The Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation supports public discourse, projects, and research, through publications and a series of conferences on Boys at Risk to promote better understanding of the developmental needs of young males.

Boys at Risk

By a very significant margin, most violence is committed by males. Starting in preschool and in elementary school, boys in the United States are more likely to be disciplined and suspended for conduct problems. By adolescence, the juvenile arrest rate for boys for violent crime is four times greater than for girls. The statistics on imprisonment in state and federal penitentiaries for murder, rape, robbery, and assault show that the male incarcerated population is about 20 times that for females for these crimes.

Is there a relation between this disproportionate male involvement and the finding that boys, compared to girls, have higher risk for a wide variety of factors that produce mortality or morbidity early in life? In other words, does research show that an association exists between a male with antisocial behaviors such as violence later in life and the origins of developmental psychopathology and regulatory behavior problems early in life?

Are boys more vulnerable–more at risk–to the interplay between evolutionary processes and experiential influences on gene expression that begins prenatally and progresses during infancy and early childhood?

Our upcoming conference will examine these questions and many others concerning the Early Origins of Male Violence (Santa Fe, May 1-3, 2019) including how interventions might be improved.

Work of the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation

For more than a decade, the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation  has sought to fulfill its mission by publishing a newsletter about the situation of boys in Santa Fe, in New Mexico, and in the United States generally, by organizing conferences, and by supporting projects directed at helping boys at risk.

Through statistics and interviews, the newsletter substantiated that young males in Santa Fe and in New Mexico were subject to the same tendencies seen elsewhere showing boys’ declining educational performance and increasing vulnerabilities in the areas of mental health and juvenile justice. Published from 2003-2009, Santa Fe Boys is available in our archive.

The SFBEF has also organized and supported conferences featuring prominent educators, academics, and psychologists who have written and spoken in support of this effort on behalf of boys. Further, the SFBEF has helped fund innovative programs targeted to boys. These activities continue to be among the main efforts of the foundation.