Yesterday I watched Laci Green’s eloquent video on the subject of men and murder and misogyny http://www.upworthy.com/... and I said to myself, "finally!--somebody else gets it." I have been thinking and talking to anyone who would listen about this particular issue for several years and the latest rampage murder near the UC Santa Barbara campus had already revived my curiosity about the connection between us Y chromosome carrying, testicle dangling humans and our propensity for violence and murder. So I decided to launch my thoughts into Daily Kos Cyberspace. I've never posted anything more than a few comments here before, and I'm not really sure how this works, so I'm just going to throw out the proverbial Frisbee for someone to catch.
My mother was a trained musician, my father an engineer and physics professor. To my father’s chagrin, I showed much more interest and ability in the fine arts than I did in science and math. Although I ended up studying Art, Music and Creative Writing in college, my father nevertheless managed to instill in me a healthy respect for the scientific method. I bought into the conventional wisdom that Science and Art were discrete subjects to be taught separately in their respective classrooms by their respective teachers. As an undergraduate Art and Music student, however, I came to what I believed was the inevitable conclusion that these domains existed in a universal field. Through my subsequent experience teaching music to elementary school children, and then Visual and Performing Arts for Elementary Teachers in a university credential program, I became an advocate for Arts Integration (AI) as not only appropriate for, but also necessary to the process of producing intellectually and emotionally balanced adults. This is not a new concept of course, but I mention it because this essay treads upon the domains of psychology, genetics, sociology, anthropology, education, politics and yes, the arts. I have no formal credentials in the sciences but undaunted, I venture forth below the fold nonetheless.
The Obvious Question That is Never Asked:
In July of 2012, I was on vacation with my daughters when I picked up the L.A. Times while buying supplies for our campsite. “Midnight Massacre” was the headline reporting the mass murder of twelve at a midnight screening of Batman in Aurora, Colorado. The headline was made all the more powerful by a black and white photo of a mortified father and his family who feared the worst for their missing son. A profile of the suspect, James E. Holmes, was just beginning to emerge; he had been captured alive, meaning he would be brought to justice and the pathology of his crime would be revealed in the process. We now know he was a highly intelligent doctoral student with an emerging mental illness who had managed to legally amass a large arsenal of firearms and ammunition. Not long after Aurora, came two more mass shootings, one in a Portland mall and another on a Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut where twenty children and six adults were killed. President Obama made an emotional statement to the nation. He expressed his heartfelt condolences to the families and raised the questions we all ask ourselves: how and why do these senseless acts of brutality happen in a civilized nation?
But there is a different question, an obvious question that neither the President nor anyone else was asking: “why is the perpetrator of these rampage shootings always a male?” The fact is that, along with Elliot Roger's Misogyny driven Santa Barbara massacre, these are just so many more entries in a long American history of mass/spree murders—also known as rampage murders—committed by mostly young men. Below are just a few more of the infamous and their heinous deeds.
Earlier in 2012 there was a shooting in Ohio at Chardon High School where a shy senior boy who had been bullied, killed four schoolmates and injured one. A year before Arizona Congresswoman, Gabriel Giffords was shot in the head and six others killed by a schizophrenic male college student at a Saturday morning “meet and greet” in Tucson. In 2005 sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise committed a spree murder on his small Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, killing ten, including himself; and then about two weeks later another news story broke about a thirteen-year-old boy who killed a fifteen-year-old acquaintance by smashing his head in with an aluminum baseball bat. Although circumstances surrounding these murders—and many others—may differ, the common denominator is that they were all committed by young males.
Why is it so many boys resort to violence and murder as the best option for settling scores and ending their pain? Why do they choose this as an appropriate recourse for resolving conflict and exacting revenge? Certainly girls feel despair and pain deeply, but they don’t often end up delivering fatal acts of vengeance upon others. They tend to turn inward with self-destructive behavior like eating disorders, self-mutilation, and even suicide, and when they do lash out they frequently use subtler methods to act out their rage. This is not to say girls aren’t capable of murder, of course they are. In February, 2012 there was a death resulting from an after-school fight between two elementary age girls that made headlines, but the resulting fatality was most likely accidental. The Jodi Arias trial, full of salacious details, was featured prominently in the news and is somewhat representative of the pathology of a female murderer. When women commit murder their offenses are overwhelmingly those against a spouse, significant other or family member. In February, 2014 a 19 year old Pennsylvania woman who was arrested with her husband for a murder in 2013, confessed to serial satanic cult killings, but her claim has yet to be verified and this type of case is rare. In a 2006 editorial the New York Times could document only two young female school shootings. Law enforcement statistics indicate, however, that 90% of all murders are committed by men. And also out of over 130 fatal mass/spree murders perpetrated in the U.S. since the Columbine massacre in 1999, only three of them were committed by women, two of them with a male partner.
