The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  As I did after describing other cases in which blindingly obvious warning signs went unheeded, I want to acknowledge that the principal at Joey’s school was probably doing the best he could with the skills and knowledge he had at the time. This is not some legal disclaimer—it is what I believe, but I also believe that cases like these involve organizational and individual laziness, as well as the hope that something will just “go away” if it is ignored.

  Advising on another case in which a young child was sexually assaulted at school (this time by a non-student), I reviewed the school district’s entire policy book. It will not be reassuring to parents to learn that the topic of safety wasn’t even raised until page 10, and that reference was about faculty safety when breaking up fights. The policy contained three full pages and twenty-one separate items about the protection of keys, but didn’t even mention the topic of danger to students until page 91.

  Children require the protection of adults, usually from adults. Their fear of people is not yet developed, their intuition not yet loaded with enough information and experience to keep them from harm. The lesson for parents in the cases I’ve cited is to take nothing for granted when it comes to the safety of your children. I suggest that you request a copy of the school’s safety policies and then settle in for a very discouraging read. Go to the school and ask them every obvious question you can think of and see if the answers make you feel better or worse. Just the fact that you ask puts safety on the agenda and forces the school to focus on it. Ask about the school’s background screening process for employees. If they have security personnel, ask to meet them and see how they respond to probing questions. Ask about previous crimes at the school. This last question is particularly important. Federal law requires that colleges maintain campus crime statistics and make them available upon request. This is so college students and their parents selecting a school can evaluate security and safety. There is no law requiring grammar schools or high schools to keep such statistics, but I wish there were.

  Rather than relying on government, you can make at least as vigorous an inquiry of your child’s school as you should of your child’s baby-sitter, because if you assume that the school is addressing the matter of your child’s safety as seriously as you would, you may be very disappointed. (See appendix 7 for a list of suggested questions.)

  Though Joey was only nine, he already had the widely established risk factors for future criminality. They are: poverty, child abuse (in the form of violence, witnessing violence, humiliation, or neglect), drug addiction in a parent, drug or alcohol abuse by the child, and a single-parent childhood. Joey had another hugely significant risk factor, one that is often overlooked: the absence of a father in his life. David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America notes that 80 percent of the young men in juvenile detention facilities were raised without fully participating fathers. Fathers are so important because they teach boys various ways to be men. Sadly, too many boys learn from the media or from each other what scholars call “protest masculinity,” characterized by toughness and the use of force. That is not the only way to be a man, of course, but it’s the only way they know.

  Some people seriously ponder the question of whether males are even necessary for raising children, and we do little to encourage the role of fathers. In fact, as Blankenhorn points out, building prisons is our number one social program for young men.

  Recently, I met with a group of men graduating from that social program. As a court-ordered part of their recovery from heroin addiction, I was asked to discuss with them the experience of growing up with violence and drugs.

  Joined by some graduates of a women’s prison, we sat in what looked like a schoolroom. In a sense it was, for here each person learned the benefits and blessings of 12-step programs (the founding of which Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, calls “the greatest positive event of the twentieth century”). Ideally, such programs would teach these prisoners to accept their pasts, for only then could they learn responsibility for their present.

  One after another, they gave their three-minute life stories. Each told of violence, fear, abandonment, and neglect. All of the men had been physically abused as children, and all but one of the ten women had been sexually abused by family members. A few told of the regret and horror they felt at having grown up to be violent to their own children.

  I wept as I heard about the progress they had made, for though this locked halfway house was a long way from the mainstream of our society, it was also a long way from the hell these people had all occupied, and caused others to occupy. I wept because the stories were moving, they were personal, they were mine, and also because my mother had not found the routes out of addiction that these people were finding.

  When it was time for me to give a forty-five-minute talk, I related some of my experiences as a child and a teenager. The similarity of our stories was immediately apparent to everyone there.

  When I finished, several people had questions. The first hand to go up was that of a man about my age, but I’d have thought we had little else in common. He was tattooed, scarred, overly muscular, and weathered. He was the kind of man most people would fear on a dark street, and during much of his life they’d have been right to fear him. His most recent long stay in prison had been for arson. He’d broken into an apartment to steal anything he could sell. (“I didn’t need money just for drugs. I also had to pay my lawyer because I had a court appearance coming up on another burglary charge.”) To cover up any evidence of the burglary, he had set a fire that destroyed several apartments and sent one person to the hospital badly burned.

