Do you think anyone knows? Do you care? Is this a real epidemic, or is it created by the media? Does every generation have its violent kids or its kids who snap, or is something going on that deserves more look? Is it violent movies and video games? Absent parents? The internet? Space aliens? Give your views.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

Answers

When I was a kid, if two boys started a fight then a coach would grab them, spank them with a large wooden paddle, drag them to the gym, put on the gloves and tell them to settle it. This frequently had the effect of bonding the two boys into friends, or at least letting their steam out. The very best thing was that when the paddling and boxing were over the whole incident was forgotten.

Today when boys act like boys it results in a lot of hand-wringing, thearpy, and legal proceedings. Boys are bored by this and it has either no effect, or reenforces undesireable behavior.

Boys respond to leadership and disipline, two things sadly lacking in todays schools.

Jim Howard (father of an 11 year boy)

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

Erm, Beth? I'm not responding to the questions above, but to the comment you made in your weblog. It strikes me that the 'feminists complaining about it being a hate-crime' in regards to a school shooting a few years ago would most likely have been referring to the murder of several women (and only women) at an engineering polytechnique in Montreal. These women, and the man who shot them, were at least university age (I have this feeling he was in his late twenties), and he specifically spouted a lot of anti-female rhetoric during the shooting. Now, if it ISN'T that case, I agree that the people trying to pin it on misogyny went well overboard. But if it was... I can kind of see their point, no?

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

No, Marianne, that was a man, not a boy. I'm talking about one of the school shootings in the U.S. I was one of the first ones, where two very young boys (I think they were thirteen, or maybe thirteen and fifteen) shot and killed several students, all or mostly girls. Someone help me out here ... was this the Jonesboro case?

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

Yeah, Jonesboro. About an hour north of Memphis over in Arkansas. The boys were 13 and 11, and the victims were all girls and one teacher, also a female. It wasn't an anti-female thing, though - at least according to the boys. The evidence supports this. They said they were just going to shoot over the heads of anyone who came out, to "scare" them. The truth there is debatable, but the cops said they were shooting into groups of children and teachers. Females just happened to be the ones who got killed.

I'm from that part of Arkansas, and I can say without a doubt that if those boys do ever get out of jail (which is, supposedly, going to happen when they turn 18) they'll want to leave Arkansas as quick as they can. It is a vengeful, eye-for-an-eye type region where these two are already well-known.

Harold wonderland 2 http://home.midsouth.rr.com/wonderland2/

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

I think most of the problems with kids today have been problems with kids throughout the ages. Admittedly there seem to be more individual cases of major transgressions lately, but then again in the past if you didn't live within 20 or so miles of the event you wouldn't even know it happened. Plus it's hard to wig out a kill a bunch of people with a musket... all that packing is a bitch.

I also think that the double income household has done some serious damage to the family structure. Not that I'm suggesting that it can be any other way, hell if my wife and I had kids they'd be pretty much on their own too. That's one of the many reasons why we're not going to have kids.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

I don't think it's just the boys. In my opinion, which is, granted, reactionary and really not informed, people in general are becoming alienated from society. Young people are simply exhibiting the symptoms more strongly, just because young people feel EVERYTHING more strongly.

But no. This is a huge problem, an AIDS of the soul, the severest symptoms of which are working its way up from the disenfranchised -- black boys -- to permeate everything. Think about it. The woman in Alabama -- yuppie mom -- shooting another yuppie mom in a traffic altercation. This morning driving to work, I heard about two incidents in the last couple of days -- a probably-gay teen (male) beaten to death in the Toronto area by a bunch of - yes - boys, AND a fourteen-year-old girl, lured to a house by a bunch of other girls, and held captive for a day, tortured, beaten with bricks and burned with cigarettes.

It's true that there has been violence in every generation, but I do think the problem now is more severe. I think it comes from a society, an entire culture that is built not on relationships but on acquisition, and that has lost any sense of _common_ decency. I don't know that I agree with the old moral and religious codes that used to form the foundation of society -- in fact, I know I don't.

However, I also do not think that people who have been educated to the lowest common denominator, in institutions that are in large part aimed, not at developing the mind but at subduing the individual, who have been raised without stability and a kind of -hm- conviction, and whose role models are, mostly, a pack of actors, are equipped to "do their own thing" and make intelligent philosophical or moral choices. And yet, what else does Western, particularly North American society now expect?

Do I have any solution in mind? No. I don't know that there is one that would be practicable in the real world.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

>>Boys respond to leadership and disipline, two things sadly lacking in todays schools. <<

Kids do need leadership and discipline, but I think the main problems with this start at home, and that one can't blame teachers and principals when children are just plain brought up badly.

