How Violent Youth Offenders and Typically Developing Adolescents Construct Moral Agency in Narratives About Doing Harm

‘And So They Ordered Me to Kill a Person’: Conceptualizing the Impacts of Child Soldiering on the Development of Moral Agency

“…Next, I discuss the limitations of two conceptual models typically used for thinking about how perpetrating violence may impact future development -one relying on the construct of moral disengagement and the other on the clinical notion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Finally, I articulate an alternative perspective grounded on the normative developmental process whereby children grapple with their experiences of wrongdoing [Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a;Wainryb et al, 2005;Wainryb, Komolova, & Brehl, 2011;Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2010;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010]. This latter framework, which marries moral development theory [e.g., Turiel, 1998Turiel, , 2006Wainryb, 2006;Wainryb & Brehl, 2006] with the narrative construction of experience [e.g., McAdams, 1993McAdams, , 2006Pals, 2006;Pasupathi, 2001], makes it possible to investigate the multiple forms that youths' grapplings might take in the aftermath of perpetration of severe violence and suggests a number of potential directions for future research, while also serving as a springboard for scaffolding further development.…”

Developing Moral Agency through Narrative

“…Narratives that include references to beliefs and goals that formed the foundation of people's behavior can restore the sense of being a good, though imperfect, person and promote the sense of being an agent that makes choices. On the other hand, narratives in which the act of choosing is diminished, a story where circumstances dictated one's actions without reference to internal decision processes, however implicit such thinking may have been at the time [Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2009], may diminish moral agency while protecting the self. Further, narratives that minimize the consequences to the victim of one's wrong doing are also likely to diminish moral agency rather than promote it -and these kinds of narratives recall the earlier issue of negotiating between internal (actor-driven) and external ways of defining acts as morally relevant [e.g., Baumeister et al, 1990].…”

“…Further, cultural contexts in which group conflicts are highly salient, or contexts that offer everyday experiences that are at odds with more general moral principles [e.g., Daiute, 2009;Posada & Wainryb, 2008;Wainryb et al, 2009;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2008; in press], may be the most important places within which to examine cultural variations in the development of moral agency. Notably, those contexts may be found in comparisons between cultures but are also strongly evident in comparisons within cultures of groups whose experience of the justice system, for example, varies within the broader context [e.g., Flanagan, Cumsille, Gill, & Gallay, in press;Huo, Smith, Tyler, & Lind, 1996].…”

Youths Making Sense of Political Conflict: Considering Protective and Maladaptive Possibilities

“…She suggests that this denial may be linked to the particular difficulties faced by Bosnian youths. Furthermore, in our own data we have observed that when youths do furnish narrative accounts of their own conflict experiences, adolescents' exposure to and especially perpetration of violence appear to be linked to their constructing a uniquely impoverished sense of their own agency and of other people's agency, perhaps as a way to cope with particularly devastating experiences [Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2010;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2008. This work is consistent with Daiute's proposal that 'researchers and practitioners should consider assumptions in the silences between words in oral language and between the lines in written language ' (p. 47).…”