The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 67, No. 31, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 10, 1980 Page: 4 of 16
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VOICES FROM THE TOWER/a faculty forum
by Camille Jones
A teenage Houston girl, allegedly Pearlie
Mae Taylor, in a fit of anger at her
boyfriend, sets fire to his house, killing four
children.
A twelve-year-old boy playing at
Scarborough High School is stabbed 17
times by two fellow youths after calling one
o f them a name.
These shocking incidents, both occuring
in the past few weeks, underscore an
apparent rise in inexplicable violence
amongst teenagers and children in Houston.
Dr. Elizabeth Long, professor of Sociology,
discusses the problem.
Do you feel child violence is peculiar to
Houston, and do you think that there are
some salient social correlaries in their
occurrences?
It's unclear that these two incidents mean
a social trend. People get very worried about
single incidents, as well they should be, but
I'm not sure there has been a kind of
appreciable increase in that type of violence.
A problem in looking at almost every type of
deviant social behavior is that of reporting:
what gets reported and why.
In terms of violence within the family, it's
unclear whether people are more violent
now; or whether our norms of acceptable
family violence have changed, and people
are reporting it more now because they don't
think that it's a normal part of family life
anymore; or whether there are, as some
people in the field speculate, "family
bureaucrats" who are trying to penetrate the
last stronghold of privacy and who therefore
are interested in reporting family violence so
that they can become part of a governmental
effort to set up programs to deal with it.
But there do seem to be various social
correlaries involved. One of the most
striking is that violent families tend to breed
violence in family members, so there is a
generational cycle set. They means, for
example, that battered wives tend to come
from families in which there were violent
marriages or child abuse. [Their husbands]
have watched people being violent and
dealing with their emotional conflicts
through violence, and don't know about
other ways of handling the difficulties that
arise.
Similarly, children in violent families tend
to be more violent with each other.
Consequently, there is more sibling violence
in families with violent marriages and where
there's child abuse of children by parents.
The other thing that sociologists talk
about a lot when they discuss violence is
stress on the family. Stress can arise from
different factors. For example, family
violence is slightly correlated with income.
Now, that could mean that there is a culture
of violence perpetuated in lower income
households, but it probably means, quite
simply, that people who live in situations
with less ease probably live a more
frustrating life in general and don't have
ways of escapng their family. They don't
have as much leisure, they don't have as
great senses of accomplishment, and, as
parents, their sense of authority may be
lessened by the fact that they are not seen as
successes in the outside world. Their self-
esteem may suffer, and other family
members may not take them as seriously.
In terms of Houston, this is really a city
that people come to expecting the American
m
Sociology professor Elizabeth Long
dream to come true. I would imagine that
there is a certain level of frustration that
occurs when it doesn't prove to be that way.
That may contribute to Houston's
difficulties.
Because of frustration, then, violence
becomes an alternative. Certainly people
who are on the lowest rungs of the
opportunity structure in this country have
more reason to be frustrated with the value
system and may turn to other solutions more
readily.
One of the other things that is looked at in
family violence is alcoholism and drug
abuse: any dependence upon something else.
Certainly this dependency seems to remove
the inhibitions that would be felt in terms of
resorting to violence. It releases the sort of
civilized checks and balances most of us
have on our behavior.
The question is partly how to reduce
conflicts, but also how to insure that people
will resort to other methods that are more
appropriate in dealing with the conflicts they
have.
What role do you feel the media — more
specifically, television — has on occurrences
of child violence? Do you feel that television
needs more restraints on its presentation of
violence and brutality?
There are two theories in sociology about
how the media affects people. First is the
cathartic theory: the media, in presenting
violence, will present an alternative to those
who might otherwise go out and commit it.
It will allow them to blow off emotional
steam and then be peaceful in their real lives.
The other is the modeling theory:
television, in presenting certain kinds of
behavior, encourages those kinds of
behavior. The second seems to be most
plausible, in that watching certain kinds of
violence does seem to contribute to an
erosion of civility and standards in general.
This is not on a one-to-one level necessarily:
most people don't watch a murder on TV
and then go out and commit a murder in
simple imitation of what goes on in
television — although this has happened
once or twice.
You have to think of the general
emotional climate that television produces.
