Gender and School Violence

Increasing Violence

During the mid- to late 1990s, a series of highly publicized school shootings by young suburban White males brought school violence into the national spotlight. The 1997 Heath High School shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, and the 1998 shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, both were featured heavily in national news. The shootings were notable particularly because of the young ages of the shooters—fourteen years old in Paducah, and thirteen and fourteen years old in Jonesboro.

The notorious shooting of the late 1990s was the 1999 killing of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The murders became the most deadly high school shooting in the history of the United States, thereafter serving as an inevitable reference point for any subsequent discussion of school violence. The Columbine shooting has also served as a reference point for young men fascinated with school violence, including those interested in perpetuating similar crimes. In 2006 alone, at least three different incidents of teenagers specifically mimicking Columbine were reported in North America, including the shooting of more than twenty people at Dawson College in Montreal. In April 2007, the deadliest school shooting in the United States occurred when one gunman killed thirty-two people and wounded twenty-five with two semi-automatic handguns at Virginia Tech University.

In the wake of Columbine, schools enacted stricter policies for violence prevention, including zero-tolerance policies requiring expulsion for any act or threat of violence. Metal detectors and video cameras also became more frequent within schools. While schools attempted to push for student safety, scholars and journalists searched for both causes of and solutions to the violence. In the national media, family problems, lax discipline, video games, violent films and music, access to guns, and bullying have been prominent factors discussed and debated as possible contributing factors to the crimes.

Boys Who Bully

One factor that was common to the shootings, but rarely discussed initially, was the gender of the perpetrators. In almost all of the school shootings of the late 1990s, [Page 364]the shooters were boys. In addition, all of the murder victims were girls in both the Paducah and Jonesboro school shootings. Despite the common factor of male gender among perpetrators, masculinity was not a prominent consideration in the popular media. Some scholars have pointed to a similar trend in studies of bullying, wherein masculinity often has been ignored as a factor in school violence despite the fact that boys are perpetrators in most cases of school bullying. Many school shootings have been related to a perceived failure at masculinity and the desire to establish masculinity through dominance and violence. Bullying is a common factor in boys' concerns at failed manliness, and bullying often has a distinctly homophobic aspect.

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