Saner gun laws and better mental health services would no doubt help our country. But the unifying problem—the one that is wholly missing from this discourse—is gender, the fact that nearly without exception violent crimes and mass murders are committed by men.
Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman has called for a national commission on mass violence saying we need to better understand the causes in order to prevent it and President Obama has promised to lead a national effort bringing together police, parents and educators.
But the starting point in any real investigation of extreme violence needs to begin with the Y chromosome, with an examination of how aberrant behavior in men can become lethal. It needs to begin with an understanding of how we cultivate and even glorify this behavior when it suits our needs.
If change is to occur, the problem of anti-social masculinity must at last be taken seriously. What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a horror but as we well know it was far from an isolated event. Men have entered schools and killed children before. Shooting them, stabbing them, and in the case of the Beslen school siege in Russia taking them as political hostages before murdering one hundred and fifty-six of them. In July of this year a Norwegian man killed ninety-two teenagers and young adults at a youth camp in Utoya.
Mass murder is not strictly an American problem. But the numbers are still staggering.
Every year in this country three thousand women are murdered by their intimate partners. By the end of this year another one million physical assaults, rapes, and murders will have been committed by men against other men, against women and against children. These are simply facts and we must face them.
If we are genuine in our desires to find solutions for the problem of violence we need to look closely at common causes. We need to understand that boys and men are uniquely at a risk for committing acts of extreme brutality. And we need to thoroughly examine the link between gender and violence instead of seeing it as an inevitable, unsolvable, mystery, or a problem that might be fixed if we took away a particular kind of weapon.
If we are genuine in our desires to find solutions we need to develop a system of screening that will identify potential problems in boys early enough to help them and to save the lives of others. We need to teach empathy in our schools. We need to use common sense when it comes to exposing children to attitudes and images that equate power and masculinity with violence and killing.
These are clearly long term solutions and it may take generations to see a change. But there is no worthier fight. We need to help men transcend the cultural and biological burdens of their gender or resign ourselves to paying in children’s blood.
Comments
Annie Campbell
I have studied violence, sexual and physical, and the dependency of gender of perpetrator and victim on outcomes. My dissertation was on trying to identify the turning point when men over ride a woman's right to decide not to have sex, and my thesis was on the role of gender in alcohol related aggression. I want to understand how we move toward an end to the violence. I believe that limiting access to guns and ammunition is a critical part of that process, and deepening our sense of being interdependent on one another. It is this aspect of humanity that I sense is weakening and which strengthening can help men (and the errant women) become less able to perpetrate violence.
You rock.
Beslan by the way included two women hostage takers, and Nord Ost was made up of half women terrorists, In Beslan, one quarter of the men who went there had endured "ethnic cleansing" and had as young adolescents been forced to watch their women being raped and having their breasts cut off. Years later they remained clearly traumatized and were enacting revenge in taking part in the Beslan event. See my book Talking to Terrorists for the full story...
I take your point that most male animals -- be they humans or polar bears -- are genetically designed to fight, and to die sooner than the female. But I'm uncertain about making the leap to suggest that it means males are more prone to mental illness.
I appreciate your sentiments about Beslen but I chose the example for a reason. The majority of politically and ideologically motivated violence is carried out by men.
Like the men who planned and executed the events at Beslen, who were in turn reacting to other acts of extreme violence carried out by men. The fact that two women were involved does not change that.
Also there is no suggestion anywhere in the essay that men are more prone to mental illness--just that they are at an extremely high risk for committing acts of violence, which as you point out may be rooted in genetics.
My point is simply that in order to find solutions to anti-social masculinity and male aggression it needs to be studied not accepted as normal. Otherwise we accept the price of living with men to be "politically motivated" massacre and random acts of brutality committed on a regular basis by the gender.