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Why Kids Kill
from the hysteria-on-the-net dept.
The images were 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 a CNN correspondent Wednesday night, "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 papers said.
The fallout was, as always, nearly instantaneous.
In Vancouver, Washington, e-mailed Enzo Falzon, high school students were pulled aside as they came through the front door and told they weren't allowed to wear trenchcoats. In a Philadelphia suburb, e-mailed Tim, (who asked that his last name remain anonymous), kids who play Doom were offered counseling. In Maine, e-mailed Vektor, who's 14, his parents made him open his private computer files so they could look through and make sure he wasn't doing anything "anti-social."
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 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 with questions but not answers. Since there are rarely trials, there is rarely any resolution, any understanding.
In June of l988, 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 from the media and 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 of 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 LA, schoolyard massacres are unknown. Nor has one ever occurred in Canada, even though Canadian kids 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 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 and computer users. Others weren't.
According to federal statistics, no school shootings occurred in l994; in l997, there were four incidents. In l998, apart from the Springfield killings, an 11-year-old-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 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 the killings 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 of child abuse, 127,000 cases involve child abandonment. Each year, and throughout the 90's, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports only a handful of child abuse cases related to the Internet. Of the 23 cases tracked from March 1996, to March, l997, 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 others involved children over age 16 running away from home, allegedly to meet online acquaintances.
What 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." It is, she wrote, 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 approaching a new art form. The animation is rich and multi-dimensional, 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, along with Web use, cable's share of audience, rap and hip-hop (also supposed to be inducing the young to violence), and movie attendance?
More relevant questions might be: Why are so many of these killers male and middle-class, rather than the poor or the underclass? Why do these assaults occur almost exclusively in rural or suburban areas? Why are these kids able to hide even severe emotional disturbance from the people closest to them?
Perhaps the most shocking thing about massacres like Littleton is that, for all of the massive amounts of coverage brought to bear on them, there really isn't anything approaching a consensus about why they occur. Since educators and authorities don't know what to do, what they tend to do is dumb.
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.
Poor Parent Engagement (Score:3)
Teen violence is not caused by games or media or artwork or books. The root of Teen violence is a deep seated need to lash out to defend themselves against what they feel is a personal assault. These kids don't have the self esteem to accept themselves as they are. Instead, they lash out.
I've lived in the Atlanta area for the last 7 years, and year after year I see good middle and upper middle class kids getting hooked on drugs. Why? Their parents aren't engaged in their lives. They don't take the time to concern themselves with the need kids have to feel bonded to something permanent. They don't give kids the feelings of safety they crave so much.
The result, we are raising a generation of children who are trying to escape the "prison" they live in. They want to have fun, because mom and dad are boring. Well guess what Mom & Dad, get off your butts and take the kids camping. Spend time with them every day. Take an interest in what they do. Demand their time. They'll get used to it, they'll eventually appreciate the time they get from you. Above all, realize that if you kid delves into drugs or hangs with a bad element, it's YOUR responsibility to do something about it. It's YOUR FAULT if you don't and something untoward happens.
(This comment was written by a single parent of 5 years.)
It's so simple.. (Score:3)
Look at car accidents. If we banned cars, no-one would be killed in a car accident.
The reason that nobody suggests a ban on automobiles, is that they serve a useful purpose. Our society has come in many ways to depend on them, and though there is inherently some level of danger associated with them, society as a whole seems willing to accept that danger in return for the benefits we derive.
The situation with guns is very different. Society does not gain very much by having guns in all its citizen's hands. Guns are something that we could remove from the posession of private citizens without losing too much (yes, we lose some freedom.. but even preventing wanton murder is curtailing someone's freedom. It's not a black and white issue.. grow up.)
So the conclusion? Guns kill people. Cars kill people. Airplanes and lawnmowers and knives kill people. Guns we can do without. These other things we cannot without losing a lot. So get rid of guns..
"It's not my fault!" (Score:3)
"I just spilled hot coffee on my lap. But, wait, it's not my fault that I was driving around with hot coffee in my crotch and it spilled, it's the place who sold it to me, because they sold it hot."
"Well, yes, I went out and laid down in the middle of the street, and for some amazingly unbelievable reason, I didn't realise I was going to get run over by a car. It wasn't my fault, it was because I saw it in a movie."
"Yes, I went out and shot 10 people, but it wasn't my fault. It was because when I was 6 years old, my daddy looked at me wrong and made me feel uncomfortable. You might even say he sexually abused me. It's his fault."
"My kid committed suicide, and it's all the fault of that music. My kid was a happy, intelligent, nice boy, and would never do something like this on his own. It's all because of that music he was listening to. That rock music should all be banned."