  He looked me up and down and asked, “Why are you sitting over there and I’m over here?” I didn’t understand the question, and he explained, “You and me had the same childhood, but you’re in that nice suit and probably drive a nice car. You get to leave today. You’re sitting over there—how’d that happen?”

  This question had often presented itself in my work and my life, first as a curiosity, later as more than that. I could have been a likely and welcome resident of the world of violence (as opposed to the tourist I became), but somehow I followed a different route. Some people come through awful childhoods and become productive, contributing adults, while others become people who do anti-social or even monstrous things. Why?

  It is similar to one brother asking another, “Why did you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.” The second brother then asks, “Why didn’t you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.”

  Some more complete answers are found in Robert Ressler’s classic book Whoever Fights Monsters. He speaks of the tremendous importance of the early puberty period for boys. Before then, the anger of these boys might have been submerged and without focus, perhaps turned inward in the form of depression, perhaps (as in most cases) just denied, to emerge later. But during puberty, this anger collides with another powerful force, one of the most powerful in nature: sexuality. Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest.

  I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much.

  Ressler’s theories on the childhoods of the worst killers in America have an unlikely ideological supporter, psychiatrist and child-advocate Alice Miller. Her emotionally evocative books (including The Drama Of The Gifted Child and The Untouched Key) make clear that if a child has some effective human contact at particularly significant periods, some recognition of his worth and value, some “witness” to his experience, this can make an extraordinary difference.

  I have learned that the kindness of a teacher, a coach, a policeman, a neighbor, the parent of a friend, is never wasted. These moments are likely to pass with neither the child nor the adult fully knowing the significance of the contribution. No ceremony attaches to the moment that a child sees his own worth reflected in t
he eyes of an encouraging adult. Though nothing apparent marks the occasion, inside that child a new view of self might take hold. He is not just a person deserving of neglect or violence, not just a person who is a burden to the sad adults in his life, not just a child who fails to solve his family’s problems, who fails to rescue them from pain or madness or addiction or poverty or unhappiness. No, this child might be someone else, someone whose appearance before this one adult revealed specialness or lovability, or value.

  This value might be revealed through appreciation of a child’s artistic talent, physical ability, humor, courage, patience, curiosity, scholarly skills, creativity, resourcefulness, responsibility, energy, or any of the many attributes that children bring us in such abundance.

  I had a fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Conway, who fought monsters in me. He showed kindness and recognized some talent in me at just the period when violence was consuming my family. He gave me some alternative designs for self-image, not just the one children logically deduce from mistreatment (“If this is how I am treated, then this is the treatment I am worthy of”).

  It might literally be a matter of a few hours with a person whose kindness reconnects the child to an earlier experience of self, a self that was loved and valued and encouraged. Sadly, for children who didn’t have nurturing even in infancy, there isn’t any frame of reference, no file in the mind in which to place kindness and recognition so that they might be seen as part of life. (All of this shows the great value of mentoring and of programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters. See appendix 2).

  When a child’s primary caregiver delivers both praise and brutality, it is a virtual coin toss as to which will attach itself to the child’s identity. Terribly unhealthy families damage children in many ways, but one of the saddest is the destruction of the child’s belief that he has purpose and value. Without that belief, it is difficult to succeed, difficult to take risks. Perhaps more to the point, it may seem foolish to take risks, “knowing,” as such people do, that they are not up to the task.

  The way circus elephants are trained demonstrates this dynamic well: When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned that they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be “chained” with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, though it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.

  “You’ll never amount to anything;” “You can’t sing;” “You’re not smart enough;” “Without money, you’re nothing;” “Who’d want you?;” “You’re just a loser;” “You should have more realistic goals;” “You’re the reason our marriage broke up;” “Without you kids I’d have had a chance;” “You’re worthless”—this opera is being sung in homes all over America right now, the stakes driven into the ground, the heavy chains attached, the children reaching the point they believe they cannot pull free. And at that point, they cannot.

  Unless and until something changes their view, unless they grasp the striking fact that they are tied with a thread, that the chain is an illusion, that they were fooled, and ultimately, that whoever so fooled them was wrong about them and that they were wrong about themselves—unless all this happens, these children are not likely to show society their positive attributes as adults.

  There’s more involved, of course, than just parenting. Some of the factors are so small they cannot be seen and yet so important they cannot be ignored: They are human genes. The one known as D4DR may influence the thrill-seeking behavior displayed by many violent criminals. Along with the influences of environment and upbringing, an elongated D4DR gene will likely be present in someone who grows up to be an assassin or a bank robber (or a daredevil). Behavioral geneticist Irving Gottesman: “Under a different scenario and in a different environment, that same person could become a hero in Bosnia.”