Developing a Profile is easy but predicting those in the Profile Who Will Murder is Hard:
In 1999, the same year as the Columbine High School shootings, the FBI issued a report on school shooters that concluded there was no reliable profile of a school shooter. The U.S. Secret Service echoed this conclusion and cautioned any profile of potential perpetrators would include too many students to be practical. A friend of mine, Neuro-psychologist and Associate Professor at Scripps College, Stacey Wood recently told me that the low base rate of this profile group compounded the problem of predicting those who would actually commit mass murder. The FBI report did articulate several contributing factors that could help determine students who might be at risk of committing a rampage murder:
• The student's attachment to school: The student appears to be "detached" from school, including other students, teachers, and school activities.
• Tolerance for disrespectful behavior: The school does little to prevent or punish disrespectful behavior between individual students or groups of students.
• Inequitable discipline: Discipline is inequitably applied (or has the perception of being inequitably applied) by students and/or staff.
• Inflexible culture: The school's culture is static, unyielding, and insensitive to changes in society and the changing needs of newer students and staff.
• Pecking order among students: Certain groups of students are officially or unofficially given more prestige and respect than others.
• Code of silence: Few feel they can safely tell teachers or administrators if they are concerned about another student's behavior or attitudes. Little trust exists between students and staff.
• Unsupervised computer access.
It seems clear to me now that it is not actually that hard to develop a profile and that there are at least six obvious external indicators present in most cases of mass/spree murders, three of which are absent from the FBI’s list (items 4-6 below).
1. Trouble, inattention or some pronounced family dysfunction.
2. A history of alienation and/or bullying at school; a perception of not belonging.
3. Disturbing Internet or notebook writings, drawings and threats of violence written or spoken to schoolmates, colleagues or councilors.
4. Access to guns and other deadly weapons.
5. Mental illness
6. Male gender
Apply this list to Elliot Rodgers and the others and you will be able to check off most if not all items: Check, Check, Check, Check, Check, and Double Check on #6.
Some Science and back to the Obvious Question:
Regardless of whether there is a verdict in court or the death of the perpetrator at the scene, punitive measures, while necessary, are ineffective in actually preventing heinous acts such as rampage murders, and trying teenagers as adults in my opinion is inappropriate, futile and reactionary. The damage has already been done. Most of these young murderers have already accepted the fact that their lives are over and the penalties provided by our legal system are of no use in dissuading them from murder. The voices advocating stricter gun laws grow louder following these events. But the powerful gun lobby’s ability to influence the debate, stifle research and intimidate politicians, has orchestrated the recent defeat of gun legislation in the U.S. Senate. Despite overwhelming national support, our legislature is loath to enact the kind of controls required to make a significant difference; and so year after year the problem remains. While stricter gun laws could certainly help keep guns out of the wrong hands, and reduce the body count, they won’t stop killers like Elliot Rodgers, who use a knife, at least for three of his victims, or in the case of Jeremy Rourke, a baseball bat, and I am convinced the roots of this problem are further upstream from gun control, increased armed security and criminal deterrents. It is complicated, dammit.
Back to the obvious question then: why is maleness a common denominator in virtually all mass murders? Is it nature or nurture? Much of the research suggests that it is a combination of the two. Men tend to have particular genotypes that are more susceptible to violence than women. Research also shows that psychopathology, i.e. mental disorder, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior, is highly related to violence, so possibly men are more likely to have psychopathic personality traits. Psychopathy is characterized partially by diminished capacity for remorse and behavioral controls. Genetic predisposition toward violence can be triggered by environmental adversity such as parental influence, family values, and exposure to discrimination, bullying, community and cultural pressures as well as various brain injuries (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...).
It is well known that empathy-inducing, positive parenting practices give rise to less antisocial behaviour than punishment-based, negative parenting practices. This relationship is shown in healthy developing children as well as in children with conduct disorder who do not present with the emotional dysfunction of psychopathy. http://bjp.rcpsych.org/...
