2019 Boys at Risk Conference

Early Origins of Male Violence

A Bio-Psycho-Social & infant Mental Health Approach to a Major Social Issue

When: May 1-3, 2019
Where: Santa Fe, NM

By a very significant margin, most violent crime 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. Adult males account for nine in ten arrests and imprisonments for the most serious violence crimes—murder, rape, and robbery. This conference, and the Infant Mental Health Journal special issue to be published in January 2019, are the second in the Boys at Risk series of conferences and publications on this general subject area of the early-in-life origins of problematic mental health and educational outcomes increasingly observed in males.

In taking a bio-psycho-social and infant mental health orientation to boys at risk from conception to toddlerhood, this conference expands the usual scope of origins of violent criminality. In addition to acknowledging the social conditions that boys may be raised in as causal factors, the plenary presenters will discuss the broader biological and psychological contemporary developmental context that males may experience, through a program that ranges from intermediate to advanced. Some of the key learning objectives of the conference are:

To describe the difference regarding the neurobiological make up of boys that may create a greater predisposition for violence and to identify the social conditions under which this may occur.
To describe how the exposure to the social environment that some small boys are raised in interacts with this neurobiological predisposition to make it more or less likely that violent behavior will result.
To discuss how the socio-economic macro-environment may color both the neurobiology and immediate caregiving environment in ways that may lead to violence.
To identify whether there is a relation between the disproportionate male involvement in violence 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.
To discuss whether boys are 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.