The Boston Marathon bombing. The Sandy Hook shooting. The “witch hunts” in Papua New Guinea. Gang rape in India, piracy in Somalia, rampant violence worldwide.

These tragedies are not as disparate as they seem. The crimes are different, but the perpetrators are the same–angry young men making a desperate grab for power and identity.

I write primarily about women’s issues, but oh–my heart breaks for young men, especially as my sons move into their teen years. I’ve grown so weary of seeing the pimpled skin, the uncertain eyes, the lanky, awkward limbs, and other features so familiar and dear to me splashed across news networks. Some primal maternal instinct in me wants to wail in agony, to put on sackcloth and ashes and sit on a hill like Rizpah, mourning the broken boys covered in blood. I can’t look at pictures of these boy-men and be angry, because somehow, I can’t look at them without seeing my own sons. I can only grieve, the tragedy of the original event redoubled by the youth of the perpetrators.

This is not a new problem. From bride-stealing to tribal skirmishes, robberies to revenge killings, it has always been the young wielding instruments of violence, fighting their father’s wars or creating their own. Some have even contended that the crusades were created primarily to get young troublemakers out of Europe, where they were terrorizing the villagers; that monks invented the code of chivalry to reign in roving bands of knights who were little more than medieval street gangs. No, though mass media has made the problem more apparent, the problem itself is nothing new.

Nor can it be blamed on the “feminization” of churches, schools, and society, a favorite scapegoat of some advocates for men. Societies where women have a strong guiding influence are far less prone to violence than societies in which women are marginalized, and besides, can it really be argued that those institutions are less boy-friendly than they were fifty years ago? Social change is always difficult to navigate, but setting the clock back for women won’t do anything to help our boys. It will just hurt everyone.

Usually, when a violent crime is committed, we look for the motivations: racism, religious radicalism, poverty, mental illness, bullying, entitlement, revenge, or just a whopping case of angst. We also tend to categorize violence; to separate rape from murder, shootings from bombings, warfare from genocide. And while those are important distinctions to consider, what if we stripped that all away for a moment, and looked at the people who are carrying out the violent actions? What if, instead of asking how we can fight terrorism, or gang violence, or sexual assault, we asked how we can best help young men between the ages of 16 and 24?

We just might start coming up with some better answers.