In that respect, by the end of high school,
most children have watched 18,000 hours of
—Bruce Davies
television and been to school 10,000 hours.
Just in terms of time spent, at least,
television is taking over a great deal of the
educational process. It seems plausible,
though, that TV is teaching people things on
a very subtle level.
The use of sensationalistic violence —
whether it be in programs or in news
broadcasts —to attract an audience is a very
bad tendency. It's hard to imagine, without
active citizens groups speaking out against
it, that the industry is going to change.
Violence seems to sell. It attracts an
audience and is profitable. Without citizens'
protest, I doubt it will change in any time
soon.
Clearly, being in Houston, it's pretty
obvious that certain sort of "frontier values"
are apparent here. If conflicts before you are
resolved through gunfire, arson, stabbing —
if that's a part of the culture around you—it
seems that you would pick violence more
readily and it will be seen more as an
appropriate way of dealing with personal
problems.
Again, you can't do experiments on things
like this. You can't put a person in a room
with 45 unmitigated hours of television
violence and then follow them to see if they
are more apt to hit people when they leave
the room. But, insofar as you can get some
grasp of these very subtle tendencies,
violence does seem to be an issue.
What can explain the reason for
children's and adolescents' growing
brutality against their teachers and
instructors?
Well, the problem is localized: it tends to
happen in inner city schools. You have to
look at several of the institutions involved
and groups that are part of the process.
Those areas are, in a sense, like social
sinkholes. They are areas where poor people
live in wretched conditions and have very
little to look forward to. Partly because of
the social factors, there tends to be a lot of
brutality among those neighborhoods,
mostly against those people within the
neighborhoods themselves.
So the communities themselves are
marked by a lack of opportunity, by a sense
of not being a part of the social mainstream,
ignored, with not much to look forward to.
Education has always been seen as the way
out of conditions of material deprivation in
America. But the problems with urban
school systems make it difficult to say that
the schools are capable of providing what
Americans have always expected from them:
access to the skills which then give rise to
social mobility.
People have also commented on the
erosion of teacher training standards
themselves. This has been seen to contribute
to an erosion in educational standards.
A third factor is the relationship between
the community and the schools. Inner-city
schools are often underbudgeted; if this is
not the case, the educational establishment
is still not always seen as responsive to the
needs of the community.
As community concern issues arose in the
60's, people in the community were worried
that the schools had just become baby sitting
devices — that they weren't really teaching
the kids anything. Children were being
passed on from one grade to the rest, often
leaving high school without knowing how to
read. As part of the unrest of the 60's
community groups rose up and demanded
that schools be more responsive to
community needs.
At the time, the demands for basic
education were seen as .part of the
conservatism of those groups seeking to
control educational standards in their
neighborhoods. But these days the demand
for basic education does not look
conservative at all. That many of the staff of
the schools were not seen as being members
of the community, and that the standards
being taught were not necessarily those of
the most active members of that community,
may have contributed to having the schools
invading and intimidating the members of
these neighborhoods.
If it turns out that families have high
aspirations for the education of their
children, then any promising situation can
be turned around for individual students.
That can be possible for communities, as
well if people can make their concerns
heard, and organize their efforts.
Are there deterrents that society can offer
to prevent child violence from being more
commonplace in the future?
Some control over violence in the media
— how it's reported and the spirft in which
it's discussed — is very important. Also,
some way of relieving strains and stresses on
parents is necessary. It might be a really
broad program like good day-care programs
or mother's-day-out programs, sponsored
either by the government or by private or
church groups. Most of the violence that is
inflicted on children in households is
inflicted by mothers, which seems to have to
do with the fact that mothers take care of the
children more. It seems that in single-parent
households the tension and the frustrations
would be larger, becuase there is no one else,
and because these single-parent households
tend to be poor.
Also, self-help groups seem to be
important for parents when confronting
issues of child abuse, in that adults can get
together and talk about these problems.
They mostly do not want to be violent
towards their children, and these sessions
can serve as a forum for expressing
frustrations.
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The Rice Thresher, April 10, 1980, page 4
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Muller, Matthew. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 67, No. 31, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 10, 1980, newspaper, April 10, 1980; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245438/m1/4/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.