"Yeah, I killed some people, but it's because of the TV, movies, and video games that I watch. Sure, 100 million Americans and millions more people around the world are able to watch these same TV shows, movies, and video games for hours and hours more than I have, and they are able to live in society without killing people just fine, but it's not my fault. It was the violent imagery I've been subjected to all my life."
It's kind of interesting, isn't it? A little bit of a central theme running through there? Instead of people just standing up and saying, "Okay, yes, I screwed up. I'm sorry." They all have to have an excuse, a reason, a childhood event, or an influence that somehow has managed to cause all of their problems, and drive them into doing what they do.
And along with this basic and simple societal defect, we have the media. The media who is always after the sensational story, and who greatly aids in people's desire to not take responsibility for their actions. Thanks to them, we have schools banning Doom, trench coats, and all kinds of other things.
This is just stupid. I've worn a large long black duster, very similar to a trench coat, for years now. Does this mean that all of a sudden I'm going to freak and kill a bunch of people? Hell no, it doesn't. You see, it's not the coat, the music, the movies, the TV, or anything else like that that causes these types of things. It's simply the people who do it that are the problem.
You see, a normal person can play doom, wear trench coats, watch violent TV and movies, and do.....nothing. Because they're normal well adjusted kids who realise that killing people is, um, wrong? The people who do this kind of thing are people with severe emotional and psychological problems. Otherwise, no matter what music, movies, games, or coats they enjoy, they would know better.
"Man's stupidity is eclipsed only by his ability to deny his own stupidity."
Passing the buck (Score:3)
I have read a lot of the comments here, and have to say that the biggest thing I see going is a synchronized "passing of the buck" to somebody else.. or at least, rejecting one particular factor.
The gun enthusiasts say that it wasnt guns which did this. "Guns dont kill people, people kill people," and other inane phrases can be heard. No, it wasnt the guns which "caused" this incident, but then, there was no one thing that "caused" this incident - it was an unfortunate situation caused by a number of circumstances. One of those circumstances was the easy availability of guns. It plays a role, and a significant role at that.. two kids are not going to be able to kill 15 people in a school with a butter knife - at least, it would be a lot harder.
The "internet pundits" ( who are usually the gun pundits also ), say that it wasnt the internet which did this. The Internet too was a factor. The availability of easy communications channels helped these kids. For me however, the internet is quite a different case from guns because the internet's sole purpose is not to kill - unlike guns.
The gaming enthusiasts say that it is not the horrific and completely ghastly needless violence and lack of imagination present in modern 3d shooters which caused this incident. The games too played a role. One can argue wether the kids were psychotic because they played doom, or played doom because they were psychotic, but I dont think the cause-effect distinction is very meaningful here. The point is, these games reinforce generally violent tendencies in children. Some times it spills over, most of the time it doesnt.
People also blame the parents - and it's true that the parents did have a lot to do with it. So did the community. These kids are smart. Reading their website, I find it witty, in a very rabid, violent and extreme manner. They knew what they were doing and they knew what it would accomplish. They didnt give a shit about the people they killed because they beleived that the community around them didnt really give a shit about them. They just didnt care. If they were in heaven (or hell) now, they'd be laughing at our wonderful psychoanalysis of them, saying to each other "we really showed those fucks, didnt we?"
Anyway - all the above-mentioned items went into this tragedy. If we take the advice of most of the posts here, we'd just leave all of them, and incinerate the parents for what their children did (that's the impression I get anyway). Something should be done for ALL the above-mentioned subjects.. The availability of guns should be dealt with, the prescense of web-sites should be noticed, the ubiquitousness of needlessly violent 3d-shooters should be curbed, parents should be made to care, and the community should be educated.
Dont pass the buck.
-Laxative
It's the thought that counts (Score:3)
What is significant, and contrary to Katz, is that the grandiosity of the crimes is on the upswing, as is the relative count of incidents of that scope. The number of kids going on a shooting rampage is at an all time high - even if gang warfare is in a recession.
The white-male-middle class is the fulcrum of society, we get no breaks, no quota, no glass ceiling to blame for our shortcomings. We are not discriminated against in ways the media is willing to make known. We are expected to be the hard working providers, to suck it up and deliver on the expectation of having had all the advantages while growing up.
This is where the problem lies. We are underprivileged and discriminated against as much as the next demographic, but we are branded as sissies if we voice that claim.
How many intelligent, non-sporting, geeks out there have had the proverbial sand kicked in their face? How many have gone on to become Charles Atlas? How many have gone on to become Charles Manson?
