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

Experiences that involve having harmed another person tend to compel individuals to consider their own behavior in light of their understandings of right and wrong, thereby serving as an important context and source of moral development. Although this process begins in early childhood, adolescents become quite preoccupied with the type of person they want to become and are thus likely to be most fully engaged in constructing a sense of themselves as moral agents. Research has demonstrated that most adolescents think it is wrong to hurt others (Turiel, 1998). Nevertheless, in the course of their normal interactions adolescents often act in ways that result in other people feeling hurt or mistreated and must negotiate the threat insinuated in their own harmful actions, namely, that they are the sort of person who sometimes causes harm to others. Hence, experiences in which they have hurt others, and the ways in which they make sense of these expe­ riences, are laden with implications for adolescents' views of themselves as moral beings (Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005; Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2(08). Whether this is also true for delinquent youth, many of whom chronically engage in extreme forms of violence against others, is less certain. Given their documented delays in moral development (e.g., Stams et aI., 2006; Tisak, Tisak, & Goldstein, 2(05) and deficits in empathy (e.g., Bush, Mullis, & MulIis, 2000; Robinson, Roberts, Strayer, & Koopman, 2(07), these youth may differ from more typically developing adoles­ cents in the extent to which they think of themselves as moral agents and in their motivation or capacity to consider their own harmful acts in moral terms. We take adolescents' narrative accounts of instances in which they have hurt others to be a window into this process. In telIing about any sorts of events, ado­ lescents (like most people) tend to talk not only about what actually happened, that is, about the concrete actions that took place in the physical world what Bruner (1986) referred to as the "landscape of action" but also about the var­ ied thoughts and feelings that they experienced and that they believe others to have experienced the "landscape of consciousness." Accordingly, their narrative