NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9534

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: NLNS: The 'Violence Initiative'
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The 'Violence Initiative':
Using science to scapegoat Black and Latino youth
Kristin Schwartz, Education for the People

(NLNS)--In the wake of the riots in Los Angeles, the federal public health
establishment announced its funding priority for 1994: the "violence
initiative"--a "psychological" approach to combatting violent crime in inner
cities. Although the initiative has been presented in innocuous terms, its
roots are in eugenics, the racist pseudo-science used by Hitler to justify the
extermination of "criminal elements" in Nazi Germany.
    This fall, opponents of eugenics, advocates of responsible science
and community organizers impeded the violence initiative by stopping a
conference partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called
"Genetics and Crime: Findings, Uses and Implications." The Washington,
DC-based Stop the Violence Initiative demonstrated that promotional
material for the conference assumed that violence and crime are genetically
linked. The NIH withdrew its response to a storm of public protest, while
conference organizers objected that the action infringed on their academic
freedom.
    Allegations of academic silencing, however, carry little weight in
comparison to the danger of using science to legitimate the racist ideology
inherant in the violence initiative. "Stopping crime" has frequently been
used as a euphemism for policing poor communities and jailing people of
color. But violence initiative research is a tool for criminalization on a more
insidious level. By providing "scientific proof" that people of color are
predisposed to violence "by nature" and focusing on "sick" persons of color
rather than poverty and racial injustice, the mental health establishment is
scapegoating the victims of public policy disasters.

The violence initiative revealed
    The existence of the violence initiative was first revealed by top
federal psychiatrist Fred Goodwin in a speech before the Federal Mental
Health Advisory Council in February 1992. Goodwin said that his agency,
the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA)
and its sub-agency, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), were
ready to take action against crime and drug use in inner cities. He didn't
mention the causes of these problems--poverty, racism in hiring, inadequate
access to education and health care--but stated: "If you are going to leverage
[problems of violence] at all, in my view, you are going to leverage [them]
through individuals, not through large social engineering of society."
    In the same speech Goodwin compared inner city youth to
"hyperaggressive" and "hypersexual" monkeys and speculated: "One could
say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, particularly
within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing
evolutionary things that we have built up. Maybe it isn't just the careless use
of the word when people call certain area of certain cities 'jungles.'"
    After these remarks came to public attention, members of the
Congressional Black Caucus pressured Secretary of Health and Human
Services (HHS) Louis Sullivan to remove Goodwin from his position as
head of the ADAMHA. Goodwin resigned, only to be appointed director of
the NIMH soon after.
    As director of the NIMH, Goodwin will oversee the agency's
program to screen inner city children. This program, which Goodwin
described in a speech to the American Psychiatric Association in May,
1992, would require teachers in urban elementary schools to identify 12 to
15 percent of their students who exhibit "conduct disorders," "cognitive
deficiencies," "impulsive and violent behavior" and other supposed
precursors of "violent behavior." After further screening through phone
calls and interviews--Goodwin called this process "triage"--clinical
treatments would be prescribed for the children who are labeled potential
"criminals."
    Though Goodwin did not say whether or not drug therapy would be
a part of the "clinical treatment," some of his colleagues have been more
explicit. James Breiling, a psychologist described by Goodwin as an expert
on the control of violent behavior, stated in the Los Angeles Times, "Are
there kids who have behavioral problems linked to depression? Yes. Should
we give them the appropriate medications? Absolutely.

Historical Roots of the violence initiative
    Biological and medical approaches to social problems are historically
based in the eugenics movement influential in Europe and North America
from the 1920s to the 1940s. Psychologists and psychiatrists played a
significant role in this movement providing "scientific" justification for the
control of people of color, women, lesbians and gays, people with
disabilities and poor people.
    Measuring "intelligence" was a pet project of the US eugenics
movement. The IQ test was developed for use on World War I recruits and
potential immigrants by Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford
University and Rober Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological
Association. IQ tests were used in the early twentieth century to "prove" that
people of African, Jewish, Irish, Eastern and Southern European origins--
the poorest groups in the US--were less intelligent than "Nordic" white. IQ
scores were cited during Congressional debates leading to a passage of the
Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This act cut off immigration into the
US from anywhere but northern Europe until World War II.
    During the Great Depression, eugencists proposed that poor people
be sterilized to improve the national "genetic stock" and to contain the costs
of social programs. These plans were never adopted, but inmates of
psychiatric institutions were more vulnerable targets. Between 1927 and
1956, 58,000 inmates of psychiatric institutions were sterilized under
eugenics laws passed in twenty states. The majority of these inmates were
poor.
    After World War II, revelations of the crimes of Nazi science largely
discredited the eugenics movement. Eugenics, however, has continued to
play a role in  public policy, particularly in relation to reproductive choice,
health, education, and criminal justice. Largely in reaction to urban
uprisings, the 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in eugenics-based
research. In 1971, the NIMH and the Justice Department granted three
psychiatrists over $500,000 to conduct research on the "biological causes"
of violence and develop screening methods and possible "therapies." The
psychiatrists claimed that urban rioters suffered from "psychomotor
epilepsy" or "temporal lobe epiliepsy" and proposed psychosurgery--
lobotomy--as appropriate treatement, particularly for "leaders" of
insurrections.

