Systems Theory According to Two

Systems Theory

According to two Washington Post articles, a 14-year-old Southeast Washington D.C. boy has been charged with felony murder and sexual assault of his 4-year-old sister who died from multiple blunt trauma. The boy lived with his grandparents, his 8-year-old brother and two younger sisters, ages 4 and 5. His grandmother had left the children unattended when the incident occurred between 9:30 and 10:30 in the evening because she had to pick up her husband from work. The boys had lived with their grandmother since they were infants, but the girls had just moved in a few weeks before the incident because their mother had recently been put in jail for assault.

Systems Theory is very helpful for understanding the behavior of this 14-year-old boy. In the family, the vertical or hierarchical subsystem is that of the parents; siblings represent the horizontal subsystem for the children. Also, according to Systems Theory, "The family is a bounded system in interaction with its environment. Within the family boundary are its members and their roles, norms, values, traditions, and goals, plus other elements that distinguish one family from another and the social environment (Longres, 1990, p. 274). Within a normal family boundary, a child learns appropriate rules or input about who does what with whom. And, an open system with flexible boundaries is supposed to facilitate the throughput that will allow the child to process the output in a useful way. When all goes as expected the output should be some degree of appropriate conduct. And, an open system is in constant interaction with the child's environment, providing feedback to allow the child to make adjustments in behavior as required.

The 14-year-old boy's hierarchical or vertical subsystem was primary his grandparents, not his parents because he had not lived with them. His horizontal subsystem consisted of his 8-year-old brother and largely excluded his younger sisters who he did not live with. Therefore, the sisters were never really a part of the boy's family boundary and he did not receive normal input about how to engage with them because the sisters had been at his home for such a short period of time. The 14-year-old was a participant in a closed system, at least with regards to his younger siblings, because of their absence in his life and because he had not established any healthy family connections with his sisters. Further, the mother's conviction for assault indicates that any input he might have had was probably not conducive to establishing a normal sibling relationship. The output, sexual assault and murder of the younger sister, was so sudden and so tragic, that the boy will never have the chance to benefit from a feedback mechanism to guide his conduct to more acceptable behavior.

Systems Theory makes several assumptions that are useful for understanding the 14-year-old's behavior:

The state or condition of a system, at any one point in time, is a function of the interaction between it and the environment in which it operates." (Longres, 1999, p. 19)

Change and conflict are always evident in a system. Individuals both influence their environments and are influenced by them. Processes of mutual influence generate change and development." (Longres, 1990, p. 19)

Each person in a family is part of the whole system. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." (Longres, 1990, p. 266)

These assumptions make us understand that the responsibility for the acts of the 14-year-old rest not with the child himself, but with the relationships and interactions in his family. More than anything else, the real issue is a family boundary problem where the hierarchical subsystem had not had a chance to teach the boy appropriate responses to a new environment. Unfortunately, the hierarchical system was unavailable to monitor the behavior of the boy the night the boy murdered the sister.