Teens Who Hurt Clinical Interventions to Break the Cycle of
Adolescent Violence
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TEENS WHO HURT
Clinical Interventions to Break
the Cycle of Adolescent Violence
•••
KENNETH V. HARDY
TRACEY A. LASZLOFFY
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
© 2005 The Guilford Press
A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc.
72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012
www.guilford.com
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording,
or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hardy, Kenneth V.
Teens who hurt: clinical interventions to break the cycle of
adolescent violence / Kenneth V. Hardy, Tracey A. Laszloffy.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57230-749-8 (cloth)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Violence in adolescence—Prevention. 2. Juvenile delinquency—
Prevention. 3. Adolescent psychotherapy. I. Laszloffy, Tracey A.
II. Title
RJ506.V56 H37 2005
618.92′ 8582 22
2004026675
About the Authors
Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, is a professor of family therapy at
Syracuse University and is Director of the Eikenberg Institute for Rela-
tionships in New York. He is the former Director of the Center for
Children, Families, and Trauma at the Ackerman Institute for the Fam-
ily in New York. Dr. Hardy has provided training and consultation for
working with troubled children and youth throughout the United
States, Europe, and Asia. His work has been featured on The Oprah
Winfrey Show, 20/20, Dateline NBC, PBS, and the Discovery Health
Channel. Dr. Hardy maintains a private practice in New York.
Tracey A. Laszloffy, PhD, is a relationship therapist who special-
izes in working with troubled adolescents and their families. Cur-
rently she maintains a private practice in Connecticut, and prior to
this, she directed the Marriage and Family Therapy master’s program
at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Dr. Laszloffy has
published extensively, and she routinely provides training and consul-
tation to organizations that work with at-risk youth.
v
Acknowledgments
We want to thank several people for the contributions they made
to this book. Foremost among them are the adolescents and their fam-
ilies who so courageously opened their hearts to us, trusted us with
their stories, and allowed us to share parts of their lives with others.
We remain grateful to them for their faith in us and for the risks that
each of them took in allowing us into their world. They taught us a
great deal, and without their courage and their confidence in us we
never would have been able to develop the model we present in this
book—hence, this book would never have been possible.
In addition to the adolescents themselves and their families, we
want to acknowledge the countless educators, social service profes-
sionals, and other concerned adults who have devoted themselves to
nurturing and supporting young people. Many of them have struggled
alone for years with minimal institutional support while extending
themselves to kids who so desperately need their help. Often at great
personal and professional costs, these individuals have challenged the
systems they work in to see the good in kids who do bad things and to
create opportunities for healing and growth. They too have taught us
so much about the challenges facing adolescents who turn to violence
and how we can best help these kids.
Thank you to our colleagues who have been there for us on count-
less occasions to discuss difficult cases and to listen and offer feedback
to our ideas while we were in the process of developing and refining
them. And, of course, thank you to our families for their patience with
us when we have felt tired, disheartened, and in despair, and for the
ways in which they stood by us as we labored to commit to paper the
work that has been the focus of so much of our time, energy, and
attention.
vi
Contents
Introduction 1
PART I • The Model
CHAPTER 1 • Adolescent Violence 11
in a Sociocultural Context
CHAPTER 2 • Devaluation 34
CHAPTER 3 • Disruption of Community 62
CHAPTER 4 • The Dehumanization of Loss 78
CHAPTER 5 • Rage 95
PART II • Strategies
CHAPTER 6 • Adolescent Axioms: General Principles 125
for Working with Adolescents
CHAPTER 7 • Counteracting Devaluation 149
CHAPTER 8 • The Restoration of Community 180
CHAPTER 9 • Rehumanizing Loss 214
CHAPTER 10 • Rechanneling Rage 241
CHAPTER 11 • Final Reflections 267
References 271
Index 275
vii
Introduction
About 10 years ago we began doing therapy with troubled and
often violent adolescents. As our work developed we began to receive
invitations to consult with schools and communities throughout the
United States who were struggling with aggression, bullying, and vio-
lence among young people. Guided by the premise that all people have
the potential to be violent, the question that most nagged at us was:
Why do some resort to violence while others do not? We wanted to
understand what factors underpin this problem, and we wanted to
develop strategies for counteracting those influences. From the many
hours we spent talking with countless teenagers and their families in
therapy and with the adolescent victims and perpetrators of violence
in schools and communities across the United States, gradually our
model for understanding and addressing adolescent violence emerged.
