Creating young martyrs: What leads young people to resort to violence?

By guest author Alice LoCicero

The accused Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, grew up in my home town of Cambridge and went to the high school my kids attended. They look like kids my children would have gone to school with, and their friends and family Creating Young Martyrsdescribe them in ways that make them seem normal and good.

How could young folks we might easily have known and loved act intentionally to create carnage, terror, and radical disruption of lives and psyches? As President Obama asked: What would lead them “to resort to violence”?

Dr. Samuel (Justin) Sinclair and I set out to answer an eerily similar question when we researched kids at risk of recruitment to the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization (now defeated) in Sri Lanka. We wrote about this research in our 2008 book, Creating young martyrs: Conditions that make dying in a terrorist attack seem like a good idea. Our findings help explain this apparent contradiction.

What we learned, both from reviewing others’ research and combing through our own findings, is that many kids who engage in terrorist actions, or who aspire to do so, think that their actions are going to bring attention to the grievances of their people, which they perceive–rightly or wrongly–as legitimate, and to begin to address a highly asymmetrical distribution of power, a distribution that disadvantages the group they identify with. The ultimate goal then, the “end” that for them justifies the means, is to help their peoples’ cause. Aware that they will die in the attack or soon thereafter, they see their actions as dutiful or, in Western terms, altruistic.

I realize that this idea–that young people who do things that result in killing, maiming, and disruption, do so with altruistic intent–is highly counter-intuitive, but it comes to my attention over and over again in our own and others’ data and in the words of family members of kids engaged in terrorism.

In the award-winning documentary film, “My Daughter the Terrorist,” in which filmmaker Morten Daae and director Beate Arnestad follow two Tamil girls, trained to be Black Tigers, who are prepared to blow themselves up in a terrorist action, the mother of one of the girls speaks about her daughter, saying, “She was different. She dreamt of becoming a nun.”

Alice Locicero is Past President and Co-Founder of the Society of Terrorism Research, as well as Chair of Social Sciences at Endicott College. She is a certified Clinical Psychologist, and has been a faculty member at the Center for Multicultural Training and Boston Medical Center, as well as at Suffolk University. In earlier roles, LoCicero served as Senior Psychologist working with families at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Disaster Responders, she provides mental health services to family members of victims of terrorism and other man-made and natural disasters. She traveled to Sri Lanka in May and June of 2007 to learn about conditions that make terrorism an appealing idea to some youths.

(This post was originally published in the ABC-CLIO blog.)

Book review: Stones into Schools

[Note from Kathie MM:  For Valentine’s Day, we would like to share a wonderful love story—a story of a love for a people and a place, for peace, and for education, especially for girls. This guest book review by Jillian Zingarelli provides a glimpse at this love story.]

Review by Jillian ZingarelliStones into Schools (image of book cover)

Anyone who read number one bestseller, Three Cups of Tea – the collaborative effort by journalist David Oliver Relin and Greg Mortenson – will be excited to see Mortenson take over the narrative wheel in his new book Stones into Schools.

In Three Cups of Tea we learn about the start of Mortenson’s passion for educating children, especially girls, and how it sparked the creation of the Central Asia Institute (CAI). Since 1995 the CAI has helped to build 131 schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, the majority of which are located in some of the most rural and remote areas in Central Asia.

In Stones into Schools the CAI ventures into post-9/11 Afghanistan where it encounters an unrelenting desire by the Afghan people for more schools for their children, even as poverty and bombs threaten their personal security.

How with all of these obstacles do Mortenson and his team (whom he endearingly terms “the Dirty Dozen”) continue to yield successful results? And why of all forms of relief to poverty, starvation, war, etc. do they offer educating girls as a principal means for engaging peace?

In Stones into Schools, Mortenson cites an African proverb he heard growing up in rural Tanzania: “If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.”  Education enables both men and women to recognize the ignorance of turning suicide bombers into martyrs, and Islam–a religion that is both inherently peaceful and complex–into a simplistic doctrine of violence and suppression.

If you would like to learn more about the CAI and become involved in their mission in Pakistan and Afghanistan, visit them at www.ikat.org.

What do you think about the idea that educating girls helps to promote peace?