Generationext
Generation violent
By Aradhika Sekhon

THE recent shooting incident in Columbine High School, Colorado, USA, where two school boys went on a rampage, killing 13 persons, has made us ask ourselves the question whether a similar situation is possible in India. In truth, we need to address ourselves to the reality that such a situation, or the seeds of it, has actually been in existence here for some years now and there’s something very big and very malign afoot. Consider the following sample cases:

--- Bharti Ramachandran (17) was suffocated and killed by Danish Kazi (18), the son of a prominent physician.

--- Tanavi (20), student of Ferguson College Pune, was shot dead by Prasanna Pandit of the same college who then committed suicide.

--- A senior services officer’s daughter attempted suicide twice out of frustration, while her parents were busy in their club circuit.

--- Sixteen-year- old Manish, son of a violent father, who used to beat up his wife and five children in drunken rages, threw a brick and seriously wounded his father on the head.

--- And most recently, Manu Sharma walked into a restaurant and when he was refused a drink, drew out a gun and shot the bar hostess.

Delhi, along with Madras and Bombay, contributes heavily to the huge numbers of adolescents between the age of 12 and 19 who are victims and perpetrators of violent crime in India each year. The rate and intensity of violence involving youth and children has escalated dramatically in the recent years and much of it is accounted for by adolescents attacking others in their age groups pushing the adolescent homicide rates to higher levels. Part of what makes this social chemistry volatile is the gun and knife culture. People too young to comprehend the finality of death have access, even easy access, to death machines. The psychological harm done to adolescents, either by possession of weapons or by fear of those who possess them, is immense. It distorts their behaviour and their human relations. The atmosphere around them is charged with the uncertainty of when shots may be fired or a knife flashed. Luckily, in India, there exists a ban on the buying and selling of guns but for a person with means or determination, procuring a weapon is not too difficult.

Roots of violence

We must accept that violence does not suddenly ‘happen’ at the age of 16 or 17. It is a part of a long developmental process that begins during the childhood. Many children mature in an atmosphere of violent relationships between men and women—husbands battering wives, women assaulted by boy friends and other males or they themselves being at the receiving end of physical punishment. These children come to adopt the same attitudes and practices in dealing with peers and, eventually, their own families as their elders did.

Sociologically, the conflict between culturally accepted values and the socially structured difficulties in living up to them exert pressure towards deviant and disruptive behaviour. This also provides a potential for the formation of subgroups alienated from the rest of the community but unified within themselves. This pattern is exemplified by alienated adolescents teaming up in gangs or becoming a part of a youth movement with a distinctive subculture. "The need to be considered effective, successful and recognised being very strong", says Dr. Harpreet Kanwal, clinical psychiatrist and counsellor, "adolescents tend to gather around an individual who seems to be able to give them an identity. This group of teens under the effect of the glorification of the act, copy peer group leaders in becoming violent."

This is set on the stage of India’s presently chaotic socio-cultural value system which faces the breakdown of traditional values and institutions, diffused social responsibility and absence of a national conscience. All this has a debilitating effect on the minds of our youth. The great paucity of role models, rather, the visibility of the wrong type of ‘heroes’, proclaims that what is bad is strong and what is good is necessarily weak. The favourite Bollywood anti-hero, who takes justice into his own hands and wrecks vengeance on his enemies, is an image that has sustained over the past couple of decades. "Children feel fear, they feel hate ...... their repressed emotions when exposed to such deviant ‘heroes’ turn them into ticking time-bombs", says a counsellor at a Delhi school.

The political mobilisation of urban youth into violent activity---burning buses, taking out morchas, stone-throwing, etc--- has given impetus to youth violence. Here it is seen as a means to easy money and power.

Terribly entertaining

In discussing the causes of adolescent violence in urban India, the role of the entertainment media comes up for examination. The expressions of violence are constantly visible and audible in Indian life. An example of just one more entry into the arsenal of media violence is a video game called Mortal Kombat, a great teen favourite, which gives the victor a chance to kill. In its most horrifying version, it provides the thrill of ripping out the loser’s still-beating heart with bare hands or tearing off his life-like head. This, and other violence-saturated games, justify the warning issued by the American Psychiatric Association Commission on youth and violence that "viewing violence increases the fear of becoming a victim of violence with a resultant increase in self- protective behaviours and mistrust of others".

Increasingly unsettling also is the involvement of youth, particularly from affluent families, in crimes of sexual violence. One reason for this, suggests Dr. Sunil Mittal of the Delhi Psychiatry Centre, is "the increasing exposure of youth to liberal doses of sex via the media, films and satellite T.V. These stretch their sexual sanity to a breaking point. With few commensurate opportunities for the release of pent-up frustrations, the deviant youth find vulnerable minor an easy prey."

Parental responsibility

Says psychiatrist Dr. A.D. Nayyar, "There is something basically wrong with the way we bring up children. The environment which the parents provide to a child determine his attitudes towards the problem of life. Although certain children are born with a personality dysfunction, it is mostly children from unstable families who succumb to pressures to perform and conform, turning to violence, even self destruction, to assert themselves. Grossly maladjusted parents, single-parent families, or where there is the physical absence of parents are the breeding grounds for deviants. Also homes where there is plenty of money — for parents who are unable to provide emotionally stable families tend to over-compensate with money and this is where children of the moneyed class get affected."

The projection of parental ambition onto the child may also cause personality dysfunction. Many parents confronted with personal failure or limited ‘success’ may mute their original goal emphasis to vicariously reach it through their children. Research shows that among people of the lower occupational levels, a substantial proportion have aspirations for a professional career for their children. It is these parents who exert great pressure upon their children for high achievement. This syndrome of lofty aspirations and limited realistic opportunities is precisely the pattern which invites deviant behaviour.

Says Dr Peter Stringham, counsellor at Department of Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine in East Boston, "Problems occur when we transmit the message to young people that they only have a place in the universe if they are strong, if they look a certain way, if they are good athletes. Young people who do not conform to that ideal will most likely experience problems".

Any solutions?

The fundamental job of educating kids lies with the parents. So community feeling even within the nuclear family needs to be developed. Giving the adolescents a practical direction and not constantly pushing or controlling them could be a solution. The present generation expects situations to be explained to them and not have idea thrust upon them. Feelings of tender associations have to be developed so that the children are so securely rooted that they needn’t go astray. Also, the family has to evolve its own concepts of life whereby modernity should be defined vis-a-vis cultural, social and functionally viable value systems. Finally, society should keep a watch over places where such peer groups are likely to originate temporarily or permanently --- places such as centres of tuition and playgrounds.