Our model assumes that indeed we all have the potential to be
violent, but what seems to differentiate those who actualize this
potential from those who do not is the interaction of four aggravated
factors: devaluation, erosion of community, dehumanized loss, and
rage. In this book we discuss each of these factors, explain what they
mean, and outline strategies for how parents, teachers, therapists, and
other concerned adults can take specific actions to address and ulti-
mately reduce this violence.
Fifteen years ago, this book probably would not have attracted the
attention of most of America. While urban, poor communities of color
were well versed in the prevalence, consequences, and need to attend
to adolescent violence, prior to the mid-1990s most of America had
not yet recognized the seriousness of this problem. When we first
1
2 • 2Introduction
began working with violent teens almost 10 years ago, adolescent vio-
lence was just beginning to capture the attention of the nation, and at
that time a book like this probably would have garnered much inter-
est. Presently, in the aftermath of 9/11 and with the country’s anxious
focus on war and terrorism, the problem of adolescent violence may
seem less important or even passé to many Americans.
Much like a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), as a society our attention shifts rapidly from one arousing
and captivating set of stimuli to another. We have a hard time focusing
for very long on any particular issue. In our rapidly paced, technologi-
cally advanced, super-speed society, we are all bombarded with a
relentless stream of viscerally arousing, quickly moving stimuli. We
live in an age when CNN Headline News has us “around the world in 60
minutes,” and in those 60 minutes multiple focal points are broadcast
simultaneously, all beckoning for our attention. From the main news
features, to the headline news streaking across the bottom of the
screen, to the sports report appearing in one corner and the weather
report appearing in another, we are subjected to a perpetual blast of
competing demands for our focus. With so much competition for our
attention, each byte of information must be presented in increasingly
provocative, sexy, colorful, tantalizing, and shocking ways if it is to
have any chance of capturing our gaze. And even when a stimulus has
caught our attention, in the final analysis, no one is capable of holding
on to it for very long.
Adolescent violence has been a serious problem in this country
for decades, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s—when the face of the
violence shifted from urban streets to suburban and rural schools,
from black and Latino kids to white kids, from those who were poor to
those who were middle-class or affluent, and even from boys to girls—
that this problem attracted national attention. For a period of time,
these shootings and the broader, deeper problem they pointed to were
shocking to most Americans. But the public’s attention cannot remain
focused for very long on any particular issue.
In late 2001 the media found a new crisis to rally around. In the
wake of the 9/11 tragedy, and in this new era of war and terrorism,
our attention has been diverted from the problem of adolescent vio-
lence. But this shift in focus should not be confused with amelioration
of the problem. To the contrary, far too many young people across the
United States continue to suffer from the trauma that both leads to
and that flows from violence. Adolescent violence is now, as it was 5
Introduction • 3
years ago, and 5 years before that, a serious problem that threatens
the health and welfare of our young people.
Currently we are living in a period when the anxiety created by
the perception of a terrorist threat and the growing list of Americans
killed in Iraq make it hard for many of us focus on the problems of
bullying, the threat of school shootings, and other forms of youth vio-
lence. Many of us are armed with a heightened sense of alertness and
guardedness that is directed at noticing and being prepared to defend
against an external terrorist threat. For most Americans, the percep-
tion is that the greatest threat exists somewhere “out there” rather
than right here in our midst.
