Eldredge finished the segment with:
“And aggression is good. I mean, you want a boy to stand up as a man to apartheid, right? You want him to stand up to injustice, then he has to have something in him that’s learned that there are good forms of aggression.”
However, perhaps more telling is the “nurture” side of why the boys in Syria “felt it was their duty.” They look around, see the dominating and abusive men in power, see the way girls and women are treated, and all the while they are being groomed and encouraged to grow up and be like those dominating and abusive men in power. If there’s something innate within them, so too is there a cultural influence channeling the “warrior in the heart” in destructive ways.
We’ve known of the influences that shape adolescent aggression since the 1970’s, when Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory took root. Now considered essential study in most academic departments of criminology around the world, Bandura’s theory put forth the notion that violent tendencies are modeled, and that children in particular learn aggression from observing others. “Virtually all learning experiences resulting from direct experiences,” Bandura wrote in 1976, “can occur on a vicarious basis through observation of other people’s behavior and its consequences for the observer,” (See PDF).
Might this difference in natural and experiential physicality and aggression be why boys, according to most reports on modern slavery, are used more often as disposable “hard” labor slaves, such as in cocoa fields, whereas girls are more often subjected to domestic work slavery?
In circling back to the word “trained,” as used in the UN report on children in Syria, I think instead of the term “brainwashing” and particularly of a child’s vulnerability to both the short-term and long-term effects of it. According to Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child:
“Adverse conditions such as abuse, neglect, community violence, and persistent poverty can disrupt brain architecture and place children at a disadvantage with regard to the development of their executive function skills.”
With all of this in mind a twofold purpose for “training” surfaces:
(1) To use boys until they can’t be used anymore (i.e. until death, injury, disease, prosecution, the job is done). Some mistakenly believe their culture can flourish even when boys are expendable because even in death the labor garnered from their expendability leaves behind development (e.g. railroad tracks, tools built from the steel of dismantled ships, homes paid for with cotton harvest money, etc.). As a refugee aid worker once told me, “When girls are only valued for their future ability to give birth, and boys only for the sweat of their labor…we’re in a bad place.”
(2) To instill within the boy slaves the attitudes and behaviors that will make of them physically strong leaders. There’s the assumption that if boys don’t become disabled, diseased or die from the work that the work will make them into “real” men—the definition of which is at once represented by and habitually manipulated by those in power for the sake of exploiting those who are not.
This assumption, to use another example, plays out in different but equally devastating ways in Cambodia.
When I visited First Step Cambodia, an NGO in Phnom Penh that works to rescue and heal boys who have been victims of sexual abuse, I learned about a phrase that translates as “boys are pure gold.” It’s tempting to think this first means “valuable” but that definition is secondary. What the phrase truly means is that boys can be burned, beaten and smashed and yet still be gold. The meaning here is that they’re tough, they don’t complain, they grow to be men where they enter into another phase, one that translates as “man with 5 hat chest.” A hat is a measurement term in Cambodia that equals about ½ meter. A “man with 5 hat chest” can be likened to our version of the macho man, the tough guy. While the body undergoes dramatic changes when going from boy to man, the masculine psyche merely congeals. This culturally-rooted idea can then be applied in sweeping layers when a boy finds the courage to tell an adult that he was raped. Because it’s believed that he can endure great punishment and yet still be “pure gold,” often there are times when no action will be taken (either against the perpetrator or to support the healing of the boy) until that boy can show the damage done or, to put it bluntly, until there’s blood.
This assumption is by no means merely the problem of “other” countries. Let’s take a look at just one aspect of our own. The United States has defined itself as perhaps the world’s greatest believer in the myth that subjecting its boys and men to “punishment,” i.e., incarceration, will somehow magically resolve the underlying problems that brought them to be incarcerated in the first place. We don’t see our young boys in the juvenile justice system, for example, as pure gold; rather, we see them as the specks of dirt within their gold. We see them as the sum of their crime.
I once taught poetry in an all-female juvenile detention center, even wrote a book about the experience, so I’m fully aware of the lack of services and resources that girls receive in this regard. However, in working with boys who have been in and out of the juvenile justice system I can’t even count how many of their conversations or essays or poems were about how members of their family and staff members within the system regarded them—their full human selves—as nothing more than their crimes (a vast majority of which were petty theft). They were often “treated like a monster.”
The go-to method for helping them get back on track wasn’t through understanding and attempting to address issues within their family (often broken homes), their environment or their mental health, but through attempting to “scare them straight” by combating their release of often frustrated and confused expression of aggression with, you guessed it, bigger and badder forms of aggression (you know, huge, muscular men with deep voices who can get in their faces and yell).
Additional research into the justice system revealed the brutal result that the school-to-prison pipeline has on boys, especially African-American boys. Here’s how the ACLU defines the school-to-prison pipeline:
“A disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out. ‘Zero-tolerance’ policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school.”
