Conference set to discuss male violence

Men commit violent crimes and populate prisons at a much higher rate than women. To better understand the root of the problem and how public policy may help alleviate it, a local nonprofit is bringing together a dozen professors, authors and researchers to present about the early origins of male violence.

The 2019 Boys at Risk Conference, hosted by the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation, will take place at Santa Fe Community Convention Center from May 1-3.

“Ninety percent of people who are in federal and state prisons for committing violent acts are male. There are very few behaviors that are that stratified,” Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation President Paul Golding said. “I think it behooves us to examine not just the sociological issues that we usually examine, such as poverty and race, but also look at a very complex intermixing of biology, psychology and society.”

Notable presenters include Adrian Raine, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of The Anatomy of Violence; David Olds, a University of Colorado professor and the founder of the nonprofit Nurse-Family Partnership; and Richard Tremblay, a University of Montreal Professor and winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

The focus of the conference is to understand the link between the conditions of early childhood development and later acts of violence in adolescence and adulthood. According to a Pell Institute Study from 2015, boys are 3½ times more likely to carry a weapon onto a school campus. In state prisons, there are 25.32 men for every woman.

The conference will also offer workshops on subjects such as the connection between early childhood education and crime, strategies for supporting fathers to support children, changing boys’ violent trajectories, child care-based preventive intervention and middle school mentorship intervention.

“It is a new way of looking at the origins of violence that is almost always committed by males,” Golding said. “There is quite a bit of scientific research that comes from the field of neurobiology and psychology that looks at the question, but the subject has been way too much ignored by general public.”