While the issue of adolescent violence may no longer arouse the
same interest or fervor that it did before 9/11, Al Q’aeda, Iraq, and the
war on terrorism, for those families and communities that have been
assaulted directly by this violence, the retreat from a broad national
consciousness about and commitment to addressing this problem is
often painful. As one mother wrote to us following a workshop we
presented on youth violence:
“I attended your workshop as a mother who lost her 15-year-old
son at the hands of another 15-year-old boy with a gun. What
enrages me as much as the senseless violence that took my son’s
life is the indifference our society has to the violence that infects
an entire generation of our young people. We spend billions of dol-
lars waging war in another nation, billions of dollars trying to
fight the terrorists who want to destroy us. But what about
what’s happening right here in our families, our schools, and our
backyards? I don’t know what the reason is for the rampant vio-
lence among our kids, but I want to understand and I want to
know that as a society we all notice and care about this problem
as much as we care about addressing other horrors in the world.
If we don’t, then by the time we wipe out terrorism (if we do),
there won’t be much left here anyway.”
As this mother’s words reveal, the families and communities that
are directly assaulted by adolescent violence realize the seriousness of
this problem as 7intensely as our nation feels the threat of terrorism
and the danger of war. But collectively our focus has shifted, and this
problem no longer attracts the type of recognition that it needs to gar-
ner if we truly are to address and overcome it. It may well be that this
4 • 2Introduction
issue will not recapture public interest until there is another Colum-
bine massacre, or worse. Certainly, we hope it does not have to come
to that, and this is what we hope to accomplish with this book. It is
our intention to help readers understand the scope, nature, and dan-
gers of the phenomenon of adolescent violence. But more importantly,
we hope to provide a framework to clarify why this violence exists and
offer specific strategies for what each of us can do individually and col-
lectively to address and ultimately prevent it.
The current level of anxiety about terrorist violence and the
increasing losses associated with the war in Iraq only intensify the
likelihood and seriousness of youth violence. Young people today are
living in an environment that is strained by the fear of trauma. Like
the drive-by shooter who suddenly lurches around the corner in an
unexpected moment, unloading a spray of bullets that randomly
assaults anyone in the vicinity, terrorist attacks create a comparable
fear rooted in the element of surprise and generalized victimization.
American children today live in a society where they are held hostage
by the threat of an impending attack. Those who live in this chronic
state of tension, uncertainty, and aggression are more vulnerable to
violence, because at some point it begins to feel commonplace and
inevitable. When kids of any age can view beheadings of hostages over
and over on the Internet, at some point they become numb to the hor-
ror and ugliness of this brutality. Violence—or the threat of it—
becomes the norm rather than the exception, and this makes young
people more likely to resort to it and more conditioned to tolerate it.
Living in a chronic state of threat fosters a hardness, a callousness
toward pain—both one’s own and that of others. It’s a defense against
pervasive stress, but if it persists long enough, with the deadening of
feelings comes a loss of inhibition and even of fear itself. At some
point a boldness emerges whereby a person can conceive of doing just
about anything because there is a sense of having very little left to
lose. This is the reality that poor children of color in urban war zones
have lived with for decades. It’s what so many Iraqi, Chechen, Suda-
nese, and Palestinian children endure. After living in a state of con-
stant threat, of constantly anticipating or actually being the target of
another’s aggression, when so much has been lost, at some point
people become conditioned to the horror of violence, which breeds
aggression. It’s built into human biology that in response to a threat
we either “fight or flee.” For those who don’t believe there is anyplace
to flee to and for those who regard fleeing as a sign of weakness, or for
those who have lost so much that there is a sense of having very little
Introduction • 5
left to lose, an aggressive instinct is honed. In this way, living with the
ever-present threat of harm nurtures a level of aggressiveness in
young people that can only increase the risk of youth violence.
Another potential consequence of living in these times is that
such circumstances tend to exacerbate ethnic and religious divisions.
The nascent trend in bullying is no longer so much about “the bad
kids” picking on the “the good kids,” or the “tough guy” who muscles
“the weakling.” Instead, it more reflective of “blue-blood kids” target-
ing kids who are believed to be Muslims or immigrants. There is so
much intense hatred and suspicion that has been generated toward
anyone who appears “Middle Eastern” or Islamic or simply “foreign”
that this creates a climate that breeds bigotry, ignorance, and aggres-
sion. More and more we are hearing about kids who, because they
don’t seem “American enough” or “Christian enough,” have been tar-
geted by other kids who see them as “outsiders” and therefore as
potentially unsafe and suspicious. Certainly Muslim children routinely
are subjected to bullying from other kids who see them as “terrorists.”
