be used as sole evidence for a conviction. The statement may be true or it may not. Over the past ten years, I have seen young people who have been reduced to incoherence and who have been physically abused in interrogation. It is an inevitable part of the brutalizing process which goes on in a violent conflict. As a result of all this, the youngster comes to court. There are a number of charges and an awful lot of eases going through the court because of the community trouble. The solicitor cannot get to the court and it is a junior barrister who takes the ease at short notice. There is plea bargaining which the youngster does not understand and he is sentenced to a first custodial sentence. By this stage, his concept of the police is of an enemy. (I discovered just how sharp this perspective is on one continental youth camp when a youth was going to a host family and discovered the father was a policeman. He was terrified and did not expect to survive the two days stay. When he returned the policemen had taken him to see the whole local police operation and his comment was that he never realized policing could be like that.) Our teenager is now in prison and may be doing time for someone else-there is great loyalty among those who feel a shared sense of injustice. Even if he was guilty the plea bargaining and the court procedure may have left him with a very warped view of the justice system and he is left wrestling with the fact that society has imprisoned him, yet his peers and many of his immediate circle of acquaintances feel his actions were justified. I remember
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hearing a clergyman talk of going to comfort the father of a boy who had just been given life imprisonment for murder, only to discover the father had been the commanding officer of the local paramilitary who had sent the boy out to kill! While this process is underway, another one has started. A section of the wider community is saying that all those who are involved in riot and violent crime should be put away or shot. The law should be strengthened to enable this to be done. The law becomes a hostage to the conflict seen by some groups as a system of unjust oppression and by others as a defensive bulwark which must be made ever stronger--and probably therefore more unjust. Meanwhile our teenager in prison is maturing. He sees his family and girl friend regularly subjected to undignified search and waiting procedures to make sure they bring him nothing dangerous or subversive. He does not think himself a criminal and becomes more political in his outlook. This is communicated to his family especially to the younger members who begin to look on him as some kind of hero. Prison visiting becomes one of the trigger points for other young people to become involved in paramilitary activity. Eventually the young man is released. More than likely he will have great difficulty to get a job and if he does wish to break with his former associates, he will have a very tough time achieving it because they are the only group able to provide him with money and support. So he is trapped for as long as the community is in violent conflict. Only when he becomes too old for active service will he be "allowed" out. If he does try to "escape" he will be treated like a criminal by his own community, sometimes being shot and sometimes pursued far beyond the shores of Northern Ireland. Bearing in mind that this is the process which occurs for the ordinary youngster from the ghetto, it is not difficult to envisage what happens to the "ordinary criminal" or "disturbed" adolescent who does not conform to the wishes of the paramilitary. Provided a lad does not step out of line he may survive, but if he is suspected of informing or random criminal activity which disturbs others and may be blamed on the paramilitary, he will be dealt with by the paramilitary in a straight and violent kangaroo court justice--with kneecapping a frequent consequence. I heard two teenagers talking recently about a kneecapping which had taken place in their street. One said they thought it was terrible. The other argued it was absolutely on a par with what the soldiers did when they found a young hoodlum and roughed him up except that perhaps the army were a bit softer! Reviewing all these small processes which have developed in our society in the past ten years I can only hope they will not be repeated in the riot cities of Great Britain. The danger that they will be exists where the numbers
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going before the courts is large and the feeling of injustice among a section of the community is great. Next, may I turn from the teenager engaged in the violent society to consider somc of those who are on the fringe and how they are affected. My wife was teaching a young lad the violin one day and he was making good progress. M y wife asked him if there was music in his family and he said that his father used to play the violin. Unthinkingly, my wife asked if the father had given up playing. After a pause the boy simply said " M y daddy was a policeman". There are now hundreds of children who can say that and the deprivation and bitterness which they have experienced is another frightening aspect of the violent situation. The headmaster of a school near my home has had the experience of seeing one of his youngsters after she was killed by a plastic bullet, despite the warnings he gave that they should all keep clear of trouble. But warnings become meaningless when you find the army outside the school gate at the end of school each day--I8-year-old soldiers watching the gate and I7-yearold pupils coming through it--a recipe for trouble. When the Provisional IRA call a day of mourning it becomes a heroic act even to go to school. Because the places of entertainment have become less accessible, we see a mounting problem of teenage drinking, teenage valium taking, glue sniffing and other similar escape activities. Teenagers whose parents try to keep them uninvolved are sometimes compelled to virtually imprison youngsters in their homes with the T V and stereo as their only outlets. The limiting effects of this kind of protection do not need describing. Where political crime is taking place, ordinary crime becomes licensed as seen in the looting of shops in the recent disturbances in England. We have the joyriders who find they can take ears with impunity--as many as 20 a week per person--and get away with it. We also find that the disturbed child can very easily write himself or herself large in the community with acts of bravado which are unchecked. The absence of career motivation and the feeling of purposelessness in the educational system leads quickly to involvement in petty crime, the statistics for which have increased alarmingly throughout the period of our violent troubles. Robbery with Violence is among the most frequently recorded crimes. While the ethnic conflict is continuing violently, one may be forgiven for saying that there is very little that can be done to change the small processes which I have described and yet I profoundly believe that it is only at the level of the small processes that the foundations can be laid which enable the ethnic conflict to be conducted without violence. So finally I want to outline some of the things which are happening in Northern Ireland which could contribute to a long-term change in the situation.
