“I got up and ran to the janitor’s storage booth

Kicked the door in loose and ripped out the screws

Grabbed some sharp objects, brooms, and tools.

‘This is for every time you took my orange juice

Stole my seat in the lunchroom and drank my chocolate milk

Every time you tipped my tray and it dropped and spilled

I’m getting you back bully

Now once and for good.’”

--- Eminem, "Brain Damage"

The rapper Eminem has been criticized for his explicit songs. However, the situation described by the lyrics above is not an unusual one. Bullies taunt children all the time. Though song lyrics have grown increasingly violent over the years, more and more children find that they can relate to them. Children come face to face with violence every day. Quite frequently, this destruction comes from the children themselves; they are acting out feelings they cannot control. The causes of youth violence are numerous and varied.

“They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop?” asks Anthony Burgess’s character Alex in his famous novel, A Clockwork Orange. Alex is a fifteen year old boy who roams the streets of London at night with his friends, “stealing and roughing” and committing just about every possible crime. His parents worry about him but do not discipline him. They barely exchange words. When his father asks where he goes with his friends, Alex tells him he does odd jobs and gives him some money, and this silences his father. The parents both take sleeping pills so that Alex can play his stereo as loud as he wants in the middle of the night.

After an ineffective stay in prison, Alex is brought to a hospital-like laboratory as part of a study of an experimental therapy technique. After each meal he is given injections which weaken his body. Next he is brought by wheelchair to a theatre, where he is forced to watch a series of films that feature sickeningly realistic violence, including scenes of torture and rape.

The therapy is too effective. Alex is so psychologically disturbed by the films that he attempts suicide. Meanwhile, people who see the changed Alex debate whether this therapy is moral. Headlines scream “BOY VICTIM OF GOVERNMENT” and a group of men take care of him so that he can be their spokesman against the state. In other words, Alex is being used as a tool against crime.

Yet Alex’s world is made of crime. The adults of this version of London stay in their houses, scared and untrusting. Even Alex can't escape it. In the end, he goes back to his former lifestyle, although his former friends have already moved on and matured.

The book may take place in the future, but the author unknowingly predicts a more recent phenomenon in youth violence: school shootings. Psychologists all seem to agree that more often, the shootings were the result of their uncontrolled anger against classmates who reject them.

A classic example of this is the title character of Stephen King’s poignant novel Carrie. Her classmates torture her in every psychological form, and she often daydreams of their demise. In one incident, she envisions the girls in her gym class blood-soaked and screaming for mercy.

However, she comes home from school not to comfort but to an obsessive mother who turns her own fears of sexuality into a twisted religion. When Carrie tells her mother that she got her period, her mother beats her and throws her into a closet, dazed, to pray. Because she is so sheltered, Carrie cannot lead a normal teenage life, and so she is tormented at school. She also has telekinetic powers, which further set her apart from her classmates.

One particularly popular girl, Susan, sees the everyday hell that the girl must face and so she asks her equally admired boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom. He does, and Carrie ends up being the most beautiful girl at the dance, despite her mother's attempts to keep her at home.

But the perfect night goes terribly wrong when another popular girl, Chris, plays a humiliating prank on Carrie and Tommy. As they are crowned Prom King and Queen, Chris and her boyfriend pour buckets of blood onto them. Carrie’s one chance at happiness is destroyed. Blinded by rage, she destroys her entire town in an apocalyptic horror.

Stephen King’s Carrie is any angry child’s justice fantasy. Her telekinesis represents the power of suppressed aggression that is finally unleashed. Her story symbolizes the emotions behind the school shootings: the feelings of alienation, rejection, and vengeance.

What makes children violent? There is no one answer, but usually children become violent in order to cope with something they are missing in their lives. One common theme in youth crime is the failure of sufficient parenting. Alex and Carrie represent two types of families that often produce violent children.

Alex has two parents, but both of them do not pay much attention to him. They provide for him physically, but do not give him an emotional or moral foundation to build on. He controls them; they do not control him. Because children like Alex do not get nurturing from their parents, they often turn to other people or even gangs for support. This leads to the use of crime as a reward for loyalty.

Carrie, on the other hand, has a single mother who is abusive. Abused children often learn early on that violence is an acceptable way of dealing with their emotions. In many cases, teens, especially girls, murder their abusers as a way of ending their mistreatment. With Carrie’s, eliminating her mother was not so much the problem as was dealing with her classmates. To deal with bullies a growing number of children carry weapons to school for protection. Stricter gun laws have prevented children from buying guns, but in most cases, the guns that they carry belong to their parents. Among teenagers, 1 in 4 deaths are by a gun—1 in 8 deaths in children.

It is interesting to note that in A Clockwork Orange, written in 1962, Alex himself does not carry a gun. He has a “cut-throat britva”—a knife. This shows how the rise in gun use has started relatively recently.

Some researchers say that the increase of violence in the media desensitizes children to brutality. Yet it is nothing new. Violence in pop culture has been on a steady rise since World War Two. In the 1920’s and 30’s, blood was never shown in movies. After the war, people had seen real gore on the war front and in the newsreels, so watching a bloodless murder did not seem dramatic or even believable any more. Later on, television arrived, and sharper pictures and eventual colorization contributed to the need for realism.

Others point out the behavior of the present adult population. Baby boomers were raised on wholesome entertainment, but ended up rejecting authority, taking drugs, and engaging in risky sexual behavior. Thus, there is no substantial evidence the media causes children to turn to violence, either.

But blame is only another form of aggression. By understanding the motives of child criminals, we can learn what they need. The needs of children have always remained the same throughout history. Young people need an identity, a direction, and a purpose. They need people to care for them. They need to feel safe. This is an age where adolescents often have low self-esteem, and when they have a negative view of life, they do not act for the future.

For now, Scared Straight programs across the country work to keep potentially dangerous kids off the streets. There also are many hotlines for troubled children that they can find as close as their school nurse’s office. Prevention is the most important tool in slowing youth violence, and it will only be effective if people work as one.