And I'm not just referring to the kids who "act out" by planning to bomb their school and kill as many of their classmates as they can before checking out. I'm also referring to kids who are on the other side of that, the ones in the "jock culture" who think harassing / hazing other people is acceptable behavior. Those kids are just as much in need of "leadership and discipline" of a different kind than what they're getting both at home and at school, if they think harassing people is A-OK.

As for kids getting into fights and acting out their anger, they always did, especially boys. The difference was, they would usually just have a fist fight, or in general the worst weapon they's be able to ge their hands on was a knife, whereas now they seem to have realtives arsenals and gun shows (and the disposable allowance money to go buy guns with?).

So anyway, they may have *wanted* to blow the whole school away, but they didn't have the means to do it, and maybe they had more "leadership and descipline" at home, and maybe the culture in general was less violent and more respectful of human life.

There are so many factors, but I do think if the access to weapons was not so pathetically easy, no matter how people *feel*, they wouldn't be able to do as much harm to others as they are now capable of doing so very very easily.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

I was very interested to read recently that the very first random all at once mass-murder was that guy in a university tower in texas a few decades ago. If that is true, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that all similar acts afterwards were inspired (directly or indirectly) by this original act. New ideas usually do not arise out of a vacuum, but are an expansion/rehash of previous/current ideas. kids are not geniuses that come up with ideas on their own, they come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our society. adults run the show on that one. and when something bad happens, mean adults grandstand and blow hot air about how good they are. many people are parents only because of societal/religious pressures, many adults think only of themselves and not of others. many adults do not understand the concept of compassion. many adults have screwed-up childhoods and pass it on. many adults are hypocrytes. many adults think they are better than everyone else. many adults are bullies. many adults are lazy many adults are not born very bright many adults do not reach their capacity for inteligence. Etc.

kids learn from the adults in society. This adult baggage stuff makes video-games look like what they are: games. The problem is with the adults.

these adults (society) exist in the nice little suburbs of columbine as well as in the inner city or rural u.s. it is not correct to label kids evil (though there are problem children), and they should not be thrown out with the trash. I am heartened by the recent phenomenon of relatives of victims forgiving perpetrators rather than seeking revenge.

just my thoughts

-- Anonymous, November 17, 1999

There's always been a fair number of very violent people (and teenaged males are, perhaps, more likely to either be the violent ones or be unable to control their violence, for any of a number of reasons). I do think the main difference now is the availability and type of weapons used. If all you can get is a knife, you aren't going to be able to kill too many people (at once) before somebody stops you. As for the larger number of school shootings recently, I think news coverage of the shootings may give people on the edge ideas, particularly when they are treated as a 'trend' (and they aren't anything new- anybody ever heard 'I don't like Mondays'? Even if that was about a girl.)

As for mass murder in general, I had a feeling it had been around before 1966 (the Texas guy). On May 18, 1927, a man blew up a school in Bath, Michigan, killing 45 people, 37 of them children. In 1955, a man gave his annoying mother a time bomb as a christmas present, that went off on her plane, killing 44 people. In 1866, a man lured all eight members of a family into the barn and axed them to death (not really random, but there's only so much randomness possible with an axe). (http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/murder1.html)

I think there may be some mass murderers now who would, in the past (or in an area without easy firearm access), have been serial killers or just gotten in one nasty fight. But if they have the means to kill everyone who bothers them, they just might try (a very big reason why most adolescents should not be allowed unsupervised access to firearms).

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

In October of 1998, CNN reported on a survey of 10th & 11th grade boys. 29% said they owned at least one gun (most for sport and hunting). 6% said they carried a gun outside the home. http://cnn.com/US/9810/14/boys.guns/index.html

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

I think there is an epidemic of violence among boys. Even though I'm not usually one to agree with my parents' generation, I think it probably has something to do with cable tv and video games. I think that the access to presentations of violence as glamorous has a real impact. I also think that children follow what they see, and violence on screen and in games provides a pedagogy that we didn't have 20 years ago.

I grew up in rural Maine, where everyone has a hunting rifle. My friends and I went into the woods and shot at little toy soldiers with .22 rifles. We hunted squirrels and rabbits, and some of my friends ate what we killed. But I can honestly say that it never crossed my mind to shoot a person with a gun. Even when we were having our most vivid fantasies about how to handle the school bullies, none of my friends ever suggested shooting one.

That might be because we never saw gun murder presented as an option. Maybe network TV had plenty of shoot 'em ups, but they were as removed from real violence as a Punch and Judy show. When cable came along, I was 14. I didn't have the toughness at that age to deal with "Body Double" and its ilk (actually, I think Body Double came out when I was 16). I had watched a protesting pig get butchered, and helped dress out a deer. But I found the realistic portrayal of a knife-wielding psycho stalking a human much more disturbing.

