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Voices From The Hellmouth Revisited: Part Seven
Why Kids Kill Nightmarish high school massacres like the one in Littleton are now an almost ritualistic part of American life. Increasingly, when they occur, journalists and educators blame new media like the Internet, computer games like Doom or violent movies. Why kids kill in this manner is an urgent and complicated question. But teenage crime isn't rising, it's falling. And there's no evidence that the Net or other new media are the reason for massacres.
The images are familiar, yet surreal: Media reports of books about "Doom," animated clips from the computer game, TV shots of Websites with ugly images, ominous reports of heavy metal bands and film clips of "Natural Born Killers."
"What is known," said one CNN correspondent about Columbine "is that the members of the Trench coat Mafia spent a lot of time playing computer games on the Internet." They had become obsessed with online killing, reported another TV reporter. They had delved into militia and hate-group Websites, some newspapers said.
The fallout was, as always, nearly instantaneous.
In Vancouver, Washington, high school students were pulled aside as they came through the front door and told they weren't allowed to wear trench coats. In a Philadelphia suburb, kids who play Doom are offered counseling. In Maine, 14 year-old e-mailed me that his parents made him open his private computer files so they could look and make sure he wasn't doing anything "antisocial."
By now, this schoolyard nightmare is as ritualistic as it is horrific. We see televised scenes of kids running and sobbing, of SWAT teams creeping through schools and bloodied bodies being carted out - followed by dark reports about hate on the Net, violence on TV and in movies. Everyone seems bewildered, uncomprehending.
Almost always, we are as confused as we are horrified, since young killers take their own lives or offer no coherent explanation, leaving us only with questions but not answers. Since there are rarely trials, there is rarely any resolution, any understanding.
In June 1998, writing for Hotwired, I wrote a column called "Why Kids Kill" after Kipland Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, killed four people, including his parents, and wounded 22 more.
Not much has changed a year later, especially when it comes to knee-jerk, ignorant stereotypes put forth the media and evaluating from educators about kids, the Net, geeks and the violence allegedly inspired by the digital screen culture.
Federal agencies and academics studying this kind of episodic, uniquely American massacre find little, if any, connection between murders and media, digital or otherwise.
Kids being warned and counseled by fearful administrators and teachers ought to know that overall, teenage violence is way down in America, at its lowest levels since the Depression. In supposedly media-saturated, violent urban areas like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, schoolyard massacres are unknown. Nor has one ever occurred in Canada, even though Canadian teens watch almost the same media as American kids, and use the Net in even greater numbers.
What do we know about these horrible eruptions? Almost all of the killers have been white, teenaged males who are emotionally disturbed. Almost all lived in suburban or rural areas, the children of working or middle-class families. They've been generally described as well parented. And in almost every single case, nobody really knows why they did what they did. They suffered various forms of social cruelty and exclusion, as so many of their peers also have, and they got their hands on especially lethal weaponry, particularly guns. Almost always, their friends and classmates and teachers are stunned and disbelieving. Some of the shooters have been avid media computer users. Others have not.
According to federal statistics, no school shootings occurred in 1994; in 1997, there were four incidents. In 1998, apart from the Springfield killings, an 11-year-old boy and his 13-year-old friend were charged with killing four students and a teacher and wounding 10 others in Jonesboro, Arkansas. A high school senior shot and killed a student in a parking lot in Fayetteville, Tennessee. In Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old boy was accused of killing a teacher and wounding two students and another teacher at an eighth grade graduation. Two days later, a 15-year-old girl was shot in the leg in a suburban Houston high school classroom. In Washington, a 15-year-old boy got off his school bus carrying a gun, then went home and shot himself in the head. Now there is Littleton, Colorado, 1999's first school massacre, with at least fifteen dead.
Although experts, therapists and sociologists have crammed TV talk shows to offer various theories about the contagion of teenage violence, it is clear that no one yet understands why these incidents occur. Sociologists like Elaine Showalter of Princeton have written about media hysterias, contagions transmitted by the speed and power of media imagery in stories about killing themselves. Some psychologists believe that when disturbed kids see the massive amount of media attention these shootings get, they begin fantasizing about this kind of attention being focused on their own, often unhappy, lives.
Other experts blame the availability of guns. Obviously, the ready availability of lethal weapons is significant in this kind of violence, but crime among teenagers has been plummeting for years now, even as the number of guns in the United States has risen.
And persistent efforts by journalists to link the massacres to hate-sites on the Net or to games like "Doom" and, before that, to "Dungeons & Dragons" don't hold up either. There are no consistent patterns of media behavior to link these killers, no single trait of movie-going, gaming or Net use. Tens of millions of kids all over the world play computer games. The biggest users of new media recreational technologies are middle-class kids, since they have the money to afford the technology. Yet violence among this group, never very high, again has been plummeting even as online use has mushroomed.
