I’m so grateful that a few men and women wrote about the 2006 school violence from a gender perspective. Right after the Colorado shootings, I received several emails from colleagues asking if I was going to write an op/ed about the fact that girls were targeted in the attack. I had actually started writing a piece when the shootings in Pennsylvania happened. For the first time in my writing career, I was too emotionally paralyzed to write. This was such a strange feeling for me because normally writing helps me process my grief. 

I encourage you to read these opinion pieces and think about the action you can take to make the world a safer place for girls and women -- for all of us.


October 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist - NY Times
Why Aren't We Shocked?
By BOB HERBERT

"Who needs a brain when you have these?" - message on an Abercrombie &
Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and
a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way
to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only
the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was
killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was
made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had
gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or
religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or
only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first
recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind
of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and
reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a
hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so
accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence
against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape,
murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as
familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the
Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in
Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so
pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to
shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no
qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their
breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three
apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The
text asks, "When was the last time you got screwed?"

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with the
lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We've been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead.
And we're still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick andhigh heels.

What have we learned since then? That there's big money to be made from
thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a
misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of
girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to
please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the
U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond
the ability of any agency to count. We're all implicated in this carnage
because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its
core to the wider society's casual willingness to dehumanize women and
girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels - objects - and
never, ever as the equals of men.

"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina
Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women's advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography
that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the
embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid
Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his
kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like "Ravished Bride" and "Rough Sex - Where Whores Get Owned."

Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where the
players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture
(the Academy Award-winning song this year was "It's Hard Out Here for a
Pimp"), and on and on.

You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's all part
of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme
touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally
quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.


Published on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Coverage of 'School Shootings' Avoids the Central Issue
by Jackson Katz
 
In the many hours devoted to analyzing the recent school shootings, once again we see that as a society we seem constitutionally unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge a simple but disturbing fact: these shootings are an extreme manifestation of one of contemporary American society’s biggest problems -- the ongoing crisis of men’s violence against women.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so let’s take a good hard look at these latest horrific cases of violence on the domestic front. On September 27, a heavily armed 53-year-old man walked into a Colorado high school classroom, forced male students to leave, and took a group of girls hostage. He then proceeded to terrorize the girls for several hours, killing one and allegedly sexually assaulting some or all of the others before killing himself.

Less than a week later, a heavily armed 32-year-old man walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and ordered about 15 boys to leave the room, along with a pregnant woman and three women with infants. He forced the remaining girls, aged 6 to 13, to line up against a blackboard, where he tied their feet together. He then methodically executed five of the girls with shots to the head and critically wounded several others before taking his own life.

Just after the Amish schoolhouse massacre, Pennsylvania Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said in an emotional press conference, “It seems as though (the perpetrator) wanted to attack young, female victims.”

How did mainstream media cover these unspeakable acts of gender violence? The New York Times ran an editorial that identified the “most important” cause as the easy access to guns in our society. NPR did a show which focused on problems in rural America. Forensic psychologists and criminal profilers filled the airwaves with talk about how difficult it is to predict when a “person” will snap. And countless exasperated commentators -- from fundamentalist preachers to secular social critics -- abandoned any pretense toward logic and reason in their rush to weigh in with metaphysical musings on the incomprehensibility of “evil.”

Incredibly, few if any prominent voices in the broadcast or print media have called the incidents what they are: hate crimes perpetrated by angry white men against defenseless young girls, who – whatever the twisted motives of the shooters -- were targeted for sexual assault and murder precisely because they are girls.

What is it going to take for our society to deal honestly with the extent and depth of this problem? How many more young girls have to die before decision-makers in media and other influential institutions stop averting their eyes from the lethal mix of deep misogyny and violent masculinity at work here?

In response to the recent spate of shootings, the White House announced plans to bring together experts in education and law enforcement. The goal was to discuss “the nature of the problem” and federal action that can assist communities with violence prevention.This approach is misdirected. Instead of convening a group of experts on “school safety,” the president should catalyze a long-overdue national conversation about sexism, masculinity, and men’s violence against women.

For us to have any hope of truly preventing not only extreme acts of gender violence, but also the incidents of rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence that are a daily part of millions of women’s and girls’ lives, we need to have this conversation. And we need many more men to participate. Men from every level of society need to recognize that violence against women is a men’s issue.

