Men commit almost all the violence against others on Earth.

Around 90% of convicted murderers are men. The great majority of those sexually assaulting children are men. Most rapists are men. The majority of domestic violence perpetrators are men. All despots and architects of genocide throughout history have been men. And in the killing fields of war, almost all soldiers are men.

This is an astonishing gender difference, and yet as a culture, we seem to have a certain blind spot about just how shockingly huge it is. Yes, we can read the statistics and talk about them, but our emotional response to the savagery of men is mostly muted when we should be treating this as a screaming planetary emergency. The trauma created by this violence is an incalculable harm that we are all living with every day, not just as the victims of violence but as the men themselves.

Even if we ourselves have not been obviously traumatized by male violence, we know many who have. It’s estimated that one in four girls is sexually molested, and one in six boys. One in 20 women is raped in adulthood. About 25% of returning soldiers have debilitating PTSD. And on it goes. Trauma is notoriously resistant to treatment, and often scars a person for an entire lifetime, resulting in them passing the trauma down to their children and grandchildren. We are a crippled species, crippled emotionally and in our functioning by violence and trauma, which are largely inflicted by men.

This is not to say that all men are violent, in fact far from it. I could not find reliable figures on percentages of men who commit violent crimes, but using my own life experience as a guide, of the many men I have known well, I have been treated with violence by only three, a father, a husband and a childhood sexual molester. And many men I have known have been gentle souls who are as equally repelled by violence as me.

But the fact remains that most violence is committed by men. Why, on average, are men so much more brutal than women? Why do they keep breaking our bodies, our hearts and our souls with their violence?

There are two schools of thought. One is nature – men have more testosterone and stronger bodies – and the other is nurture – it’s the way we bring up our boys.

Personally, I am not convinced by the nature theorists. Yes, men do have more testosterone than women, but there are and have been many peaceable cultures where it is highly unusual for a man to commit violence, even though presumably, the men in these cultures have the usual male share of testosterone. Two examples are the Cretan culture and the Hopi, and there are many others.

It seems that by far the strongest influences that create male violence are cultural. They seem to lie in the ways we treat our children, multiplied by our millennia-old cultural expectations of boys and men.

Those who inflict violence on others have more often than not had violence done to them. It is well known that trauma begets trauma, and that the majority of people in prisons have suffered some kind of childhood trauma. However, we would expect that childhood trauma such as poverty or absent, addicted or mentally ill parents would fall more or less equally on boys and girls. After that, some of the details are probably a little different – boys are often treated more roughly, but girls are more often victims of sexual violence – but these factors are probably more or less equal in their effects.

If traumatic circumstances visit boys and girls equally, then it must be the particular way that we raise our boys, along with our cultural expectations, that create an epidemic of violence among men.

What is it about the way we raise our boys and treat our men that traumatizes them and turns them towards violence so much more commonly than girls and women?

I don’t know the whole answer yet, but a number of studies show that, right from birth, we interact differently with girls and boys. Below are summaries of a handful of studies which looked for differences in parental interaction with young boys and young girls. They ALL show that we respond more to boy’s abilities, and less to their emotions, while the opposite is true for girls.

• Newborn girl babies are seen to be more sociable, boys as more physically capable, even though the brains of both are identical. By 4 months of age, there are already subtle behavior differences that align with the way the two genders are seen. Boys are more emotionally distant, less verbal and less social than girls.
• It’s been shown that the expectations of parents, especially fathers, for their sons, are more narrow and rigid. Parents are often more alarmed if their sons prefer toys and activities that are usually associated with girls, than if their daughters show such cross-gender preferences. A boy who is emotional and nurturing, who likes tutus and dolls creates more dissonance than a girl who is a tomboy and likes short hair and baseball.
• Mothers are less likely to use emotional words and emotional content when speaking with their 4-year-old sons than with their 4-year-old daughters. Fathers with toddler sons are less responsive to their sons’ needs and speak less openly about emotions than fathers with little girls.
• Fathers of little boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play and use more achievement related language, than fathers of little girls.

What these studies all have in common is that boys’ emotional life is not especially valued, which inevitably results in them shutting down that aspect of their humanity. They lose touch with their hearts, with their compassion, kindness and empathy. What is encouraged and supported is doing, action and capability.

We literally encourage them to be heartless action figures.

But the devaluing of emotions also creates trauma, especially attachment trauma. Secure attachment is most supported by a parent who is emotionally sensitive and responsive. Without that, attachment trauma is created. This results in children who are anxious, emotionally avoidant, depressed and angry, and who tend to project the depriving, unresponsive parent onto all other human beings, whether or not it’s deserved.

So now we have angry heartless action figures who don’t feel kindly towards other human beings.

When we add in the cultural expectations for men, these effects are vastly reinforced. We unthinkingly expect men to be the doers and the fixers. We expect them to be strong, to be able to take charge and to be in control, not just of themselves but of others. They are the ones we call up in times of war. We expect them to be willing to die for the defense of their country. We expect them to kill other human beings for the good of their nation.

They become angry heartless action figures who are trained to kill.

So there we have it. From suppressing the softer emotions of baby boys all the way through to expecting men to be able to heartlessly kill other humans, we turn our men towards violence. They may appear to be the perpetrators, but first and foremost they are the tragic victims of our blind and heartless cultural expectations of them.

An example of this victimization can be seen in the lack of care that they show towards themselves. They are notoriously resistant to seeking health care, and die by accident or suicide at much higher rates than women.

The violence of men is an ongoing planetary tragedy. It is all the more a tragedy when we see that there is very little that is inherent in men that turns them to violence. It is almost all in the ways we treat them.

How can we heal this tragedy? We drastically need to change our expectations of men. We need to start with our little boys and love them just as they are. We need to allow them all their emotions, especially the heart-felt emotions, and support them to be complete human beings, valued as much for their love as their strength. We need to bring them up as empathic beings who naturally sense the pain of others, and with that knowledge, can never cause them harm.

And this care for others needs to create a planetary shift where men refuse to go to war, where violence and killing others is not seen as a solution, where mediation is used to solve disputes, and where love, peace, respect and goodwill are guiding principles both socially and legally. Impossible as it may seem, this is the only cure.