  In the future, genetics will play a much greater role in behavioral predictions. We’ll probably be able to genetically map personality traits as precisely as physical characteristics like height and weight. Though it will generate much controversy, parents may someday be able to use prenatal testing to identify children with unwanted personality genes, including those that make violence more likely. Until then, however, we’ll have to settle for a simpler, low-tech strategy for reducing violence: treating children lovingly and humanely.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel, says that “Life’s miseries fall disproportionately on children,” and this is certainly true. Throughout history, half of all children have failed to reach adulthood. Considering this and all that we know about violence against children, they have much more reason to be afraid of us than we have to be afraid of them. Even so, the mistreatment we invest in children does come back to us, and is already costing us our safety and our peace.

  A Federal research project selected 1,600 children who had been abused or neglected and followed them for nearly twenty years. As of last year, fully half of them had been arrested for some crime. Still, even though it is so expensive for us, mistreatment will probably continue until we take an entirely different view of children, not as temporary visitors who will someday grow into citizens, but as full-fledged, fully contributing, fully entitled members of our society, just as they are right now. Children are often seen as burdens to society, no more than hapless victims of their circumstance, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Recognize that children are the primary child-care providers in America. Siblings caring for siblings and children caring for themselves represent an important part of our economy. They also care for the elderly, cook meals, take cigarettes out of the hands of sleeping parents, and contribute in countless other ways.

  If only more abused children could know that they are the residents of their homes, not the architects, then they might believe that where they are will not limit where they might go. Until America focuses shame on perpetrators instead of victims, these children will have children, and the war they thought was over won’t be over, for them or for us.

  We can, of course, continue ignoring these children, but a few of them will grow up and commit the one crime which is impossible to ignore: assassination. While that may feel distant from your life, I raise the topic here for a very practical reason. Just as the members of a troubled family are forced to look inward when their teenage son gets into serious trouble—after years of signaling that he would—the assassin makes us look at ourselves as a nation. The assassin makes us look at the media, at attention-seeking crimes, at our huge harvest of handguns, at violence, and at child rearing. Understanding the assassin, who may seem the most remote of criminals, can help you understand and be safer from the least remote of criminals.

  ▪ CHAPTER THIRTEEN ▪

  BETTER TO BE WANTED

  BY THE POLICE THAN NOT

  TO BE WANTED AT ALL

  The intercom in Rebecca Schaeffer’s apartment was broken, so when the buzzer rang on Sunday morning, she had to go down to the front door of the building to see who it was. It turned out to be a fan who’d first seen the young actress on her weekly TV show, My Sister Sam. She spoke to him briefly, and he left. A while later, the buzzer sounded again, and again she went down to see who was there. It was the same young man, but this time he was not her admirer—he was her murderer. He fired one shot into her chest. She screamed out “Why? Why?” and fell to the floor. She was still alive as he stood there looking down at her. He could have asked someone in the building to call an ambulance, or he could have called one himself, but that would have defeated the whole purpose.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Among individual crimes, assassination has the greatest impact on the American psyche. Bullets have demonstrably influenced most presidential elections in the past forty years. A nation based on the concept that the majority chooses its leaders is entire
ly undermined when a minority (usually of one) undoes that choice with a gun. Whether the assassin’s target is the mayor of LaPorte, Indiana (killed in his bed by an angry citizen), or the president of the United States, the system we live by also falls victim. Because of their disproportionate impact on our culture, identifying those people who will attack a public figure is our nation’s highest-stakes behavioral prediction, one that affects everyone.

  At some point during our not so distant past, the conditions surrounding being famous changed. There is a part of that change that makes public life in Western society more challenging than it ever was before. It is the part that every prominent person, from the local politician to the beauty queen to the radio talk-show host to the internationally known media figure, must consider at some time. With fame there are hassles that some say come with the territory, but where did anyone sign on to the idea that if you do very well you will be at risk of being killed for it? To answer that, we must go back to the infancy of the media age.

  Performers, politicians, and sports figures have long been admired and even loved, but that love used to be contained and distant, relegated to a part of the mind and heart reserved for people one didn’t know personally. It was, emotionally speaking, a one-way street, because feelings could be displayed to the public figure only as part of an acceptable function, like voting, sending letters, or seeing a show. Except for applauding louder or longer than others, members of an audience didn’t seek to make themselves known personally to performers.