by Noora Juvonen, #TRAGE project intern

When a school shooting occurs, media tends to look to the shooter’s background to identify risk factors that lead to the act of violence. Mental illness, past experiences of school bullying or abuse and lack of social connections are some subjects that arise commonly in media coverage of school shootings. Although the vast majority of school shooters are white men, the complex relationship between race, gender and mass violence is typically left out of media coverage, and there’s a notable silence around these background factors that are shared by nearly all American school shooters (Follman, Aronsen & Pan). In this text I argue that increased attention to these topics could point the way to additional solutions for preventing future violent incidents, and improve the public’s knowledge about male patterns of violence.

Although the linkages between gender and school shootings are an under-covered topic in news media, some academic studies of school shooters have taken gender as their point of approach and they have reached some similar conclusions. Both Farr (93) and Kalish & Kimmel (462) point to a failing to conform to an adolescent masculine norm as an instigating factor in school shootings, and frame the shooting itself as an attempt to perform a violent version of masculinity within the environment where the validity of the perpetrator’s masculinity has been questioned. Instead of internally processing their feelings of hurt and alienation, school shooters feel justified to take revenge against the school community.

Although school shootings garner much media attention, very little of it is devoted to these questions of gender and aggrievement. The broadness of gender as a category and the prevalence of male aggression across the whole of human life may cause gender to appear an unchangeable, unaddressable fact about mass violence, but studies show that the correlation between testosterone production and violence is weak (Mims). Looking at school shootings through the perspective of gender as performance (as opposed to gender as physiology) is especially instructive, because it gives us an understanding of how violent masculinity is socially constructed from a young age. Additionally, addressing violent masculinity in youth could help prevent issues caused by it in adulthood.

Better access to mental health treatment, tighter gun control legislation and new school safety measures are often proposed as preventative measures that could decrease the likelihood of future school shooting incidents. The extreme gender disparity in school shootings calls for additional measures to address violent masculinity in schools as well as in American culture more broadly. Farr suggests classroom discussions of masculinity as one avenue for action, and it is clear that whether in schools or in media, a more open discussion about gender norms would increase understanding of the social dynamics of American adolescents, and make addressing problems easier (94). Having a shared language for experiences of gender and the ability to talk freely about gendered pressures within the school community could be among the important first steps toward addressing the gender component of school violence.

For more information, see AJ video Who Are The Majority Of Mass Shooters In The U.S.? | AJ+ – YouTube

Sources:

Farr, Kathryn. “Adolescent Rampage School Shootings: Responses to Failing Masculinity Performances by Already-Troubled Boys.” Gender Issues, vol. 35, no. 2, 2018, pp. 73-97.

Follman, Aronsen & Pan. “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2019: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation.” Mother Jones, 31 Aug. 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2019. 

Kalish, Rachel, and Michael Kimmel. “Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement, and Rampage School Shootings.” Health Sociology Review, vol. 19, no. 4, 2010, pp. 451-464.

Mims, Christopher. “Strange but True: Testosterone Alone Does Not Cause Violence.” Scientific American, 5 July 2007, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-testosterone-alone-doesnt-cause-violence/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2019.