© 2021 Robert W McBride, LCSW
Breaking the Cycle
Discussion of Intervention to Male Violence
For the most part, prostitution, drug addiction, drug selling and crimes of all kinds are not committed by people with assertive and secure attachment behaviors.
It seems to me that presently commercial and social programs promote the development of insecurely attached children.
The suffering is unnecessary even if its creation was unintentional. It is too expensive, dangerous and wearisome to deal with or treat the carnage of insecure attachment, maladaptive schemas of self, affect dysregulation, antisocial behavior and personality constraints.
The major reason we must continue to build prisons is to house the “garbage” of poor parenting, whatever the reason or excuse.
As a nation, we spend billions upon billions of dollars each year fighting the problems we create. We finance wars on poverty, mental illness, drugs, violence and crime. We finance the building of welfare systems, mental health research programs, addiction education and recovery groups and law enforcement agencies.
The solution is to be found in how we raise our children. Supporting the solution would cost a fraction of the cost of containing the problems.
Prevention is the only real solution. We need to end the hypocrisy and begin to value our children. As the ability to parent improves, the need for treatment of men (and women) with abusive, violent and criminal behaviors will decrease.
For example, children who grow-up without parents because they both work to obtain material gratification or to survive. From a lecture in 1996 by the Director of Lookout Mountain Cypress Unit in Colorado, the children incarcerated there are “the most dangerous people in our state.” They are not only criminals but also sexual perpetrators who, as young children, were victims of sexual assault. Often, social services had been aware of their living conditions since their early childhood.
We need to develop and promote concepts for parents about fulfilling an infant's or child's needs, setting reasonable limits and boundaries and helping a child learn how to become competent, responsible, satisfied and trusting in his or her environment.
*The next presentation Where We Have Been and Where We Need to Go is a discussion of a study of the psychopathology of men who are abusive and violent.
*The material for these articles is derived from Breaking the Cycle, 2001: McBride, Gylantic Publishing, Centennial.