Dead Kids

Published June 10, 2010 at 2:12 a.m.
Startling sociological findings about violence and Boston's inner-city youth
Boston's violence promotes more violence, and its murders beget even more murder...

Boston's violence promotes more violence, and its murders beget even more murder.

READ: "Words to live by," by David S. Bernstein.

That's the sad but unavoidable lesson to take from a powerful new book just published by sociologist David J. Harding, who studied Boston's inner-city black youth while at the Sociology and Social Policy Program at Harvard University.

In Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture Among Inner-City Boys (University of Chicago Press), Harding depicts the daily lives of teens — often using their own words — growing up in some of Boston's most troubled neighborhoods.

Harding concludes that, rather than looking at social conditions as roots of violence, we need to understand that, to a surprising extent, violence is causing the dangerous and deadly social conditions in parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. It might seem irrational or contradictory, from our outside perspectives, but to the boys living with constant fear, self-destructive behavior can provide a roadmap to survival.

This startlingly bare-knuckled conclusion is painfully relevant to the gun violence that is once again dominating so many media reports.

The latest tipping point came in late May, when two gangbangers allegedly grabbed 14-year-old Nicholas Fomby-Davis from his scooter, at around 8 pm on a Sunday, and shot him to death on Bowdoin Street in Dorchester.

Fomby-Davis was the third murder victim that age in the city this year. And those were just the most horrific examples. A 10-year-old girl was shot in the leg on Creston Street this past Friday. The 27 murders in Boston through the end of May are the highest since the bad old days of 1995.

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