Essentially we are punishing the boys in schools, pumping them into the juvenile justice system where we can punish them some more…
Note: The term restorative justice is still unfortunately likened to a curse word in many parts of the US. The reason? Because it’s viewed as challenging the prevalent and macho “tough on crime” school of thought. I once saw a renowned criminologist in my hometown booed for bringing it up when he was asked at a town hall meeting how he’d handle crime. Can we get over this already?
…and once they turn 18 we can funnel them directly into the overcrowded prison system.
Sure, the problem is partly our obsessive belief-despite-the-facts in the “punishment works with boys” myth. But considering how much money we spend on our justice system and how little of that goes towards efforts to address the roots of the offenses committed, it’s clear that we just undoubtedly hide our justice system absurdities better than the other countries to whom we ridicule when we hear, for example, how they cut off the fingers of their thieves. In some countries a serial thief has a finger cut off but can return back to society. Is enduring years of incarceration for similar offenses—in prisons where half of sexual abuse claims involve guards and where black offenders receive 10% longer sentences than whites for the same crime—really that much more civilized?
In his article titled Storming the American Bastille, Wilhelm Cortez opens with a question: “There is not a crisis of crime that fills our prisons; it is unjust conviction and sentencing. Can we re-envision the prison system?”
He then goes on to provide a common sense answer that simply isn’t being taken into account in the current model of our justice system:
“If a crime is committed it should be a social red flag that indicates an individual has somehow slipped through a social gap. The response should not be incarcerate, enslave and exploit. Instead, sentencing practices should take the role of finding the social problems at the root of the crime.”
For an additional read on the US penal system, check out Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.
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The current system was created by the male gender. Women have had little, if any say, in how our society works; for most of history, women stayed home, raised children. Men created wars; men fought one another, created ever more dangerous weapons, raised the prestige of war, the military, violence. Men raped women, abused and killed other men. The disposability of men is a direct consequence of patriarchy. To solve all these problems, start there. Can men in power reach inside themselves to find and embrace the feminine? The antidote to dominance, power, control, individuality? Can women become leaders without… Read more »
Name one animal species where males aren’t disposable. Even where there is no patriarchy, males are treated as disposable. Your argument is not valid.
the language od disposable males as a support fir women is essential to the creation of buy-in drom which those who take leadership positions. It is a core belief system guiding part of their rules of the game. This is why the raging psychopaths who hate women get the (un)ethical structure being promoted and then try to do it themselves. I assume that any system which systemically harms any set of people is harming everyone. The only time that one group is set aside for a greater portion of spoils is when they are being used to help perpetuate that… Read more »
@Not Buyin It For me,the biggeest failings are the pretense fueled by hypocrisy,the psychological-slieght-of-hands-trick that is the fake concern.One cannot care ,equally for males and females,and, also be unable to see male and female as both victim and perpetrators.This sparing of just and due consideration to males as victims because abuse of males fails to meet some mythical threshold is base.Beyond that,the passivity of too many men is an invitation to be treated with indifference.The seriousness of this issue is reduced to coffee house chit chat.
@ogwriter …. “passivity of too many men is an invitation to be treated with indifference.The seriousness of this issue is reduced to coffee house chit chat.” Well stated and very true. I’d also like to add that “if” it even makes it to coffee house chit chat.
@Danny I know that you have made this point before about how the use of language contributes to the complex web of denial.I believe that the convulted use of language is a symptom and not the real issue,which is closemindedness and good ole fashioned bias.But we can’t ever address this bias directly because those that control the narrative on abuse will not let it happen.Women contribute to the disposability and abuse of men and boys.By admitting to and exploring such issues hurts the credibility of feminism.But few will admit to this truth,hence the misdirection through the clever use of language.Tell… Read more »
Ogwriter
The prevelent ideology and political correctness dictates that any concern shown to males of any kind is basically misogyny , regardless of the realities facing males specially in the third world , nothing will change until a lot more boys and men die systematically to affect the bottom line of these countries , companies, … Etc, males ( boys and men ) are disposable every where as a price to be paid to reach goals ( win wars, wealth, etc)
Ogwriter, you’re on a roll… keep it up
I am disappointed that this site has not done a good job of providing a safe place for men like myself to discuss and illuminate abuse that happens to men. Time and again, these articles appear and get bogged down in debates about nonessentials. A fact that was addressed by Cameron’s disclaimer. People who deny that these things happen to males should not be tolerated..
I have to comment here and share that it was hurtful reading some of this. Of course because it pains me to think of how children – girls AND boys are treated so horrifically around the world. But with that, it pained me to read the subheading – “he UN’s recent reports on the treatment of children in Syria and in the Roman Catholic Church…” To put the “Roman Catholic Church” in the same context as the examples in Syria and other parts of the world is a gross misinterpretation of the Church. The sins of certain people who are… Read more »
Thank you for speaking up E.M.