What the media is missing is not that these kids had a screw loose - it takes that to go berzerk. It isn't that they were desensitized to violence, I'll admit that I am... How many of you are dismayed that there is no UNDO button in your life? I am.
It is not NOT the fault of the parents, but a teen CAN hide things from a parent - even a pipe bomb and a gun. It's easy. If you can hide pot, you can hide ammo. This is not the issue. It isn't even the issue that parents are too busy to care - for the most part they're not, and it's more than a full time job to be completely aware.
Your kid needs some space from you - else you raise someone incapable of living their own life. Parental involvement, or lack thereof is not the issue either.
What is at issue is pure animal reactionism. Colorado was a suicide mission. So was the Kip incident. They just took their sources of pain with them when they died.
Consider: If you chain up a dog in your back yard, and beat it, and kick it, and underfeed it, and leave it in bad weather, and yell and alienate and hurt - will you dare wonder why it bites?
These kids were beaten and humiliated for at least their four years of highschool. They were abused by jocks, embarassed by the popular girls and looked down upon by the teachers that were there to help them into the 'real world'. Why was it a gym teacher that was killed? This was the only class they were failing, probably. It takes little thought to run laps, and you have to use the same locker room as the jocks that constantly give you wedgies. If you go to the teacher, you're labeled a panzie.
They grew up feeling like a minority, but seeing another minority get breaks and special treatment. There isn't a White History month, is there? There isn't a Geeky, Smart Male support group.
These kids saw the world as inherently unfair, hurtful and not worth living in. Their suicide was not an escape from responsibility or a resignation from the challenge of living - it was a singular assertion of control over their own destiny. They could not change the way the world treated them, so they took away the world's means to hurt them - they took their lives.
And, in the process of asserting their control over their lives, they chose to stick it to the world, just once. They got back at the people that had hurt them in a way that will forever be remembered. All the people that ignored them, saw through them and dismissed them as white thrash will remember them forever.
It's little wonder, from this perspective, to blame these kids for turing to neo-Nazism, racism and seclusion. These were the only niches of our demented culture that actually offered these misfits a sense of belonging to a community.
There's a whole treatise to be written on how a community of hate alters it's members mindset to serve it's own goals, but the point here is this: These kids were driven out of society proper by their inability to fit in. They were at the bottom of the pecking order, and they chose to separate themselves. They chose to associate themselves with a hateful mindset, and who can blame them? The mindset pushed their already well greased resentment buttons, and as life became more hopeless, they chose to go out in a blaze of glory - in their miswired frame of mind at least.
These kids were the children of our society, we let them down and they bit the hand that should have fed and nurtured them - but failed to do so.
Society is not the cause (Score:3)
I have to admit, I've been glued to the TV when the news of these killings came on. I knew the kids at my HS who wore trench coats and were on the rifle team. They were the science fiction club. I know it's probably a generalization or a stereotype, but every high school has those kids. Does that mean that they'll snap?
I've yet to see anyone to take on the bigger problems in this case. How easy was it for these kids to get automatic weapons? How could they build a massive arsenal of guns and bombs with no one (parents, friends, teachers) noticing? Why did their classmates insist on tormenting and teasing them?
Blaming "society" and our exposure to violence is too easy an answer, and not a good enough one. The U.S. never had this problem when we were involved in Vietnam, in Korea, or World War II.
Why (Score:4)
I was humiliated repeatedly by those that were athletic and popular. I am sure each school has different little indignities that are visited upon unpopular kids. In my school, they denied simple dignities to me such as a place to sit and eat my lunch. If I tried to sit down and eat at a table first I was ridiculed and if I did not get up then I was literally pushed onto the floor. It did not matter which table either as there was a shortage at our school. They also set up pranks with me as the butt and used me as a punch line for jokes. They often stole my homework to copy it so that they could get better grades. If I complained to authorities, I was told to work on my social skills and not to be a tattletale. I fought back however I could,which amused them greatly. They made fun of my complete impotence to affect them.
But I was female. Society punishes males more for being powerless, impotent. As a female, I was trained and pressured to be less out spoken, nicer--especially because I was not pretty. I was told time and again just to take it, not make waves. I was told that I could not afford those qualities because I was already not attractive and unpopular--being outspoken as well was just antagonizing people.
I don't think that we encourage young white males just to accept impotence. I think we instill in them the American feeling that "you too can be president" and "you can make a difference" and "you matter--speak and be heard." Must be quite a shock for these boys to find out in high school that they have suddenly been marginalized as well. It is quite the double bind for them.
I don't know what triggers the violence. I do know that when you place people in double bind situations you get irrational behavior.