'i'm rough and tough,' said nine-year-old Gemma, raising her arms in the air in a gesture both menacing and defiant.
'I'm rough and tough.'
'You're rough and tough,' I affirmed.
'Yep,' another dramatic gesture, this time nearer my face.
'And if you weren't rough and tough, what would you be?' I asked.
Tears sprang into Gemma's eyes, her cheeks flushed. 'Well,' she said, rubbing both her hands over her face, 'I used to like people, but nobody liked me, so now I'm rough and tough.'
'Do people like you rough and tough?'
'No, but I don't cry any more.'
Gemma had been referred to me by her worried playworkers. 'She settles everything with her fists,' said one. Gemma was indeed an aggressive child, thumping, spitting or biting whenever she felt frustrated by another child.
After six weeks in after-school club, she had begun to lash out at her playworkers. They reported, 'She's always been verbally abusive, but now she's hitting us.'
Violence comes in varying degrees of severity - teasing, insults, verbal bullying, play fighting that goes too far, vandalism and generally disruptive behaviour. People's feelings and self-esteem can be severely hurt by these lesser degrees of violence, but what most affects adults is a child like Gemma who deliberately sets out to inflict physical pain on another child.
Physically aggressive children are the most difficult to manage. They frighten and repel other children and they worry adults. They can make us feel helpless and deskilled. As Gemma's playworker said, 'We've run the gamut of our skills, we just don't know what to do with her.' They can also make us feel frightened because they can make us want to be aggressive to them in return.
'I can hardly keep my hands off her. What she needs is someone to do it to her so she knows what it feels like,' cried one playworker who had just witnessed Gemma attempting to drag another girl by the hair. Her comment was even more stark because of the usually thoughtful and reflective nature of this playworker's attitude to children's behaviour. Indeed, aggressive children will often invite adults to be aggressive with them.
Understanding violence as a communication
Violence as self protection
Gemma and her family background show us very clearly why a child might become 'rough and tough'. Self-defence and self-protection are natural instincts.
Gemma's home was full of violence, between the parents, between the siblings and from the parents to the children. Her parenting was erratic, with constant swings between excessive permissiveness and excessive aggression. Gemma never knew, in her own words, whether she was 'behaving or not behaving'.
Like many children from violent homes, she grew up unsure of whether or not she was loveable and likeable. Children take the self-concept they develop in the home into club. The child from a 'good enough home' will approach people outside the home with the presumption that they will be reliable and friendly. Gemma's fear was that everyone was as unreliable and unpredictable about her as her parents, and so she approached people defensively.
What we call 'violence' is often ordinary behaviour going a step too far.
Given her home experience, it was appropriate for Gemma to be cautious about people, but she set up a vicious circle wherein she attacked first to protect herself. This, of course, provoked the very hostility and rejection she so feared.
The extraordinary fact is that violent children are trying to get close to someone. In a moment of insight in therapy, Gemma asked, 'Why do I always say the horrible things first?' She wanted to like people and she wanted people to like her, but also she wanted to protect herself from rejection.
But not all aggression is bad. What we call aggression can also be called vitality, a noble demand to break through to other people and be heard.
After all, many of our greatest leaders and innovators of change could be labelled aggressive.
Violence as a way of being heard
In thinking about a violent child, it is important to observe their violence. Violence is different to sadism, which is when someone takes pleasure in inflicting pain on another.
Violent children may seem 'satisfied' after a violent act. They rarely seem to be pleased. Their sense of satisfaction comes from the fact that they may feel they need to be violent in order to defend themselves against what they feel is a sadistic attack on them. For example, Gemma feared people 'enjoyed' not liking her.
In observing her, Gemma's playworkers noticed that she tended to hit out when she felt she was being ignored or not heard. In this sense, we can think of her violence as an extreme form of persuasion. (We all know the feeling of thumping the table to emphasise a point!) When Gemma hit another child, she knew she had made an impact on them.
It was interesting that when I asked her mother, 'How would Gemma know when she had made an impact on you?', she replied, 'When I yell.' Gemma had not had the experience of feeling she had made an impact, or was a pleasure to be around, or was valued simply because she was herself. Nor had she learned a vocabulary with which she could express her feelings. As a result, anger, sadness and fear were all expressed physically in violence.
Coping with conflict
As adults, we sometimes forget that children have to learn to cope with conflict. Conflict is part of life, and most friendships have their difficulties and disagreements. Indeed, the risk of adults urging children to 'play nicely' is that it suggests there is only one way of socialising.
Conflict is part of socialising and so it is natural to expect a degree of aggression in children's relationships. However, there is a big difference between a child being aggressive, and a child like Gemma who could only be aggressive.
Aggression is a solution to feeling powerless and vulnerable. We feel so much stronger when we are angry than we do when we are sad. Troubling as they are, we can be much more hopeful about aggressive children than withdrawn children. Gemma was persevering to get close to adults and other children in an inappropriate way, where a more withdrawn child may have given up.
We also need to remember that some children seem to be temperamentally more aggressive than others. Sometimes, violence occurs not as a response to frustration, but because the child is born with a tendency to be aggressive. In such a situation, we need to focus on helping the child to recognise their own signs and signals and handle their aggression in a more appropriate way than violence.
Managing violence in children
* There may be no solutions to a violent child, but only better ways of working with them.
* The more that a violent child is ignored, the more violent they are likely to become. They may be slow to respond to warmth, praise and acknowledgement - but they will. However, they need a great deal! Try to show them that they have made an impact on you simply by being themselves.
Commenting, 'I am enjoying playing this game with you,' makes it explicit that you like them.
* Help the child to understand the impact of their behaviour. Explain, 'When you are angry and fighting, you make sure that people remember you, but you maybe feel they don't like you very much.'
* Violent children can and do respond to being given responsibility.
Children within the group will copy the playworkers' attitudes and behaviour. If the workers model an inclusive and understanding approach, the children will eventually adopt a more tolerant approach.
* Violence breeds violence. If adults respond to violent children with either verbal or physical violence, then they give an explicit message that 'it is okay to be violent'. We also need to remember that there is no such thing as harmless violence. Encouraging children to hit a cushion or punch bag when they are angry may prevent them from hitting another child, but it also confirms to them that the only way to react to anger and frustration is physically. What violent children need is to be given words with which to express their feelings.
* Not all aggression is bad, and we should be careful to convey this to children in our management of them.
Andrea Clifford-Poston is an educational therapist and author of Tweens: What to expect and how to survive your child's pre-teenage years (Oneworld, Pounds 8.99)