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My wife and I started fostering young offenders in our home some ten years ago and we quickly learnt that there were some basic principles which underlay the help we might give. First, we had to learn to communicate with the youngster and this only became possible when trust had been built up. In our experience it was often one of our baby daughters who built the trust relationship first and because they trusted us, the teenager came to do likewise. When it came to communication, some of our youngsters only understood physical admonition at first and most of them had very short "intake" times. It was pointless talking with them--one had to work and play with them to build communication. After that it was important to stand by them in a crisis as this was tile best practical expression of love. Finally, it helped enormously when they found a constructive activity on which to base their self esteem. All of these principles have application in helping the teenagers in our conflict situation to handle themselves without violence and it is only when a generation has been created that can handle conflict without violence that we have the hope of a happier future in Northern Ireland. A great deal of work is therefore being done in the field of residential opportunities for young people on holiday and on courses. Research published by the King George Jubilee Trust several years ago showed that periods spent in residence with new teachers by disturbed youngsters moving to secondary school could do much to prevent the development of antisocial behaviour patterns. Many organizations in Northern Ireland, and not a few outside, are running residential experiences aiming at improving communication between the two ethnic traditions. The effects of this work will be slow but profound. In addition, much attention is being given to intervening in the family which is not functioning well, so that harm to children can be minimized. The use of the surrogate mum is one of the experiments being tried by my own agency. Another range of projects clusters around developing new leadership patterns in the areas from which violence has traditionally flared. This is done by helping peer groups to establish constructive objectives and achieve them. Already it is possible to see some of those who have benefited from this type of experience emerging to important roles in the community. Both in the employment field and in the educational field, there are now pilot projects experimenting with new forms of motivation. One youth and community workshop bases its programme on encouraging the participants to decide at every stage the direction they are going to take and sticking to it. Again, in one inner city flats complex, previously unbiddable teenagers are involved in a highly motivated learning project where they decide what they want to achieve.
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Another way in which the teenager can be helped out of the military process is that of establishing a caring, respectful relationship outside the normal peer circle. Adults with time have a considerable role here if they can strike a bargain with a young offender and use that as the basis for a guarantee to the court. Quite a lot of this type of w ~ k is being done. In the policing field too, considerable progress has been made. We have a very highly developed community relations division whose activities involve, for instance, young people going on mountain rambles with policemen even of the very highest ranks. This helps to change the relationship between the young and the police substantially, and it is by no means a one-way process. We live in a disturbed and disturbing society. Those of us who have insights into the behaviour of disturbed people have a responsibility to try and see how those insights might be relevant to our society as a whole. The world we grew up in has failed to deliver the goals which it set for the next generation. Given the frustration this creates, it is easy for the young to move into violent forms of communication--it brings attention, it brings about changes, though maybe not the ones sought, it brings the satisfaction of revenge on those who may be thought to bear some of the guilt for the situation. The responses of Government and police are predictable and they tend to lead to more frustration and an escalation of violence. If we understand these processes we must begin to seek ways of changing them. In Belfast today there is emerging a new dynamic; a section of those who are unemployed, unable to live without purpose, are seeking one in voluntary work.
John Keats once wrote in a letter to a friend "I saw a stoat today. It had a sense of purpose. Its eyes were alive with it". I believe that a human being without purpose will perish. If young people grow up in a society where their purpose is a violent protest against society as they find it, society will perish. The hope for the future must lie with finding new concepts of living. Alongside the traditional work sector there will, I believe, emerge a vast non-work sector in which people will find fulfilment in self-development, education and travel, in creative arts, in physical skill and sport, and in service to the community.