A pattern in rural school shootings: girls as targets

[Bunny]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20061004/ts_csm/aschools_1

<snip>
They are startling incidents against the backdrop of declining numbers of school fatalities. But this premeditated attack, like another one five days earlier in which a drifter corraled teenage girls, killing one, at the high school in Bailey, Colo., have an unusual and disturbing feature: girls as targets.

"The predominant pattern in school shootings of the past three decades is that girls are the victims," says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociologist whose recent book examines the roots of "rampage" shootings in rural schools.

Dr. Newman has researched 21 school shootings since the 1970s. Though it's impossible to know whether girls were randomly victimized in those cases, she says, "in every case in the US since the early 1970s we do note this pattern" of girls being the majority of victims.

The two cases are reminiscent of a 1989 shooting in Canada, when a jobless hospital worker killed 14 female engineering students at the University of Montreal, accusing them of stealing jobs from men, says Martin Schwartz, an Ohio University sociologist and an expert on violence against women. He sees such incidents as related to a culture of violence against women, "a mutation - something beyond."
<snip>

I won't post this in GD because I refuse to argue with those overly sensitive males. :eyes:

[ThomCat]

1. In countries like Afganistan nobody is surprised

when the girls are targetted. But when the same thing happens here most people are in denial.

I think that attacking girls before they can grow up to be women is a way of targetting all women. I think that rape is similarly an attack aimed, on some levels, at all women. These are attempts to enforce a repressive social order with women at the bottom. It's a way of showing women "their place."

I think a valid comparison could be made to the way Lynching was used to tell black people "their place." I think the only reason violence against girls and women isn't recognized as a similar tactic is because it is so normalized within society that most people refuse to see it.

[Bunny]

2. I think the comparison to lynching to valid.

And violence toward women is very normalized, hence the HUGE level of denial. Sigh.

[smirkymonkey]

8. Excellent point - I never thought of it like that before.

But the intimidation factor impacts female behavior more than we can imagine. I think on some level women know that they are being unnaturally "kept in their place" and I think there is a lot of rage beneath the surface. I have known women who seemed very sweet and compliant on the outside burst in to a fury over sexism, misogyny and being treated shabbily by men. You wouldn't exactly call these women feminists, but they are just as angry. It's just that they push down the rage because they have been taught that men are the keys to their worth as a human being and on some level are afraid of offending them.

I have a theory that the women who tend to be afraid of feminism or anti-feminist are REALLY afraid of their own rage and what it would mean for them to fully acknowledge it and have to act in accordance with their own truth. They don't want to look at it because I think it makes them feel even more helpless than they are already.

[lukasahero]

3. I really did not know this had been the case before these last two

incidents. Before I go cry myself to sleep, I have to say when "Backlash" came out, I wonder if anyone ever really thought it would turn into this.

You know, there have been three guys in my worklife that we wondered if they would 'go postal' on us and everyone said right out loud that they'd be coming after the women. All three times I've been one of the women. They never did it but one came close. These guys just could not handle the fact that women were their "superiors" in the office. Interestingly enough, all three were outrageously incompentent. But rather than accept instruction and aim to do a bettter job, they lashed out at the women who were "responsible" for their failures.

The most unnerving thing to me is that my husband is only now coming around to understand the actual war on women that's happening in this country. He had to hear what's his name, the Harvard professor who's writing books about how men are superior to women, on NPR to realize that it's a real and growing concern. He sat open mouthed listening to this guy and turned to me at one point and said "What did he just say?" (He had said men have to stand up and tell women that we are not their equals.) Until he heard it on NPR and heard it coming out of the mouth of a Harvard professor, he was willing and able to push it off as my oversensitivity and conspiracy theories. And this is a truly remarkable feminist guy (albeit a little too trusting of the MSM.)

It seems the figurative war on women has taken up real arms. God I fear for our daughters.

[Ranec]

4. I saw an interesting blog post on the same topic

Here:

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_echidneofthesnakes_archive.html#115990607082420615

[Warpy]

5. Someone mentioned the war against women

in the shooting threads in GD and there were remarkably few kneejerk jerks responding to the post. I was surprised. It's not the norm.

I've been flamed for suggesting that hate crimes legislation include women, if we're going to have it at all, because women and female children were the most frequent targets of hate crime.

Male hatred of women is so deeply ingrained and institutionalized that it's never challenged except by us uppity feminists, and too many males confuse loving to use women with loving women to confront the issue at all.

I'm sure there will be a few responses to this thread to confirm exactly that.

[ThomCat]

6. I think you are exactly right and raise a good point.

"Loving to use women" vs "loving women"

I think the trend is expanding rather than contracting, with it becoming more of the norm to treat people like commodities. People are objects, resources, playthings, status symbols, anything except actual people. People are lumpted into categories and treated accordingly. The more this occurs the more women are going to suffer for it, because the objectification of women and the categorizing of women is so deeply ingrained.

Feminism requires education, attention, and discussion. It takes work. If people are denied access to real feminist ideas (or worse, don't even know there there is a history of feminist thought, idea, practice and activism) then stereotyping and objectification is going to thrive in the breach.

[Control-Z]

7. I will never forget

how shocked and sickened I was by a man I thought I knew when he told me he had sex with women to "degrade" them. His word.

He considered sex a "violent act", not a loving one.

This sliver of honesty from a man who claimed to "love women".