Are we looking in the wrong direction?

While women can be ‘white supremacists’ too, ‘cultural difference related’ rampages are executed by men. Seldom old men, almost all are ‘mentally and socially’ isolated young men.

My anthropological PhD (2013) is on thirty young men successful coming of age. They were mentally hospitalized, military drafted, incarcerated, humiliated in schools, criminal, violent, mad and most of time expelled from school.

When young men are a) ‘disembedded’ from safe family, community and social bonding, and/or are b) marginalized and/or are b) structurally humiliated (destructively shamed and unacknowledged shame) the chance that he get in trouble (even rampaging) is predictable. (violence, crime, drugs addiction, mental/psychiatric and educational troubles).

Boys and young men (and girls in their gendered complementary ways) express and signal all potential solutions of many social afflictions. If we are not able to ’embed’, protect, support and limit them in transforming (making social) their sexual and aggression drives.

We need look no further to understand their horrifying and unexplained (even terrorist) murderous outbursts.

Read Mehmet’s dramatic story: ‘To Belong and To Be Different: Balancing National and Ethnic Loyalties in Male Adolescents’ (on the net) of one the thirty young men participating in this research.

2012 auguts 15th; The Netherlands
Dirck van Bekkum
Clinical and social anthropologist