The video games of my era were violent the way network TV was. You blew away a lot of Space Invaders or Centipedes, but it had nothing to do with real killing. Now, kids can play a very realistic game where the player wields an automatic pistol instead of a joystick, and walks through a maze, shooting bad guys. The pictures of the victims (bad guys) are TV quality, on a 30" screen. I think it suggests something that Centipede simply couldn't -- I don't think it's silly to read the game as a message, "Kids, take up arms against your sea of troubles."

I'm sure there are other factors at work in the recent rash of school killings, but my high school had all the risk factors (poverty, drug use, neglectful parents). Without any template to follow, however, it would have required a lot of originality to plan a stalking and shooting -- maybe that was the real barrier. In the end, we probably never shot at each other mostly because it didn't really occur to any of us as a real possibility.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

Um, I don't know any girls who decided they'd become "women" just because they'd gotten their first period. I don't quite buy your logic there -- men are men when they grow up and do manly things that impress other men, but women are women when they can, technically speaking, make a baby? Ick.

And you know what makes me want to take up weapons and shoot up a school? The phrase "cheerleader-quality girl," used apparently without irony. Double ick.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

Its obviously a complex issue, and there are alot of contributing factors. I have a teen son. So far, he has been the easiest kid in the world to raise, but I am also constantly on vigil to make sure he is doing ok. One thing I think helps alot (and maybe I'm being simple-minded) is to get kids involved in activities before their hormones go into over-drive, and do whatever you can during the teen years to keep them active in structured stuff. Ben's been in Tae-kwon-do since third grade (incredible teachings on respect towards others), does band and Jazz music, basketball, confirmation...I also have an open door policy on friends...yes, I will provide pizza, chips, pop, homemade cookies. Yes, you can play loud obnoxious music, or shoot-em-up movies. I will tolerate the noise and mess, because at least I know where he and his buddies are, and that they're safe. I know this isn't the whole answer, but I do think it's a little bit of it. Boys need adults who love them to hang out with (or, near!) them. You know the huge response you got from people saying how important home is to them? Well, kids don't know yet how to create a sense of home by themselves...maybe these kids are homesick, and there isn't a place for them to find that.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

I have to disagree with Lohr on two points. First, I don't think all, or even most, boys are going around amassing social points on the way to manhood. I was pretty clear when I was in high school that manhood was a long ways off. That was because of the second point on which I disagree with Lohr: I was also pretty clear on what the rites of passage to manhood are.

Actually, they're the same rites that make girls women: graduations and military discharge, marriage and first serious job, having a child. Some of the signposts I didn't grow up expecting, but recognized when they went by: death of friends and family, aging of my uncles and aunts, mortgage, first time my son smiled at me.

I don't go around checking to see if I'm a Man, as opposed to a guy, but I don't feel like there's some magic barrier I can't cross because of some thing I failed to do. It may be that this indeed is the feeling that leads boys to violence, but I don't know where they would get a message that I never got about violence leading to adult respect.

Was I lucky? I knew violent men, and bullies. I didn't respect them. I thought the bullies were pitiful, even when I was running from them, maybe because it was a small town and I knew their parents. And the obviously violent men were not as impressive as the veterans that I knew, who were not proud of the human deaths they had caused.

Maybe I *was* lucky never to think that killing gave me any special claim to adulthood - good role models, starting to hunt while I was unambiguously a boy? - but it's still hard to picture that 20 or 25 years have changed the culture so much that suburban boys have developed some new need for violent scoring to feel like society will accept them as men.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 1999

yeah i have to agree with Beth about the "ick." and also, "trailer trash"? Who exactly is trailer trash? can you really be sure that nobody who grew up in a trailer park (if that's what you mean) reads this? that's a pretty bold phrase to throw out there unqualified. ick again.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

In the US, middle-aged people have higher rates of violent behavior than teenagers. Mike Males, a sociology professor at UC-Irvine, has written about this: these links to some op-ed pieces he wrote are, at least at this moment, still live:

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/archives/99/34news2-males.shtml http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/wsn3B88.html

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

The man in Bath, Michigan who shot up the school just happened to be a school board member, and had also planted an extensive network of explosives within the school. He had planned to level the building. Instead, he became the most sucessful school mass murderer in history.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

I am the mother of three ADHD boys. I see a problem with boys & girls. When my oldest (now 10) was in kindergarten & first grade, he would tell me about how some of (usually the cutest & most likely to be teachers pets) would taunt a retarded boy by asking if he wanted to have sex with them. Nothing was ever done about it by the administration. My 2d child (now 7) was chased & kissed against his will by girls in kindergarten. Nothing was ever said to them. He, however, would occasionally push them & lose part of his recess.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

I am the mother of three ADHD boys. I see a problem with boys & girls. The girls are terribly cruel, verbally, socially. We live in an area which prides itself on its education system. But many of the teachers are rude to the students, yelling at them & putting them down in front of the class. Our principal was borderline physically & verbally abusive to 2 of my sons. If the kids live with it at school, they learn it at school & they will probably act on it at school. We have complained, but nothing is accomplished. I thought about homeschooling, but that would mean a loss of needed income for us at this point.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

I'm shocked to find myself saying this, me who grew up in the 60s, but I think there's less respect for authority, and I think authorities have abdicated authority in a bad way.

