Can't find what you're looking for?


Discussion Threads

Transcripts of some of the discussions on CYC-Net's email discussion group

Social environment and behaviour?


Dear Colleagues

I intend to start a research project answering the following question: How does the social environment contribute towards the behaviour of boys between the ages of 13-17 years old. If you have any information or can provide me with direction where information can be obtained I would be very grateful.


Alfred Harris

I have seen so many boys between the age of 13-19 get involved in drugs or gangster activity

1. because they looking for belonging.
2. they are afraid of being a target to bullies and become a bully.
3. some children really have no self esteem and turn to drugs or adult influence.

This what I see daily.

Charmaine Stephens

This report comes from a 25 year longitudinal study into early intervention and prevention. It specifically looks at the trajectory for the age group you are researching!


Are you looking at the Social Determinants of Health? I would google that as a search term. Check out the role of poverty and the racialization of poverty and how the social emotional and economics lead to marginalization socially and shaming for individuals.

See The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett. Meta analysis of inequity cross nationally and its impacts. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better is a book by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, published in 2009 by Allen Lane. Wikipedia

Rick Kelly

Check out this author...Carl James!

Students “at Risk”
Stereotypes and the Schooling of Black Boys

Also Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity by Jamil Jivani.....just published last week:

About the Book
The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him.

Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.

Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.

Rick Kelly


P.O. Box 23199, Claremont 7735, Cape Town, South Africa  /  207 L'ile de Belair, Rosemere, Quebec, J7A 1A8, Canada

Board of Governors  •  Constitution  •  Funding  •  Site content and usage •  Advertising on CYC-Net  •  Privacy Policy   •   Contact us

iOS App Android App