VIEWPOINTSWhen Children Murder Children

Last April, along with a number of my colleagues from the Univer-sity of Victoria, I attended the annual conference of the AmericanEducational Research Association, which this year was being held inMontreal, attracting over 12,000 participants. On the second night ofthe conference, the news broke about the school killings in Littleton,Colorado.

For the remaining three days of the conference, in every sessionthat I attended, people made reference to the Littleton murders.Some sessions began with a moment of silence for the victims andtheir families. Others provided time for open discussions for thosewishing to express their thoughts and feelings about the killings. Pre-senters giving talks specifically focussed on school violence and vio-lence prevention, myself included, dispensed with our introductorystatistics about school violence. Our carefully crafted introductions,built around incident rates and statistics were instantly rendered outof date with the worst school killing in the history of the U.S. Thesense of grief was palpable throughout the conference.

The answers as to why this event happened may never be known,although as a scholar and a researcher I, along with many others inthe field, work to find such answers so that we may prevent the re-occurrence of similar tragedies. Some explanations appear obvious,while others are more elusive. Public reaction, while permeated witha sense of disbelief that such a thing could happen, is predictable.

There will be more calls for gun control, as there should be. InAmerica, there will also be more calls for armed guards and metaldetectors in schools, which despite their well meaning intentions, arenot likely to have any appreciable effect on school violence. There willalso be more calls for a "get tough" approach to youth violence andsuggestions for stiffer penalties for young offenders, these calls com-ing at a time when the U.S. has a greater proportion of its populationbehind bars than at any other time in its history. Correctly, therehave also been calls for a more intensive look at the media that youngpeople consume and how that impacts on their developing minds.

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Each of these responses call for much debate which will no doubtoccur as individuals struggle with the troubling scenario presented byLittleton, Colorado.

In searching for answers as to "why" these things happen we mustnot forget that children live in a world that is not of their making.Dependent on adults for care, children rely on their elders for food,for shelter and clothing, for an education, and for protection and guid-ance. Completely without a political voice, our youngest citizens arein essence powerless, and have no choice but to live, for better orworse, within the social structures of family, school and communitythat our culture makes for them.

The fact that at least 20% of children in Victoria, British Colum-bia's, Capital Regional District and in other Canadian and Americancities live in poverty is something poor children are powerless tochange regardless of however much they might want to do so. Sim-ilarly, children have no say in the type of mass media produced forthem on a daily basis. The 6,000 murders that the average childwatches on television by the time he or she is in Grade 8 are notproduced, marketed and televised by children. The video games thatpromote the development of lightning fast responses to killing are notdeveloped and sold by children. Neither are the gangsta rap and mu-sic videos and movies that glorify violence and aggression as solutionsto problems made by children. And yet, these are the items of popularculture sold as entertainment and consumed most often by childrenand adolescents. Television, movies, video games, and music accountfor a large amount of an adolescent's leisure time activities. As a seg-ment of the consumer market, our children are fed a distressinglylarge dose of material that is arguably psychologically toxic. Sadly,this is the stuff of our culture. It permeates broadcast and cable tele-vision, large segments of the music, video game and movie industries,and offers children a distorted and bleak picture of a world in whichviolence, deviance and anti-social attitudes are portrayed as normalor even ideal behavior.

As adults, we need to pay more attention to the mental toxins towhich we expose our children. As a culture, we are now at a pointwhere our ability to produce and acquire messages via the mass me-dias of television, movies and computers has vastly exceeded our abil-ity to process and reflect on that information in a meaningful way.

While the technologies of our mass media are guilty of flooding chil-dren's worlds with a complex mix of contradictory messages, ourschool systems struggle to react in ways that are helpful. And yet,despite many attempts at reform and the best of intentions on thepart of well meaning teachers and administrators, public education inessence still serves primarily as a system for ranking and rating stu-

Child & Youth Care Forum

Ted Riecken

dents on the basis of simple performance measures such as tests andwritten assignments.

Those puzzling over the tragedy at Littleton expressed surprise atthe fact that both of the killers were straight "A" students. That weshould somehow expect that we can realistically sum up the totalityof a complex human being, and represent that complexity in the formof a single symbol such as an A, B, C, D, or F, is at best naive. At itsworst, such ranking ignores vital dimensions of children's person-alities and leaves a void in which they must build identities that takethem beyond the graded descriptions of their lives as determined byothers. Faced with such simple A, B, C, D characterizations of them-selves as individuals, teenagers construct their own identities draw-ing upon the raw materials of the popular culture that surroundsthem.

In many respects this is nothing new. Teenagers have long groupedthemselves into cliques built around similar interests, and those ado-lescent subcultures have often set themselves up in opposition to thevalues and morals of the adult world. However, what is differentabout this present time period, is that we now have adolescent oppo-sitional subcultures directing hostility and aggression toward eachother, sometimes with deadly consequences as we have seen both inCanada and in the U.S. Add to the mix a steady exposure to messagespromoting violence as a solution to interpersonal problems, a growingintolerance for difference, a ready access to lethal weapons, and youhave some explanation for the killings in Littleton, Jonesboro, Oregonand Victoria.

There is an urgent need for us as adults to address youth violenceas a social problem of significant proportions. I suggest the answerdoes not lie in getting "tough" on crime. What is required instead, is amuch deeper look at the conditions that have lead young people totheir current location in our society. It is important for adults to ac-knowledge that young people do not create the poverty in which manyof them live. Nor do children create and market the media imageswhich pass for entertainment while shaping their young minds. Nei-ther do they have a role or voice in shaping how their school systemsor society at large recognizes their many accomplishments as individ-uals.

In talking with young people about their needs as individuals insociety, the message one receives is remarkably similar, wherever onegoes. Young people will tell you they need adults in their lives whocare, and who are willing to listen in a respectful manner. They alsoneed positive affirmations about their possibilities, on a daily basis.They need to hear about their worth as family members, as students,and as citizens and they need to hear optimistic messages about what

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the future holds for them. As adults, we need to provide this, as aminimum, and then supplement those messages with guidance andmodeling that show young people how important it is for us to betolerant and respecting of differences, whether those differences beamong friends, different peer groups, or between entire cultures orreligions.

As citizens, and as parents, we also need to hold accountable thosewho profit from using violence as a starting premise in what is pre-sented as entertainment in television, movies and computer videogames. The denials of effects and responsibilities by these culturalindustries are eerily reminiscent of the kind of denials made for yearsby the tobacco and alcohol industries. Denials, which until recently,were accepted by an overly complacent public.

In this case however, the stakes are higher. It is children who aresuffering, and they are doing so with no voice, within a world that isnot of their making. If it is indeed true that children learn what theylive, then the time is here for us to look deeply, critically, and withmuch soul searching, at the lived experiences of those in our care.

Ted RieckenAssociate DeanFaculty of EducationUniversity of Victoria

Child & Youth Care Forum