Intriguing also is the controversial and often conflicting research on testosterone and violent behavior.
Castration experiments demonstrate that testosterone is necessary for violence, but other research has shown that testosterone is not, on its own, sufficient. In this way, testosterone is less a perpetrator and more an accomplice—one that's sometimes not too far from the scene of the crime. http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
Another very interesting study explores the connection between firearms, testosterone and aggression. It found that “Males who interacted with the gun showed significantly greater increases in testosterone” and exhibited higher tendency toward aggressive behavior than those who interacted with a “children’s toy.” (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...).
Boys with emotional detachment, impaired moral socialization and related conduct problems have abnormal gray matter concentrations in the frontal lobe (Size matters: increased grey matter in boys with conduct problems and callous unemotional traits. De Brito, Mechelli, Wilke, Lauren, Jones, Barker, Hodgins, Viding. Brain. 2009 April). Research shows sociopathic behavior can be acquired and that frontal lobe abnormalities may be associated with deviant social behavior and violent outbursts.
Toward a Solution:
I do not believe we can do anything about the internal risk factor of genetics, at least I am not advocating that we do, but we can address the environmental adversity that can trigger homicidal behavior in men. We can come to a consensus that there are identifiable external risk factors and, although possession of all or some of them does not mean any one particular young male will be driven to commit violence, those factors in and of themselves have a net negative effect on the children, male and female, who populate that group. Instead of focusing on the profile group once it has emerged in middle school, high school or college, we should do what we can to keep the group from forming in the first place, or more realistically, reduce the size of it by guiding young boys away from developing destructive behavior patterns and mitigating external adversity while they are very young. We need to start in preschool and elementary school to identify boys at risk by providing training and tools for our teachers, counselors, administrators, parents and child welfare professionals to better recognize the signs of trouble, build a network for communication and protocols for taking preventative action before it becomes too late.
This will not be easy because it requires we change from a culture that historically has taught its boys they need to be tough and emotions like kindness, compassion and empathy are somehow unmanly. To their credit many schools across the nation, including the school both my daughters attended have implemented anti-bullying programs. Retired elementary school principal, Tom Cooper told me his faculty and staff addressed bullying and socialization issues with twice monthly cross-age activities that encouraged upper graders to mentor lower graders and build trusting relationships. They also had each class read books dealing with a variety of bullying related themes. Teachers then created classroom discussions and activities related to the theme of the book. Certainly there are hundreds of excellent examples of schools implementing effective anti-bullying strategies, but as the recent film Bully revealed not every principal and administrator is on board.
Employing the Visual and Performing Arts:
It is time to employ creative writing and the performing and visual arts as part of the solution. They are a window into the emotional health of young students and can provide avenues to redirect emerging anti-social behaviors. For example simple theater activities and games can be employed to reveal and correct emerging anti-social behaviors in children. Crick and Dodge noted that children must be able to “notice social cues, interpret social cues, formulate social goals, generate possible problem solving strategies, evaluate probable effectiveness of strategies, and enact response,” to develop the problem solving component of social development. http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/...
Theater games can then be used to guide struggling children to learn and practice appropriate situational schemata. Preschool and lower grade teachers can use simple pantomime games to improve children’s ability to display and recognize basic emotions such as happy, mad, nervous, surprised and disappointed. As the kids move into the upper elementary grades more complex situations can be suggested as improvised scenarios to teach problem solving and anger management. For this approach to be effective, active participation is a must. As boys grow older they become more concerned with avoiding humiliation in front of their peers and therefore less likely to participate in performance activities such as acting in a play or singing in a choir. They tend to stand on the sidelines with their arms crossed in a dismissive “this is dumb” posture. Enthusiastic participation therefore is more likely when these activities are organized into games designed to be fun, topical, team oriented and non-threatening so as not to unwittingly set boys up for one of their biggest fears: public embarrassment.
