LA County can’t help girls if it doesn’t help boys too: Guest commentary

By Joseph Charney

POSTED: 01/13/17, 12:50 PM PST |

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has agreed to appoint a commission to recommend how county departments can better help girls and women to live safer, healthier lives, increase their opportunities and eliminate gender inequity.

To reach these goals, the plan should expand to also focus on disadvantaged men and boys.

The board must recognize that the success of men and intact families is an essential part of any agenda that purports to further the opportunities, safety and health of disadvantaged girls and women. Many of our stressed communities are fractured by too many fatherless homes, leaving too many boys without essential guidance and oversight. Without competent, caring males and intact families, women’s lives are often negatively impacted.

Males suffer serious and distinct disadvantages. They make up 87 percent of the jail population in L.A. County. Homicide is the leading cause of death here for men between the ages of 17 and 44. They suffer traffic fatalities at three times the rate, and addiction and suicide at twice the rate of women, and comprise two-thirds of L.A.’s homeless.

Boys are three times more likely to have reading and learning disabilities, and far more likely to suffer from autism and dyslexia, than girls. Men also graduate at far lower rates from high school, undergraduate and graduate institutions than women.

Concentrating on women’s disadvantages is too limiting for a county-wide strategy, and implies that women need increased county focus more than men do. This is a false premise.

Girls raised in stable homes that promote gender equality and achievement, with access to good schools and resources, are doing quite well and are on average outperforming their brothers. Focusing on gender alone blurs the county’s capacity to target and find resources for the groups experiencing disadvantage.

White women do as well as their male counterparts educationally, and are increasingly surpassing them. Asian and white women have twice the college degrees that African-American women and Latinas do. Infant mortality for African Americans is three times that of whites and Asians. The homicide victim rate of African-American males is five times that of white males. And while African-American males make up just 4 percent of our county’s population, they constitute 32 percent of our jail inmates.

Female disadvantage exists primarily in communities of color where male violence and destructive behaviors so often impact and undermine the progress and success of women. There is an epidemic of fatherless boys in our county, many of whom are destined to be imprisoned, unemployed, homeless and drug addicted. Too often they offer little in the way of support, emotionally or financially, to the women of their communities. Out-of-wedlock births often deprive both girls and boys of the advantage of competent male oversight and support as they mature.

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This present state of disadvantage isn’t fixed and inevitable. Many boys and men of color have seized success, notwithstanding circumstantial disadvantage. They have been empowered by family, institutions and their community’s resources. A description of this success is found in a recently published report from the UCLA Black Male Institute, “The Counter Narrative, Reframing Success of High-Achieving Black and Latino Males in Los Angeles County.”

Frederick Douglass wrote: “It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.” Every dollar expended by the county that furthers a boy’s respect for women, that teaches future orientation, deferred gratification and the rejection of theft and violence as acceptable behavior, is a dollar that not only benefits those boys acquiring the behaviors but the girls and women who suffer from their absence.

To include boys and men in a study would address existing successes, and incorporate recommendations that could lead to new strategies throughout the county’s operations and departments. The county now spends billions of dollars to manage the failure of thousands of disadvantaged boys and men. The Board of Supervisors should work to reduce these expenditures by directing resources that can provide for their success.

Its proposal to methodically study ways to ensure effective use of dollars and program implementation is a good idea. But limiting the search to “gender inequity” by focusing only on girls and women is an inadequate roadmap. The commission should also study ways that we can assist boys before they become broken men.

Joseph Charney, a resident of South Pasadena, is a retired prosecutor and served as a justice deputy to former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.