Dysfunctional Households and Violence
From the calm of my rural repose, I am not qualified to parse the dynamics of the recent mayhem in several American cities. However, I am confident much of the violence in isolated urban neighborhoods in places like Chicago is rooted in a concentration of dysfunctional households.
These households reflect commonalities: they are generally female-headed; welfare dependent; exhibit low educational achievement, even illiteracy, with rarely any books in the home; underemployment, and often use/abuse of drugs and alcohol.
By the way, there are also too many white, single-parent households in my rural setting that share these same pathologies. The difference is these spread-out households are at least spared the incredibly toxic brew of gangs and guns found in some cities.
The problems of dysfunctional families are often inter-generational. Not only the single parent, but also her mom as well, and even the grandmother, have lost the significant skills needed for successful parenting.
As a result, “wants” are often fulfilled before household “needs.” A social worker friend of mine tells me many of the households she visits have more “things,” such huge TVs, than she does. This leads to money problems, stress, even chaos, as well as inadequate time to express love, set rules and enforce them, nurture high expectations and provide the support necessary to achieve them.
In this context, the lure of gangs, which indeed provide some of the elements missing at home, becomes almost compelling. This is especially true in Chicago, which has more gangs and gang members than any city in the nation, according to the Chicago Crime Commission.
The commission estimated in 2012 that Chicago had 70 gangs and 150,000 gang members! To provide context, I extrapolated from demographic data that Chicago has roughly 250,000 black and Latino males between the ages of 15 and 30. Of course, there are a few female and white gang members, but if the figures are to be believed, more than half the young black and Latino men in Chicago are gang members.
Gang leaders become role models. Guns provided by the gangs give kids, otherwise unmoored to strong positive values at home, a “big man” swagger and a sense of protection on the mean streets.
Schools are competition for gang leaders, so the word goes out that doing well in school is definitely not cool.
Isolated, gang-dominated neighborhoods are shrinking, which is both good and bad. Population in East St. Louis has dropped from 70,000 in 1972, when I visited as a candidate for lieutenant governor, to 26,000, probably less, today.
And in just the five-year period between 2012 and 2017, the Census Bureau estimates the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago, such as Austin and Englewood, lost about 10 percent of their population. Let’s face it, the human animal moves toward opportunity and away from threat.
That leaves those who can’t move more isolated than ever. The cops don’t live in these neighborhoods, nor do most of the “do-gooders.” Middle-class black leaders fled long ago.
Although some good, decent people remain, they are overwhelmed by the dominant, toxic culture of gangs, guns and drugs.
The single moms are also overwhelmed. Many give up, believing there is no practical way up and out for them. The moms and their gang-member children live in a dark world unknown to you and me, one bereft of hope.
What to do? There is obviously no silver bullet, or it would have been fired long ago.
In the mid-1990s, I volunteered with welfare moms in Peoria who were required to work or go to school to keep welfare benefits. I learned the moms, most of whom I came to like, were big bundles of bad decisions—bad men, multiple teen births, school failure, drugs, and petty crime (which affected job potential).
As urban ghetto expert Leon Dash put it: Reforming welfare doesn’t stop drug trafficking; better policing doesn’t end illiteracy; providing job training doesn’t teach a young man or woman why it’s wrong to steal.
There is good news. Across America, and among all racial groups, teen birth rates have absolutely plummeted in the past 30 years, from 62 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19 in 1990 to just 17 in 2018! We must come to understand this dynamic of positive behavior, and work to bring the rate down even further, indirectly shrinking dysfunctional household numbers.
And hard as it would be to do, requiring near-saints, we must flood these benighted neighborhoods with police of their own color. They would provide community policing, ideally embedding in the neighborhood. They would insist on order, and provide role models for the young, before they join gangs.
