In his book entitled "Visions of Social Control," criminologist Stanley Cohen tells the following story. Three men are standing beside a swiftly running river. Suddenly, they see a man being swept down the river drowning. One of the men on the shore jumps into the river and saves the drowning man. As this man is recovering, another drowning man comes down the river. A second man dives into the water and tries but fails to save the drowning man. Person after person comes down the surging river and the two men dive in repeatedly trying to save them, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not.

After a while the third man, who has been standing on the shore watching, starts to walk upriver. "Where are you going?" One of the other rescuers calls out. Help us."

"I'm am going to help you," the man replies. "By going to find out who's throwing these people in the river in the first place." .

Those of us who work in the Criminal Justice System and the related social services, try again and again to save people, to keep them from drowning, to rehabilitate them or to at least keep them from dragging other people under with them. We sometimes succeed, but most often we fail. Sometimes we go through periods in which we try to save people through various forms of therapy - individual, group, art, shock, or animal therapy to name but a few. At other times, we try to save people by meting out tough punishments such as long mandatory minimum sentences, hoping that such lengthy punishments will deter future criminal behavior. Sometimes, we just give up on the drowning and lock them out of sight, in prisons.

But, these are responses to a problem. The solution, as Cohen well illustrates in his hypothetical story, is upriver. Whether or not we save or lose an individual is not so important as finding out what is producing the particular behavior we are concerned about.

Sociologically oriented criminologists believe that society is like a factory, churning out people with certain attitudes and behaviors. Individual differences exist of course, as does free will, but these are strongly influenced by the culture in which the individual lives - by the way culture shapes personality, behavior and thought..

This story of Cohen's came to mind as I was reading another article about the killing of a child by a young man who was supposed to be caring for the infant. These types of killings are all too frequent.

When I go upriver on this one, looking for causes, one of the things I see is the way in which this society socializes males. Just think for a minute of the adjectives and phrases that most young men would like to have applied to them, i.e., how society defines the ideal man: strong, powerful, assertive, hard, forceful, tough, aggressive, bold, quick to react, quick to strike, invulnerable, cool, streetwise. Now, think of similar adjectives and phrases that this same young man would resent being applied to him, i.e. characteristics which he scorns: defenseless, vulnerable, dependent, needy, frail, powerless, delicate, unprotected, innocent, naive, gentle, sympathetic, long-suffering, sensitive.

Most of the men involved in these child abuse/homicide cases are much too young to have children in the first place. They are still going through adolescent development themselves, trying to establish a male identity in a culture which all too often celebrates the tough and the violent male over the tender and the loving one. Taking care of children and being a tough streetwise young mack, don't go together, at least not for most young men. These young men probably resent being in the position of having to take care of a child in the first place, and feel themselves degraded by an activity which most of them think of as "women's work." Many of them are still going through characteristic adolescent short temperedness, self absorption, self centeredness, and weak impulse control. They are not good candidates for child care.

Secondly, a good many of these cases involve young males killing children that are not theirs biologically. Society has a tendency to teach everyone, but especially men to think of sexual partners as possessions. How many times have you heard the expression: "My woman." "My girl." In a commodity oriented society like ours, where women's bodies are used to sell every product under the sun and where a beautiful woman is a status symbol for a man, relationships become commodities just like everything else and men are encouraged to think of women as their property, something they own and control. Ever heard a young man say: "If I can't have her, nobody will." This is a commodity statement, a statement of possession.

The young man, residing with or having a relationship with a woman who has had a child with another man is confronted daily with a poignant reminder that "his" woman has been sexually intimate another man. The woman has not always been "his" woman and the child is not "his" child.

As with all social problems, there are multiple causes and multiple alternative solutions. The answers are never easy, nor are they ever uni-dimensional. Child homicides by these young men are categorically different from the pedophile child murder. And, what may work with this problem will not necessarily work with another type of child abuse or homicide.

Encouraging young men and women not to have children at a young age is a good idea. And, parenting education may work with some of these young men, education about both how to care for a child and information about the dire consequences of seemingly innocent actions, like shaking a baby to get it to stop crying. But, we also need to talk about male socialization and how it predisposes many young men toward behaviors which could be harmful to children. Government sponsored free child care would also help.

If this society really cared about children, it would provide free, safe and supervised child care for every parent that needed it. This would not only reduce the stress and strain of constant child-care responsibility for mothers and fathers, it would also help ensure that working mothers are never confronted with the necessity of going to work and leaving a child with a potentially violent and abusive male. Funding for Children and Family Services investigators is crucial. But, these investigators can't be everywhere, and they can't go snooping into the private lives of all the people who come to their attention. There are privacy issues that these case workers are legally obliged to respect. When a child dies, we are quick to criticize them for not doing enough, but at other times, we despised and resent them for snooping into people's business (usually poor people's business) and treating people with different child rearing practices as if they were criminals.

When I worked for the Criminal Conspiracies Division of the Justice Department, I evaluated evaluations of other people's research. In a conversation with a high-level woman in charge of research for the Department, I commented that we needed more research in this or that area. "Research." She scoffed cynically. "We don't need more research, we just need to do something with it."