But also children who simply look Middle Eastern in some way, irre-
spective of what their actual ethnic or religious identity is, are often
targets of bullying. We have heard accounts of attacks upon Jewish
kids wearing yarmulkes and Mexican American children who were
mistakenly assumed to be “Arabs.” In these instances the attackers are
responding to a conditioned hatred against anyone who appears to be
“other.”
What is important to understand is that the trend in bullying,
with its strong xenophobic undercurrent, is reflective of what young
people today are learning from the adults around them. Kids mimic
the adults in their lives, adults whom they hear making bigoted and
hateful comments about those whom they perceive as “others.” The
promotion of “other” from the broader political sphere makes it possi-
ble for us to distance from the suffering that violence creates, which
increases the likelihood of more violence. When any living being
becomes “other” in our eyes, it becomes easier to inflict violence upon
that individual with little hesitation or remorse. We are conditioned to
not relate to the “other” as someone like ourselves, with feelings,
interests, or connections to family. Our compassion is short-circuited,
and at that point violence is not only possible but highly likely. This is
what happened in Abu Ghraib where U.S. military prison guards piled
up the naked bodies of Iraqi prisoners to beat and humiliate them for
amusement. The acts were possible because in the eyes of the guards
the Iraqi prisoners were “other.”
6 • 2Introduction
Another consequence of the times we currently live in is that our
strained circumstances send a powerful message to young people
sanctioning violence as a solution to problems. Children learn from
what they observe. Hence, we may preach to them about the value of
nonviolence and peace, but if they see us behaving in ways that legiti-
mize the use of force as a way of “getting what we want,” this is what
they will learn. In this time of war, our young people are especially
vulnerable to learning that aggression is a solution. While they may
hear spirited debates among adults ranging from their parents to
political candidates, at the end of the day they live in a society actively
engaged in the use of militarism as a method of managing a difficult
situation. They also hear the often cited rationale for this force which
is that “we have to get them before they get us.” Such a message
increases the likelihood that young people will resort to violence as a
way of managing their problems and as a defense against their fear of
being hurt. Hence, now, during these times of terrorism and war,
when the fear of violence looms so ominously across this nation in a
broader, more generalized way, now more than ever each of us must
be attuned to, concerned about, and committed to addressing both
potential and actual violence among adolescents.
Of course, we don’t want to suggest that all is bleak. While ter-
rorism and war having numbing and damaging effects, for sure, there
also is a bright side that should be acknowledged. During times of
great stress and turmoil people get motivated to take action. We live
in a society that tends to be reactive rather than proactive. As a result,
we are most likely to act with intention when confronted with a crisis.
Our current state is just the type of crisis that can inspire organized
peace-based activities. Feeling the threat of what might happen if we
don’t find less aggressive methods for managing the dilemmas we
face, families and communities around the country are finding creative
ways to develop nonviolent alternatives. We have talked with families
that have responded to the increased violence in the world by initiat-
ing family conversations about how people can find diplomatic solu-
tions to divisive conflicts. We have had the privilege of learning about
schools and communities that have spearheaded initiatives designed
to advance constructive approaches for responding to both global and
local conflicts. And among adolescents, as often as we hear stories of
violence, trauma, and pain, we also have heard stories of hope and
healing, of young people who have pushed back against the pressure
of fear and aggression through loving, peace-based collaborations. In
Introduction • 7
examples like these we see the seeds of hope that are directly reflec-
tive of an underlying thrust of this book, namely, that it is incumbent
on each of us as adults to find ways to see the good in the bad, to
replace cynicism with optimism, replace fear with courage, bitterness
with forgiveness, and to challenge despair with hopeful possibilities.
Throughout this volume we argue that young people will learn from
what they see us do, and, as we live in times of extreme tension and
aggression, now more than ever we must provide young people with
living examples of how to promote healing and practice hopeful, posi-
tive action to counteract the pressure to succumb to violence.