Yet despite the confusion about the cause of these killings, all across America, newspapers and TV stations are warning parents about computer games, suggesting that their sons and daughters might be secretly turning into potential mass murderers online.
This is willful ignorance. There's no mystery about the greatest dangers to children. Every day, writes Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital, three children in the United States are murdered or die as a result of injuries inflicted by their parents or caretakers. Of the annual three million reported cases, Missing and Exploited Children reports only a handful child abuse cases related to the Internet. Of the 23 cases tracked from March 1996 to March 1997, 10 involved the transfer of pornography, an adult soliciting sexual favors from minors, or sexual contact initiated over the Net. Of the remaining 13 cases, two involved police officers posing as children, and in two others the girls had previous histories as runaways. Nine other cases involved children over age 16 running away from home, allegedly to meet online acquaintances. While these statistics indicate, Tapscott says, is that "children are 300,000 times more likely to be abused by their own relatives than by someone they have met over the Internet."
As horrific as massacres like Littleton are, they are also extraordinarily rare. Statistically, children are more likely to have an airplane fall out of the sky and kill them than they are to be shot in school, despite the staggering amount of media coverage.
Sissella Bok of Harvard, whose book Mayhem examined the effects of violence in media, writes that young people's lives are saturated with graphic violence in a way that's different and more dangerous than in previous generations.
"We have movie role models showing violence as fun, and video games where you kill, and get rewarded for killing, for hours and hours." She wrote. "It is a very combustible mix, enraged young people with access to semiautomatic weapons, exposed to violence as entertainment, violence shown as exciting and thrilling."
There's no question that violent imagery is ubiquitous in screen culture, from gaming to TV. But these comparisons seem facile and unknowing. Gaming is intensely creative, in some contexts - Quake 3, Unreal, Ultima almost approach a new art form. The animation is rich and multidimensional, and violence is stylized, often presented more as a strategic challenge like chess than anything truly brutal or graphically violent. If the stylization of violence is a problem, it doesn't show up anywhere in crime or violence statistics involving computer users.
If Bok is right, it would. Why would there be a decline in youth violence even as "violent imagery" in the media has indeed increased, $with Web use, cable's share of audience, rap and hip-hop (also supposed to be inciting the young to violence), and movie attendance?
More relevant questions might be: Why are so many of these killers male and members of the middle-class, rather than being poor or from$underclass? Why do these assaults occur almost exclusively in rural or suburban areas? Why are these kids able to hide even severe em$disturbance from the people closest to them?
Perhaps the most shocking thing about massacres such as Littleton is that for all the massive amounts of coverage brought to bear on th$really isn't anything approaching a consensus about why they occur. Since educators and authorities don't know what to do, what they te$is dumb.
And since the kids they're supposed to be protecting know quite well that wearing trench coats, going online or watching movies isn't dangerous in and of itself, mostly what educators and journalists end up demonstrating to kids is that they're clueless.
Note: Below are some of the comments and emails that Jon's column inspired.
"I guess when you look at yourself in the mirror, you see who you are inside. All of the depth and mystery that makes you you. You are the only person who knows what you think and what you are capable of doing with your life. When someone looks at who you are on the surface and judges you, you become defensive and sullen, withdrawing into the shell of your mind. As more and more of you're liberties and personal freedoms are attacked, you withdraw more, and turn instead into a primal animal concerned only with personal survival. After a time, the constant attacks become routine. Only when they go above a point, and reach a line only you know the location of, you snap and lash out. Then, as you employ your last line of defense you are the one who receives blame...when you are protecting yourself... Why are we forced to return to the behaviors of animals? Why does one person think that his/her moral beliefs are better than you? Every person deserves equal respect until they cross the line, choosing to think that they are better than another person. The ones in this world who deserve punishment are the people choosing to place themselves above another. We are all the same flesh. The only difference between you and I is the content of our minds. Yours may have more, but it is in no way superior. People choose to be different than you. Accept it, and accept them for who they are...the world will be a better place. Treat offense with great happiness, it could be a sign of fear of who you are. If who you are is someone who must be feared, you've done something right." ---S.R. (Original Comment #1)
