Head Strong Society Fails Because Families Do

Head Strong | Society fails because families do

A study shows that homes without both parents have a higher chance of being involved in violence.

April 22, 2007

By Michael Smerconish

You've offered yourself for public service. You've appeared at countless candidate forums. You've published platforms and taken positions on matters of public concern. To a person, you deserve the praise Theodore Roosevelt offered to the "man in the arena."

But now, time's short. The election is one month away. And the city has an unprecedented problem with violence. While each of you has offered plenty of proposals for curbing the rising homicide rate in the city, those proposals (more cops and cameras; job creation; stop-and-frisk; stanching the flow of guns) have been addressed mostly to manifestations of crime rather than to its root causes.

Perhaps that's because discussion of what drives violence is sometimes not politically correct, and often brings out intemperate speech. But the stakes are too high to remain silent. We need to talk. And I believe we can do so at a level that spurs public discourse without demagoguery. So allow me to attempt to begin the dialogue.

I posit the following: that Philadelphia, like much of the nation, has a family problem, more than a firearm problem.

Consider:

A U.S. Census survey released in late 2006 shows that married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households - the lowest ever recorded, a figure that has declined by half since 1960. Households with married couples and their children are now the exception, not the norm. Marriage rates have declined, and social scientists say it's becoming an institution for the affluent and well-educated more than for other income groups.

Meanwhile, more babies are being born out of wedlock. And the rates of such births follow a disturbing pattern. About one-third of first births among white women occur before marriage, compared with three-quarters among black women, according to a recent review of research on cohabitation coauthored by University of Michigan professor Pamela Smock and Wendy D. Manning of Bowling Green State University.

The bottom line? A dismaying proportion of children - especially poor, urban children - are growing up outside of a married, two-parent household.

Just what does that have to do with violence?

Plenty, according to experts such as Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the department of sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He believes those children are the most susceptible to the violence that plagues our city.

Sampson has published extensively on the link between youth violence and the marital status of their parents. In a study of Chicago neighborhoods he coauthored in the February 2005 American Journal of Public Health, the odds of perpetrating violence were 85 percent higher for black youths than those for white youths - and the marital status of a youth's parents was a key determinant of those odds. The presence of married parents was linked to a lower probability of violence among young people, and it also significantly lessened the disparity in violence between black youths and white youths.

A separate 2006 study coauthored by Sampson affirms the benefits of marriage for the children, as well as for married men themselves. There, Sampson and coworkers closely followed a sample of 500 at-risk men from adolescence to age 32, reporting a "significant reduction" - 35 percent - "in the probability of crime" among those men when they were married.

To sum it up: There's a correlation between the presence of a coherent family unit, marriage, and a reduction of violence. Unfortunately, we're seeing fewer and fewer married couples with children, particularly in the city.

Candidates: None of you seems to be focused on these things.

And yet, they may explain why, according to the Violence Policy Center, blacks, who are only 13 percent of the nation's population, make up nearly half of all homicides. Pennsylvania - no doubt because of Philadelphia's family problem - led the nation in both number of black homicide victims (398) and black homicide rate per 100,000 (29.52) in 2004. That homicide rate was six times the national average.

Perhaps this dysfunctional family dynamic may also provide insight into violence in Philadelphia public schools, and the deaths, reported by The Inquirer investigation into the city Department of Human Services, of more than 20 children in the last three years despite their having come to the attention of the DHS.

Above all, it could help explain why the homicide rate has already risen to triple digits this year.

Sampson told me things I wish we would hear from you candidates. Things like this: "If I were in charge of policy, I would point to the link between many different social phenomena. We tend to divide this up and talk about the police for crime. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of things go together. Infant mortality, low birth weight, school dropout, teenage pregnancy. These all cluster in the same neighborhoods.

"We tend to only talk about one or two things in terms of policy. Politicians talk about the criminal-justice system, police, locking people up. Sociologists tend to talk about poverty. I mean, these are all relevant, but there's a more complex picture, I think, involved."

Promises to "target guns" or "add cops," and the rest of the usual menu selections, will get us no closer to solving the problem. It's time to think outside the box, even if this issue is too big for any mayor to solve.

Let's have the difficult conversation. I'm suggesting you address the smallest voting bloc you can find: the family.

Questions to answer on a separate sheet of paper:

1. Briefly state the main idea of this article.

1. List three important facts that the author uses to support the main idea.

1. What information or ideas discussed in this article are also discussed in your textbook or other readings? List the textbook chapters and page numbers.

1. List any examples of bias, opinion, or faulty reasoning (disagree with or “don’t add up”) that you found in the article.

1. List any new terms/concepts that were discussed in the article, and write a short definition.

1. Sociological Imagination - What connection(s) to your own life can be made from the information in the article?