In my elementary music classes I had students write poetry based on themes related to the primary teacher’s study unit. We would organize the poems to fit common musical forms-- binary, ternary or rondo--write them on the board and together decide on rhythm and pitches that we would could perform. Girls and boys participated enthusiastically in the process. Later we would study blues poetic form and themes and follow the same compositional procedure. Because of the plaintive nature of blues poetry and that the boys already felt comfortable composing, it was surprising how easy it became for them to express their feelings, with some basic ground rules, through the musical form. This is an important step emotionally for boys. Girls are more comfortable expressing their feelings and therefore can regularly unburden themselves of troubling thoughts often in tearful outbursts, which are socially tolerated as normal, while boys generally are taught to hold in their feelings and suck it up like a man, which can be detrimental to their long term emotional health as it deprives them of a pressure relief valve. Tobias Greitemeyer found that “exposure to prosocial songs increased the accessibility of prosocial thoughts, led to more interpersonal empathy, and fostered helping behavior.” http://psp.sagepub.com/...
Likewise visual art is a valuable tool for teachers and mental health professionals. I remember once during a private lesson, while looking at a drawing my then three-year-old daughter had presented him, my guitar student said to me “now that’s a healthy picture!” Responding to the quizzical look on my face he quickly added “you must think that is a strange thing to say.” He went on to tell me that he was a psychologist and how he used art to help him diagnose the mental health of children he counseled. He explained certain recurring images in a student’s artwork such as houses with no windows and faceless people, predominant use of black and red, in addition to the obvious depictions of violence and death, are red flags for emotional problems. He also explained a technique called “sand table therapy” which he said was effective with some children under ten to work through problems and track progress over time. With this method children are given figurines of people and animals, toy cars and other items and allowed to play with them in a sand table. How the pieces are arranged by the children can give the trained observer strong clues as to their emotional health and photos are taken after each session to track progress. He also said playing with clay had amazing results as boys were drawn to it, got them to project their anger unambiguously and provided an incompatible alternative to disruptive behavior often associated with attention deficit and hyperactivity.
These techniques often require training and the curriculum hours to implement. Time and money are in short supply in our schools so many will argue these kinds of solutions are idealistic at best. I of course disagree. Whenever I have the opportunity, usually proximate to a new tragedy, I engage people in this conversation. Many are receptive, but some are skeptical. In a discussion several years ago with the mother of one of my vocal students I mentioned the SCANS Report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991), its Five Competencies and Three-part Foundation which highlight the importance of social skills as one of the three pillars; she dismissed this as “social engineering.” Others have responded that we would be raising a bunch of wimps and rebut with the “spare the rod and spoil the child” quasi-biblical reference. I know many Americans bristle at the idea that public schools, paid for by their tax dollars, would be training our children in things other than the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics (item 1 of SCANS Report). The sad fact remains however, only a small percentage of school age children have anywhere else to learn these skills in a necessary group setting, especially children in lower socio-economic districts. As a society we can’t afford the inequity. It is important to understand it was President H. W. Bush who formed the commission and it was comprised of not only educators and politicians but also many top members of the business community who insisted on the “Personal Qualities” component of the report, which undermines the complaint that this was some kind on socialist idea advocated by academic elites.
The visual and performing arts need not be taught apart from the “academic” curriculum as though all subjects are stand alones to be segregated from one another, but rather merged into a universal field of learning. Instead of being considered “extracurricular” they should be designated as “trans-curricular.” The current trend is to refer to this as Arts Integration or AI. Classroom teachers can be trained and provided materials designed by integrated subject specialists that strengthen lesson plans in math, science, history and language. The benefits will not only deepen understanding of each subject but also will produce more emotionally stable girls and boys. The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth (2012) by the National Endowment for the Arts found that at-risk youth with a high level of exposure to the arts did far better in a wide range of academic and social behavioral measures.
The visual and performing arts can and should be employed to identify boys at risk of falling into the profile group from which these young murderers come and provide additional tools for educators to guide them toward a more socially successful path through middle and high schools. A comprehensive and integrated approach would also better assist students to recognize peers at risk, offer them support and communicate with the appropriate adults to avert a potential crisis. Secondly the arts are needed in our schools because of the benefits they provide all children when integrated into the existing curriculum. Children will learn subject matter more deeply and a broader population will be reached by addressing the multiple learning modalities that are overlooked in many traditional classrooms. These children develop confidence and self esteem, maximizing their opportunities for success as adults. And finally, whether or not children grow up to be artists, actors, musicians or writers, they will be better citizens with an understanding of aesthetics, the ability to think creatively and laterally, which in turn will make our communities safer and more beautiful places to live.