One night in 1924 two well-heeled college boys in Chicago kidnapped and later murdered a 14-year-old called Robert Franks. The two teenagers held for the crime were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the son of a department store magnate.
Interviewed by the police, Leopold said: "We had all the money we needed, but we thought it would be a good adventure to kidnap some youngster and try to get the money for it to show that we were better than the kidnappers we had read about."
Seventy-five years later, two American boys of similar age to Leopold and Loeb walked into their high school in Colorado, both wearing black trench coats and carrying a variety of weapons. An hour later, after a terrifying orgy of shooting, shouting and hysteria, 12 of their fellow students and one teacher lay dead, as did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, by their own hands.
Where were their simple human feelings, on those two occasions, three-quarters of a century apart? To put it another way, what makes young men kill like that? Why did blond baby Jamie Bulger die so horribly? Why do young soldiers, improperly supervised or with the Geneva convention totally ignored by their commanders, commit such appalling atrocities in war, when adrenalin is pumping and the restraints of society are thrown off?
Or to take it to a more mundane level, why do boys get into so much more trouble than girls? In the US, around 95 per cent of juvenile homicides are committed by boys. They are also the perpetrators of four out of every five crimes heard by juvenile courts. In Dublin's Mountjoy prison in 1993, one-third of the male prisoners were under 21. Research in Britain indicates that the "peak" age for male offenders is 17, at which point they also commit a greater number of crimes than any other age group. Paul O'Mahony's study of Mountjoy indicated that the number of young offenders in Irish prisons was more than twice the figure for England and Wales.
The flipside of boys' bad behaviour is their misery, shown so shockingly in the statistics for young male suicides in all the affluent western countries. In the US, a 15-year-old boy is seven times as likely to commit suicide as a girl of that age. The phenomenon of the disaffected male is growing to epidemic proportions, and although it would be wrong to demonise women and reduce any of the desperately needed social reforms to save them from violence and marginalisation, it is becoming clearer and clearer that men need help too. They have to cope with a changing world, in which a job for life (largely a product of the 20th century in terms of financial security) does not exist, in which their traditional hunter-gatherer role is undermined, and the violence to which they resorted recreationally (headlight-hunting, cockfighting) is challenged.
It's the news, also enunciated by Daniel Goleman in his best-selling Emotional Intelligence, that parents don't really want to hear. How you treat your child dictates how he treats his society. So if he is violent, uncaring, problematic, it is not just "because he's a boy". It is because he has been treated as if he is bound to be violent, uncaring and problematic, as that is a major traditional stereotype of young male behaviour, which sustains societies across the globe.
The argument put forward by US psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson owes a lot to the Golden Rule: boys will do unto others as others have done unto them. The two, both child psychologists, reject any notions of innate badness and plump for the nurture alternative.
My son is eight, and I am thrilled that he continues to show me lots of tactile love, plenty of hugs and kisses, for I know well that boy children can get embarrassed about affection from the time they start school and reject "mushy stuff". Yet many men grow up desperate for hugs, even if they turn to board when one is given. They just don't know how to react and are overwhelmed by embarrassment, while their starved hearts cry out for the simple comfort of a human embrace. We are all to blame for that.
A man who shows his emotions does not have to be exclusive of a man who is brave, decisive, tough-minded, all the qualities we value as "manly". Bob Hawke, the former Australian prime minister who was a Rhodes scholar and a top trade union official before leading the nation, got away with crying in public on two occasions: once when his daughter's drug problem was publicised, and secondly (more acceptably) when Australia won the Americas Cup yacht race in 1983. But even that was pushing the envelope; Australian men did not start hugging and weeping en masse.
"Boys suffer deeply as a result of the destructive emotional training our culture imposes upon them," Kindlon and Thompson write. As a result, "many of them are in crisis and all of them need help". They point out that girls get lots of encouragement to be "emotionally literate", whereas boys are likely to receive the exact opposite, with "don't be a sissy", "cry-baby", and "act like a man" exhortations forcing them to fit into the role which their parents or teachers feel comfortable with, even if not condoning its implications.
This is because one thing people rely on is simplification. We are all different, yet we are all the same. It is much easier for ruleformulators, teachers, doctors - and parents - to take refuge in "you're all the same" than in "what is your particular problem?"
"It's the testosterone," people shrug, in amusement or in sorrow, as eight-year-old boys run riot at a birthday party, or young loyalist extremists in the North light petrolbombs from bonfires and throw them at families. That myth is exploded in Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, the Kindlon/Thompson book. One of the other disturbing truths about socialisation of boys made in this valuable book is the "culture of cruelty" in which boys grow up, often the result of harsh peer group pressures. Describing the many levels of bullying, both physical and psychological, which children endure, the authors say: "The power of this cruelty is so strong, and it is such a pervasive part of the masculine identity, that boys take it for granted, and men remain silent about it.
One of the characters of the brilliant British comedian Steve Coogan is Gareth Cheeseman, an abominable computer salesman whose outsize ego has nothing to do with his minimal good qualities. In one scene, as a callgirl readies herself for him in the bathroom, Gareth sits on a bed and says, "I'm not one of those men who keep on talking to a lady like yourself, going on about their father . . . in fact I never did get on with my father." Then he goes into a glazed-eye re-enactment: "Daddy don't lock me in the garage, I want to watch The Man from UNCLE" and so on. It's amusing, but like a lot of good comedy, hairbreadth close to pathos, and the reality that unresolved conflict with a father is the cause of much misery in men's lives.
Kindlon and Thompson devote chapters to boys' relationships with both parents. They write: "The emotional bond a man has with his mother is the most deeply rooted connection in his life." Yet, they also tell us, when a grown man cries in therapy, it is almost always about his father.
The psychologists' findings, if boiled down, are that the competition which inevitably develops between an ageing father and a growing son is the core problem in that relationship, while with mothers the issue, predictably, it is that the woman must accept her son's need to prove himself as an individual in the mode the society, and the microclimate of his peers, has dictated for him.
The authors make the point continually, in either direct or indirect ways, that what boys - what children - need is unconditional love. This doesn't have to mean condoning bad behaviour. But it does have to mean providing the emotional security that a young person needs to grow and flourish. Also, it has to mean that we, the parents, have to take some distance and behave in the way adults should: with maturity and restraint.
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, is published by Michael Joseph this Thursday. £9.99 in UK.