When I was in grammar school, it would not have occurred to me to openly defy a teacher. If someone made a smart alec remark, the class held its breath in fear of the punishment to come. Even in high school we called our teachers "Mr" and "Mrs" and raised our hands to speak in class, except in a few classes like art or something. This was in southern california, not some midwestern small town.

Our parents thought the teachers were in charge too, and upheld their judgement. Now you read about cases where parents sue the school because their child was suspended. As for that case in Illinois, if I'd ever gotten into a fight at school, I'd have had a lot more to fear from my parents than from the school board, and my parents would have supported the school board in whatever they decided.

Parents now want to be pals with their kids, and I can't blame them for that, but I don't think it's good for the kids. Parents do know best in a lot of situations, and have to make kids do things they don't like, like obey school rules or do homework.

My mom was a 4th/5th grade school teacher for over 40 years. She says that in the latter years, there really seemed to be a change in children - they had less respect and less attention. They'd get up and wander around during class. She attributed this to TV, a medium whose audience can talk, walk around, and pay less than 100% attention. (I didn't get to watch much TV while growing up - coincidence?)

I don't say this leads directly to violence, but for that one kid in 100 who is inclined that way, it's a factor. All the guns that are around don't help things either.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 1999

In many ways there is a real espidemic. A lot has to do with the historical background of the United States from the time it became a nation on July 4, 1776, with a legacy of turnmoil of Americfa's wars especially the War of Independence(American Revolution) which the United States was born during a surging revolution from 1775 to 1791, the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and all the other wars America fought in all the way to the Gulf War; the militarization of American societyof the way it controls the economy, the way it provides most of the jobs in states like Washington, Texas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and other states, the way it takes up the taxes of all Americans diverting money away from education, health care, the instructure and social needs that also explains why the middle-class like myself, working people, the poor and the disabled suffer because so much money is spent on arms of the military-industrial complex keeps on going, despite the then President Eisenhower's warning of the dangers sof the military-industrial complex in 1961 as my them father and I listened to his speech in his Farewell Address where he mentioned the factrs in his speech. It was all described in Fred Cook's book THE WARFARE STATE. This is one of the contributing factors of the aggressive, hostle, nasty and violent behavior of a good many boys and men because the violeence all starts in the military where those in it are taught to kill and to be violent as it spreads around when those persons get out of the various branches of trhe armed forces. Besides the history of militarism in America, the legacy of turnmoil of its involement in its wars from the American Revolution to the Gulf War, also America's violent history of being born, raised, brought up and raised on guns of the gun culture especially in states that were part of the Old West that had a rough-and-tumble history with justice on the spot known as "the frontier mentality", the same in the Southeastern states like Oklahoma and Texas have this cowboy attitude, the "frontier mentality" and even in the Southern United States that were part of the Old Confederecy that were involved in the Civil War that had a racist past and a history of violence against minority groups especially blacks dating back to the days of the United States Constitution of the second amendment of "the right to bear arms" has a lot to do with the deeply enthrenced gun culture being encouraged and promoted by groups such as the National Rifle Association, which is strongly opposed to any sort of decent gun control legislation; also the violent history especially the winning of the West by force of people especially gunmen came first where there was justice right-on-the-spot in the days of the Wild West and the predominately male domination of all the rural areas of America, as well as a good many American cities. All this also has to do why a good many boys and men are aggressive, hostle, nasty and violent based on my reading experiences of various sources and what one of my penpals told me especially the part of the predomoinately male domination of many American cities and all the rural areas has something to do with the nasty and violent behaviour of many American males. There is also the media that makes money by promoting violence. There is even absent parents. As a Canadian citizen one of the reasons why I am much better off in Canada is it is a much less violent country historically because it is not so military driven like in the United States, it is not so gun crzy, the attitudes, history, customs and traditions are different historically. Canada never had a war of independence, it never had a civil war, the Canadian west was ssettled more peacefully because law and order came first before people came, also it never had any bloody Indian wars like Custer's Stand in America. A lot has to do with Canada's more peaceful history. Canada spends more on health, education, housing and the infrastructure with a lot less on arms which also explains why the middle-class, the poor, the disabled and working people are doing better, eventhough it is not perfect. Also this has to do with the more diplomatic, more peaceful, more tolerant and less aggressive behaviour of many Canadians of males and females. This is based on what friends of mine told me and my personel experiences.

-- Anonymous, May 07, 2001