Old and new "clinical treatments"
    Today, psychiatrists arguing that criminal and violent behavior have
biological causes no longer advocate psychosurgery as a "cure." Instead,
their research focuses on brain chemistry. Studies on serotonin, a
neurotransmitter that passes chemical messages between nerve cells in the
brain have become particularly popular.
    Though studies have linked low serotonin levels to violent behavior,
no connection has been conclusively proven. Nevertheless, the anti-
depressant Prozac has been approved by the FDA and several other
serotogenic drugs are awaiting approval. If NIMH plans related to the
violence initiative go through, a huge market for these drugs will open to
pharmaceutical companies.
    Attempts to link biology and genetics with "criminal" behavior
demonstrate how politics determine scientific research. Who is a criminal?
What is violence? Systematic racism, sexism and economic exploitation
underlie these definitions. The "justice" system, for instance, general turns a
blind eye to crimes committed by people with power and money. As Ginger
Ross-Breggin of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry asks: "In whom are
we looking for violent genes? In Los Angeles police? In the people involved
in the S&L scandal? In the people involved in Irangate?"
    In 1973, the Kerner Commission concluded that the cause of the
urban rebellion of the 1960s was white racism. NIMH studies conducted in
conjunction with the Kerner Commission found no evidence that
participants in the rebellion were more "pathological" than non-participants.
The NIMH Psychosurgery Review Committee concluded that
psychosurgery was an experimental treatment and recommended that it not
be used on "involuntarily confined persons or persons incapable of giving
consent, either by reason of age or mental condition."
    These recommendations were reinforced by a 1973 legal decision,
Kaimowitz v. Department of Mental Health. The three judge panel in this
case observed that the US Constitution protects freedom of speech, that
freedom of speech depends on freedom of thought and that lobotomies
interfere with thinking. The panel concluded that psychosurgery could not
be performed legally on people who were confined or otherwise incapable
of giving consent.

Stopping the violence
    Will these prohibitions against psychiatric abuse be upheld in the
1990s? Will public health agencies redirect their research, and stop ignoring
and rationalizing twelve years of massive cuts to social programs? After
Goodwin's initial "monkeys and jungles" speech brought the violence
initiative to public attention, people have taken action both inside and
outside the government.
    John Conyers (D-MI) of the Congressional Black Caucus has
directed his Committee on Government Operations to investigate violence
initiative research being conducted by the NIH, NIMH and Centers for
Disease Control. The CDC, for example, is studying the "epidemiology" of
the riots in Los Angeles. One of Conyers aides, however, told Education
for the People that the Committee was finding it "extremely difficult" to get
information about the initiative from the CDC and the NIMH.
    The Stop the Violence Initiative is urging people, especially those
involved in the field of psychology, to write Secretary Sullivan asking that
Goodwin be fired and that the NIMH change its longterm research
orientation. Rather than focusing on brain chemistry and genetics, the
NIMH should adopt a more integrated approach to mental health that takes
into account the psychological effects of economic, racist and sexist
exploitation.
    Goodwin et al. are promoting their work as cheaper, more effective
and more humane than policing and incarceration. Certainly we must
address drug abuse, violence and crime everywhere in our society. But
labelling kids as potential criminals and putting them on heavy prescriptive
drugs is hardly humane. Only concerted efforts to overcome systemic
poverty and racism will quell the justifiable anger and frustration in inner
cities.
    Nazi Germany provides an example of what can happen when
public health agencies attempt to "scientifically" scapegoat racial groups--in
this case Black and Latino youth. Violence intitiative research is
scientifically flawed, racist to the core and must be stopped.

[For a list of footnotes and sources used for this article, contact Education
for the People. Robin Templeton contributed to this report.]

Education for the People is a national progressive student paper and
networking organization on educational issues. Their address is: Education
for the People, 1806 T St. NW, Washington, DC 2000; [phone].

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