"While I think what happened in Colorado is tragic, please, enough already. We can talk till we're blue in the face as to "why" they did it, and "why" people tend to pick on those that are "different", but in the end it doesn't do much good. Why? Because this is the way it has been for many years before anyone reading this was born. People do stupid things, for stupid reasons. That's life. I'm not trying to glorify what happened, or make excuses, I wish things had turned out differently, but we live in a world where people have wants and needs, and we also live in a world that has certain "rules". Those people, and those rules will clash, and there's nothing any of us can do about it, because it's human nature. Look to our past if you want to see a glimpse of the future. We come from ancestors that had slaves, burned people at the stake, raped and pillaged and caused genocide. Like anyone I wish this wasn't the case. I wish that we had come from a happier past, but when I look at what happened in Colorado, I think to myself THIS IS NOTHING NEW! This is something that has been talked about since Biblical times, and sadly hasn't changed a whole lot since. In the end, I think it's a great burden to want to take on the task of solving centuries of problems with humanity in one fell swoop. I've taken a different approach. I do my part to make the world around me a better place. However, the world isn't just about me, it's also about other people and how they react to me. People tend to be real big on individuality and while I think that's important, there's a difference between being an individual and being self-centered, and I think a lot of people don't understand the difference of those, nor the consequences." ---V. (Original Comment #2)
"As with every democracy (even the representative democracies) the US has a problem on its recently re-bloodied hands: how do you serve the minority when the majority rules? The short answer is: usually, you don't. In high schools across the country, students are ritually ostracized, ignored and avoided by their peers, supposed mentors and potential friends, because they dress differently, they listen to different music or they have the wrong color skin. This is not news. The Slashdot community (can I call us that?) is in a bit of an uproar, because "Hey, those guys over there in Colorado, that's us...or could be if we lost it...not saying that we'd blow people up or anything, but Jesus, it's be nice to get some revenge on these jerks who've been mercilessly picking on me since they developed muscles and I learned to code." Not that Slashdotters would actually go out and do anything violent. We've got better things to do. Like watch Freshmeat update. Or day trade. But still, we can understand." "So teachers get worried. Because, after all, many of their middle school students are already more intelligent than they are. Not in all cases certainly, but after all, those who can, do, those who can't teach, right? Obviously over generalized, but you get the picture."
"When you have to send your eighth grade student over to local college to get math tutoring, you have to worry that maybe the kid, without guidance, will be a bit of a danger. Because it's not a far jump from learning math to learning physics to learning chemistry to making bombs. Especially with such easy access to violent images in the media, not to mention the sex and violence they learn in Sunday school from the bible. So teachers run scared of their students, who can, in many cases, out-think them, certainly outnumber them and with a bit of weaponry, could destroy them. Small wonder that they trample student's civil rights in the name of protecting themselves and other students. Small wonder that they pawn intelligent students off on psychiatrists, guidance counselors and the schools principal (Remember, the principal should be your pal...or treat him like a member of the family...and older brother...) when any student shows promise, or interest in something not specifically in the curriculum. A fascination with war could be interpreted in two ways: if the kid is a jock, he's a West Point cadet, if he's abnormally intelligent, he's Oppenheimer, pursuing a "sweet technology" at the Trinity site. How do you balance your fear of those who are more able than you with your duty to them as a teacher?"
"Here's a thought: punish students who pick on other students, instead of ordering the students who get picked on to go to counseling." "You want solutions: don't turn to parents, who have turned absentee-landlord. Maybe it's time to up teacher's salaries, so we can get teachers that are more able to cope with gifted and ostracized students. Perhaps looking to a President nicknamed "Bubba" is the wrong thing to do when dealing with the rights of the oppressed? Maybe it's time for corporations to send their techies out to do some one on one, or one on groups with gifted students? Show them that at the end of the tunnel is a paycheck, if not a light. Maybe it's time to stop hand wringing and ask misfits what it is exactly we'd like, why we hate four years of life and how we could make it better. Because you certainly won't see teachers reproaching the football team for locking the chess club in lockers and setting fire to the swim team's clothing. But you will be sent home for wearing a trench coat. Because many of us can understand the hatred that wells up in the pit of the stomach when the opposite sex laughs at your advances, the media gives you no voice and your peers and mentors all view you as different, because you have been cursed with intelligence, or view the world slightly differently, or have acne, or god forbid, are of a race not the majority. Those of us who have made it through the gauntlet of high school, getting marginalized, ignored and offended, could take some of those marginalized kids, and help them." ---S.O. (Original Comment #3)
Heh! When I was at school (UK, 15 years ago!) I found out from my drama teacher that he had overheard the head master and the deputy head discussing whether I was on heroin or not! (At that point in my life I think I had maybe smoked dope twice but that was all).
:-)
Similar to your story, I was never really in any major trouble, but generally considered a bad influence and rebel by my teachers. At the same time, I was academically strong. They made me and a group of friends sign an agreement before our last two years (though we probably broke most of the conditions!).
Funnily enough, 15 years later I actually look back on school with quite good memories! I guess that all the bullshit that went down at the time was more stressful for me then than long term. Nowadays I tend to remember the fun side - getting away with bending the system
My advice is just enjoy school and don't let the bastards grind you down.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
Katz, what's the status with making a printed version and the prospect for getting it widely circulated?
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