The predictable demonization of teenage boys

A mother's comment after the Apalachee shooting.

The same month our divorce was initiated, my son turned 14. Yesterday, after growing increasingly sick to my stomach over the language being used to describe the 14-year-old boy in Georgia who just killed two teachers and two students with his Christmas present, I searched my phone for all the photos of my son that year. Each photo below is a glimpse of him at 14.

I, as a mother, know something about teenage boys. I raised two teenagers, and so for many years, my home was a low-lit, late-night refuge for videogaming, board gaming, movie-watching, snack-foraging, music-playing, and everything else they did upstairs in the bedrooms while I heard heavy footfalls and muffled laughter through the hundred-year-old wood floors. I call many of them “bonus children,” because I mothered them too, as was my right, when they sat at my kitchen table and murmured about their lives while I served soup. It was usually soup, since it was also Montana, and in Montana, it’s usually cold. The entryway seemed an endless smear of half-melted snow and dripping boots with wet laces. My antique church pew could hold more puffer jackets than you might expect, if they were stacked the right way. I never had a place to hang them, and no one noticed.

The more the boys grew, creeping toward and then beyond my own height, the more my ears pricked when I was out in the world, hearing the cultural messages being constantly placed on their shoulders: teenage boys were, by virtue of their age and gender alone, guilty of being careless, reckless, cold, stupid, rude, entitled, destructive, selfish, lazy, and violent until proven innocent. Except there were never any trials. And these were the white ones. I have some knowledge of how boys of color were talked about in my town — before he was old enough to speak, a friend’s black son was referred to as a “thug” by a volunteer in the church nursery — and most of us have learned that the labels for boys of color start earlier, are categorically worse, are statistically more threatening, and harder to escape with age.

In ancient Israel, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest would absolve the collective sins of the community by placing his hand on the head of a goat. Having transferred the people’s sins to the “scapegoat,” the animal would then be led outside the city into the wilderness, a symbolic removal of guilt that would have otherwise landed on the people. This process is described in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus, chapter 16. I’ve been thinking a lot about scapegoats, who selects them, who names them, who leads them out of the camp. What happens to them then.

The U.S. has a lot of problems. The prevalence of school shootings distinguishes us in the worst way possible from our global peers. But it’s not the only issue for which teen boys — and by teen, I mean children under 18 — are quick to be blamed. Listen to your neighbors, scroll the Nextdoor app for five minutes, and you’ll quickly find an ever-rotating carousel of issues where young boys are explicitly named as the problem. Not their parents, not the lax laws, not gaps in funding, not access to resources, not the loss of community in our neighborhoods, not the loss of multi-generational support systems, not the absence of mental health awareness or services, but kids. Evidently, children are the problem.

When you experience this narrative play out, as your neighbor drones on about his trash can being knocked over again by a 14-year-old “hoodlum,” I want you to pause and consider what genuine problem that could be addressed by a capable adult is being veiled by blaming a child. There is always something being obscured, some bigger issue, usually a controversial one, or at least one that is more difficult to solve than it is to point a finger at a boy with unwashed hair and dirty sneakers. I’ve watched even the most common-sense solutions be dismissed by the adults in the room if the buck can be passed to a kid. Maybe you could move the trashcan to the other side of the driveway. Maybe you could ask him some questions. Maybe you could take some proactive responsibility for the problem, perhaps employ creative thinking and relational strategy, instead of name-calling. I realize this is a simplistic hypothetical.

After the shooting this week, a former president referred to the 14-year-old shooter as “a monster.” Another political journalist referred to him as “evil.” His humanity, his childishness, was stripped away without hesitation. Make no mistake that these statements were acts of misdirection, red herrings thrown in the direction of teenage boys once again being the problem. When I noticed the pattern and paused, I asked myself, What do they want us to ignore? What problems that could be directly helped by adults taking action to address root causes of children shooting other children in schools are being obscured? And more importantly, why obscure them? Who has a stake in the matter? Who benefits from the sleight of hand? And whose hands are truly dirty? When teenage boys are blamed for problems adult leaders could be effectively solving, we must immediately start questioning those leaders.

I’ll state the obvious: some teenage boys do make bad choices. We’ve heard how their developmental neurobiology prevents their actions and critical thinking from lining up until their mid-20s. But I’m not sure what accounts for the lag in critical thinking for many who would scapegoat boys. Fear is certainly involved, perhaps a deviation of what I talked about here. However, what disturbs me is the way I see our elected leaders placing their hands on the heads of boys, not as priests offering absolution, but as accusers, desperate to lay blame onto something they can lead outside the camp. I say something instead of someone on purpose; it’s a gross trick to turn boys into creatures so they can be objectified, ostracized, named demonic. I wonder if what’s really happening is even simpler, less political; I wonder if those who rush to lay blame are just looking to offload their own sins. Lives are lost, and it’s their own guilt that claws them inside out. I’m speculating.

If you’re a parent, you may have told your small kids to avoid strangers who ask them for help. “If that man really needed help finding his dog, he would go to another adult.” It’s Parenting 101 to teach them that kids aren’t responsible for adult problems. Kids can’t be blamed for them either. I had a visceral reaction in hearing the boy in Georgia who pulled that trigger, the one who, according to his aunt, begged for mental health support for several months, would be tried as an adult. It is a strategic imagining that he is a fully responsible man when he is not. To be dragged outside the camp at 14 is orchestrated misdirection.

I don’t believe anyone is broken. I don’t use the word anymore to refer to people. The 14-year-old boy in Georgia desperately needed mental health support and a 2023 Christmas gift that couldn’t kill people. Maybe a trampoline could have helped him self-regulate, though I’m sure his needs were much more complex. I’m praying for his care while in legal custody. And I’m praying for the four families who have lost loved ones in the tragedy. My best friend who lost her teenage son in June said to me a few days ago how the grief hit again upon hearing of the shooting, knowing there were more families who have joined her in experiencing the death of a child. We have so much work to do. Leaders, we are looking at you hard; leave our kids out of it.

You are the Beloved,

Leslie

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” — James Baldwin

(thanks to @blackliturgies for sharing the quote)

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