Lafayette and Pharoah’s violent world was so disturbing to Kotlowitz, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, that he wrote a prize-winning story about their lives for the paper in 1987. That story led to Kotlowitz’s recently published best seller, “There Are No Children Here,” which follows the boys and their family from 1987 to 1989. The title came from a conversation between Kotlowitz and the boys’ mother, LaJoe. When Kotlowitz told her he wanted to write a book about children in the projects, she replied, “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.”
Although the boys’ lives seem extraordinarily grim, they are –sadly–not unique. As Kotlowitz points out in his book, 4,000 children live in the same project as the Rivers boys. Around the country, an additional 12 million children live in poverty-many of them in equally violent inner-city ghettos. In the last few years, researchers in child development have studied the effects of growing up in the shadow of danger. Their conclusions: children of the inner city resemble, more than anything else, children living in war zones.
Like Lafeyette and Pharoah, the children quickly adapt to their hazardous surroundings in ways that seem shocking to outsiders. They regularly see friends and relatives die simply because they are in the wrong place–the path of a bullet–at the wrong time. In his book, Kotlowitz describes how Lafeyette attends the funerals of close friends without even shedding a single tear. But that outward calm is deceptive, says James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development in Chicago, who has studied children and violence for many years. Children like Lafeyette must turn off their feelings in order to survive, he says; in a war zone, “very few children can afford to be open and emotionally engaged. It’s too exhausting and too threatening.”
Garbarino’s newest book, “No Place to Be a Child,” written with Kathleen Kostelny and Nancy Dubrow, describes the psychic damage of constant violence in war-torn areas around the world including Cambodia, the Mideast–and inner-city Chicago. He says there are clear similarities between the Chicago projects and Cambodian refugee camps: guns are widespread, trivial disputes end in violence, adult males are often a marginal presence, mothers are frequently clinically depressed. In both places, boys in their early to midteens have already become frontline warriors. In Cambodia, they are guerrilla fighters; in Chicago, they are gang members.
Kotlowitz found that many of the children he interviewed had difficulty remembering even routine events, perhaps because they were accustomed to blocking out so much. Many were hyperactive or suffered from stress-related ailments; Lafeyette, for example, has frequent stomach problems. One boy named Rickey had looked on as an adored older cousin was killed in a gang battle. Later on, he had flashbacks, similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans. “At 13,” says Kotlowitz, “he wished he was 8 years old again.” Garbarino says that PTSD is common among children in war zones around the world.
There are, of course, important differences between children of war and children in the inner city–and these suggest that the cities may be an even more life-threatening world for kids than the conventional battleground. Urban children, Garbarino says, are likely to start with an “enormous accumulation of risk factors” including everything from life-long poor nutrition to inadequate education and employment opportunities. There’s also a greater chance that their family structures have been destroyed, perhaps for generations. Children in other war zones, he says, “are much more likely to have a couple of domains of their life still be intact.” They probably have direct memories of “normal life” before the fighting started. And, the fighting-though obviously destructive-can provide families with a common, unifying sense of purpose as well as an end to the conflict with the defeat of a clearly defined enemy. For children like Lafeyette and Pharoah, the enemy is everywhere; peace is just a word.