A similar incident to the Amish schoolhouse massacre took place in Canada in 1989. A heavily armed 25-year-old man walked into a classroom at the University of Montreal. He forced the men out of the classroom at gunpoint, and then opened fire on the women. He killed fourteen women and injured many more, before committing suicide.

In response to this atrocity, in 1991 a number of Canadian men created the White Ribbon Campaign. The idea was for men to wear a white ribbon as a way of making a visible and public pledge “never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women.” The White Ribbon Campaign has since become a part of Canadian culture, and it has been adapted in dozens of countries.

After the horrors in this country over the past two weeks, the challenge for American men is clear: will we respond to these recent tragedies by averting our eyes and pretending that none of this happened? Or will we at long last break our complicit silence and work together with women to turn these tragedies into a transformative cultural moment?

Jackson Katz is the author of "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help" (Sourcebooks, 2006).

Houston Chronicle
Oct. 6, 2006, 8:00PM
What we refuse to see about school shootings
Gender implications in crimes is marginalized
By BEVERLY MCPHAIL

The latest school shootings have taken a tragic twist — male perpetrators in Nickel Mines, Pa., and Bailey, Colo., specifically targeted girls. This heralds back to previous school shootings in which girls and women were expressly under fire: the 1989 Montreal Massacre where a young man walked into a engineering school, separated the young men and women, and killed 14 women before killing himself.

Closer to home, in 1998 in Jonesboro, Ark., the two male shooters, ages 11 and 13, also were targeting girls — four middle-school girls died as well as their female teacher — and nine of the 11 wounded were also female.

Although this deadly roll call of gender-based violence has been generically termed "school shootings," they are more appropriately termed gender-biased hate crimes. A hallmark of hate crimes is that victims are not chosen for who they are but rather what they are — in this case — female. Although the word "random" was used to describe some of the attacks, the word does not seem suitable when such a gendered pattern can be identified.?

Gender seems to be the proverbial elephant in the living room that takes up a lot of space, but people ignore as if it was not there. The gender implications in these violent episodes, as well as other school shootings such as Columbine, seem obvious and important, but continue to be marginalized in the reporting and analysis of these crimes. Without acknowledging the importance of gender, the problem is never correctly defined and thus proposed solutions will not be effective.

Researchers have developed a scale to assess male conformity to norms of masculinity and found that both over- and under-conforming to masculine norms predicts psychological distress in men. A partial list of male norms includes violence, power over women, dominance, emotional control and a disdain for homosexuality. These factors have all been implicated in school shootings across the nation.

In some cases, the shooters appeared to be over-conforming to masculine norms, in other cases under-conforming, which led to them being bullied and then striking back with anger and resentment.

Emotional control seems to be a major factor in many of the crimes with the perpetrators suffering emotional wounds but unable to express them nonviolently. Ironically, women are often described as the "weaker sex" and viewed as more emotional than men; however, researchers have determined that baby boys are more emotionally vulnerable than baby girls. Our socialization of boys denies their emotional vulnerability and teaches boys to contain and deny their feelings, except for anger.

The socialization of boys also includes conflicting messages about girls and women. Psychiatrist Gary Brooks notes that boys and men are taught both chivalry and misogyny. Media images ranging from advertisements to pornography depict women and girls as sexual objects for male consumption. Lack of relational and sexual success with women can frustrate men who feel entitled to sexual access to women. When men feel bullied and put upon, often by other men, women can become targets of male frustration, anger and sense of powerlessness.

Noting the gendered nature of violence is not meant to be an indictment of men, but rather an indictment of masculinity. As a society we can change how we define masculinity and socialize men and boys. We must acknowledge the emotional vulnerability of boys and men and intervene early to support them during difficult and stressful times. We must stop teaching boys to disdain women and homosexuality. We can teach men greater flexibility in responding to gendered expectations. We can address how the masculine imperative can range from parents exhorting their sons not to cry, to men beating their wives, to men attacking young girls in schools.

President Bush is calling a summit next week on school shootings and hopefully some of the experts will include those who bring a feminist analysis and gender-bias hate crimes background to the table, as well as researchers on men and masculinity.

Although gender dynamics alone do not explain the violence, it is a critical piece of the puzzle, and all pieces of the puzzle are needed to gain a clearer picture of the nature of this violence. Until we do, schools will remain places of violence and fear rather than fun and learning, and our daughters will continue to be at risk.

McPhail is a Houston-based writer with an interest in women's issues.