“Dead and non-identified workers….leaving a widow and children with no news and no income.” This kind of language continues to aggravate me, and not enough people are calling bullshit on this rhetoric. Language like this suggests that killing men is bad not because men are human beings but because dead men can’t support their wives and families. A man’s death is bad because it’s inconvenient to other people who need his paycheck. It reminds me of an oft-quoted statement attributed to Hillary Clinton that the true victims of war are women, because war makes widows. (And how does a married… Read more »
No Man in Particular. I like how you stated this. A few tears ago I saw an article that mirrored your example. The widows left behind were the true victims. I’m trying to find it but I remember losing it when I read it.
I read this piece a few days ago and I still keep coming back to it to read it again and again, linked articles included. It’s taken me a little time to get through everything. But my suggestion to anyone who does read this piece, is to not just read the article but to go through the actual links too. Every single one of them. I still don’t think I’ve yet absorbed everything I can from it. Child soldiers used as shields, cotton field slavery (you can’t just go and stop wearing cotton to help), shipbreaking (I had no idea… Read more »
@Erin I just do not get it? !Why is it so darned difficult to see what is so clearly evident and true?!Over the year that I have been visiting GMP this subject, males are disposable and abused, has been visited with regularity. You write, ” I often forget that they can also be victims of these crimes as well.” WOW!? Thanks for the empathy. For that reason, I have visited this site with less frequency. That men can be and are,like women, victims and perpetrators is a no brainer. It seems to me as soon as feminists can accept what… Read more »
Cameron I would like to thank you for enlightening me to this “elephant in the room”. It saddens me in this day and age of supposed intelligence and human rights that such is barely tolerated. Your term disposability is apt and profound. It implies disregard for value and worth and conjures up thoughts of waste. Thank you for your exposing me to another dark corner that needs to be exposed and dealt with. I pray this provides some momentum to align the rape, abuse and exploitation of boys and men with the progress that has been made regarding the same… Read more »
One reason posited for this discrepancy is “comfort.” An anti-slavery NGO staff member told me that the “mass of a population is far more comfortable hearing the story of a girl being used as a sex slave” than as a boy being used as a sex slave. “It’s man-to-girl,” one anti-slavery activist told me, “…and in the minds of many this is a far more natural leap of imagination than is man-to-boy. It’s as though we can’t talk about this issue properly because we don’t yet have the language to do so. But we do have the language. We’re just… Read more »
There is a very, very long history of the disposability of boys (and men) often in the eyes of the few men who hold the bulk of power and authority in societies around the world and across time. It doesn’t belittle patriarchy or women/girls to admit this because patriarchy is not really the rule of men but the rule of elite men who see other males as tools to be used or obstacles to be removed.
Shocking. But necessary to know. Boys are typically not tracked with sex crimes/trafficking, there’s no real data to show the harm that’s happening to them, as there are for women. This piece is very important! Thank you.
A critically important and powerful article. Well done my friend. These heart ranching stories and facts need to be told, discussed and hopefully provide the catalyst for action around the world to combat this cancer. Income inequality and poverty are the root of this evil. Desperate people will do unspeakable things to survive including selling their children into slavery, sexual and labor, and our human urge for domination, exploitation and greed coupled with sexual urges and violence provide the fuel for this holocaust. This link is for a great Frontline piece on the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. An ancient illegal… Read more »
Excellent piece, Cameron. Thank you for writing it. Let’s hope it continues to get the traction and attention it deserves.
Based on conservative numbers (1 in 6 males sexually abused before the age of 16) there are well in excess of 500 Million male survivors of sexual violence in the world today. Realistically speaking, the numbers are likely much higher. But even at this level, the staggering amount of abuse that exists is sobering.
Survivors, no matter their age, race, gender, faith, or sexual orientation deserve to be supported.
Chris Anderson
Executive Director, MaleSurvivor
Great article, and one of only a few discussing male disposability as a consequence of institutions of capitalist hegemony and patriarchal dominance (industry, military, etc). Most want to blame feminists for the plight of men, but in reality (poor) men have been expendable to other (rich) men for much longer than western feminism has been in existence. This article is EXTREMELY important for digging into the fundamental causes of inequality, and for men, long-standing socioeconomic class inequities are every bit as influential as it they are for women. Men, women, and children all suffer under current social systems, they just… Read more »
I know you’ve gotten a lot of heat for the preface, but I understand that you are positing this in an overall uncivil internet community (though GMP is quite good!). Actual feminist scholars (not angry kids in the comments sections of blogs or reddit) have been deconstructing the class structures that perpetuate economic inequalities regardless of sex since the 1960′s. In reality, we’re all on the same side. Don’t let the bitter, anonymous internet ghosts silence you… ever. What you have to say is far too important. I think that’s a bit unfair, implying that that preface was just for… Read more »
Powerful stuff, Cam.
Cameron, This is a heart-breakingly powerful article about the state of our world and how we treat each other. You write powerfully and clearly with facts and feelings. Its the best kind of writing I’ve found and so important to the healing that we need on the planet. It is too bad that you have to remind some people that telling the truth about the tragedy of boys in no way diminishes our concern for girls. But the reality is that some of the dialogue on male/female differences was (and sometimes still is) used to denigrate females. As more and… Read more »