CRIME
The School Shootings: Why Context Counts
BY
LYNNELL HANCOCK
The
images are horrifying. Children are wheeled out of school on stretchers,
while medical workers chase them down pathways with oxygen masks,
bandages, intravenous drips. A security officer is slumped in
the hallway, his face bloodied by bullet spray. A gangly fifteen-year-old
is marched past TV cameras into custody.
This
numbing scene was replayed on March 5 from Santana High School
in Santee, California. After a young student there allegedly killed
two classmates and injured thirteen others, Dan Rather led the
CBS broadcast with a sweeping introduction: "School shootings
in this country have become an epidemic." Within hours of the
California tragedy, MSNBC. com posted a package of stories, including
a map of the U. S. that allowed readers to click onto each state's
previous violent school incidents. The cover of Time trumpeted,
"The Columbine Effect," illustrated by a bright blue schoolbag
packed with pencils, notebooks, and a revolver.
A
national sense of dread took hold, again. Within days, more than
thirty children, from New Jersey to Georgia, were either arrested
or suspended for making threats that targeted kids or teachers.
And beyond threats, a fourteen-year-old Pennsylvania girl shot
another student on March 7 in her school cafeteria. At the end
of the month, a sixteen-year-old in Gary, Indiana, was shot and
killed by a former classmate in their high school parking lot.
It
seemed as if no school, no child, was safe from an enraged classmate
with a gun and an urge to kill. Every American teen ambling down
the sidewalk with a book bag became a suspect; every student a
potential victim. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey post-Columbine
found that 71 percent of the people who were polled believed that
school killings could occur in their communities.
Is
the public's heightened fear based in reality? Or is it exaggerated,
fed by saturation media coverage that is painting a distorted
picture?
Despite
the frightening shootings, from Paducah, Kentucky, to Littleton,
Colorado, the numbers support the latter view. From 1992, when
the National School Safety Center began keeping records, to 2001,
the number of people shot and killed annually in elementary or
secondary schools declined from forty-three to fourteen. The drop
is not a straight line. During the tragic 1998-99 school year,
for example, twenty-four were killed -- more than half at Columbine.
But the trend clearly shows that death by gunfire in schools is
on the decline.
The
downward trend also holds true for other school violence statistics
kept by the center. When the numbers for total school deaths since
1992 are broken down, the categories for deaths by suicide and
deaths for "reasons unknown" hold fairly steady. But "gang-related"
and "interpersonal disputes" -- the largest categories of causes
of death outside "unknown" -- show striking declines. Gang-related
deaths drop from thirteen to one over the measured years, while
deaths from "disputes" drop from eighteen to one. Bullying, an
apparent factor in some of the recent shootings, was a factor
in only twelve of the total 295 violent deaths recorded by the
center since 1992.
It
should be noted, meanwhile, that these 295 deaths occurred in
a national school population of 52.7 million. Each American child,
then, has only one chance in two million of getting killed on
school grounds. With those odds, a student has a greater chance
of being exterminated by a stray comet that wipes out the earth.
Other
research groups support the argument that schools are safe and
getting safer. The federal National Center for Education Statistics
found that 25 percent fewer children brought weapons to school
in 1997 compared to four years earlier. The study reported that
"serious crimes" such as rape and sexual and aggravated assault
declined 34 percent during the same period. Federal agencies from
the Secret Service to the U.S. Department of Justice have released
reports saying schools are one of the safest places for children
to be.
"Stories
about school shootings should mention these trends," argues Vincent
Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute, a research
and public policy group based in Washington, D.C. "You wouldn't
write a story about Mark McGwire's home run streak without mentioning
Roger Maris."
This
is a simple matter of context. In its absence, "journalists are
scaring the life out of parents and school officials about their
violent kids," Schiraldi says. "The truth is, kids are no more
violent today than they were twenty years ago. And schools are
not the locus of homicide that the media portrays."
Certainly,
media coverage of school shootings has significantly increased
in column inches and broadcast minutes over the years.
*
In 1974, a seventeen-year-old Regents scholar carted guns and
homemade bombs to his upstate New York school, then killed three
adults and wounded eleven others from his sniper post on the top
floor. Newsweek carried only a 700-word story about the
mayhem, well inside the magazine.
*
In 1978, a smart, tormented fifteen-year-old in Lansing, Michigan,
killed one bully and wounded a second. The story was front-page
news in the local State Journal. But ninety miles away,
the Detroit Free Press ran a much smaller story inside
its pages.
*
In 1988, a Virginia Beach sixteen-year-old armed himself with
a semiautomatic weapon, 200 rounds of ammunition, and three firebombs
before entering his Baptist school. He killed one teacher and
wounded a second. The Associated Press sent a brief story about
the murders over the wire that was picked up without much fanfare
by a handful of papers around the nation. The San Diego Union-Tribune,
for instance, ran a 360-word story on page three.
Neither
MSNBC nor CNN existed when those teens opened fire. The national
and international media did not descend on victimized towns and
schools. Words like "rash of killings" and "epidemic" were not
mentioned in the stories. "'Epidemic' is exactly the wrong word
to use when it comes to school crime in the nineties," says Lori
Dorfman, director of Berkeley Media Studies Group, which urges
reporters to add context and perspective to every violent-crime
story.
Experts
like Dorfman argue that real epidemics, which pose far more serious
dangers to children than school shootings, go under-covered. Consider
child abuse, for example. An average of five U.S. children are
killed by their caregivers every day, according to the National
Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect. Life is clearly more
dangerous for children outside school walls than within. National
education statistics show that, at most, thirty-five children
were murdered in school during the 1997-98 academic year, while
2,752 were killed beyond the campus.
Yet
the volume and intensity of coverage of modern school shootings
focus public attention on children's safety inside school buildings.
Many schools respond to this by adopting strict "zero tolerance"
policies. New rules require kids to be expelled or suspended for
everything from carrying a gun to carrying a nail file. In the
wake of Columbine, a six-year-old from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
was suspended for bringing a toenail clipper to school. A first-grader
in Jonesboro, Arkansas, was suspended for aiming a chicken nugget
at a teacher and saying, "pow, pow, pow." The Harvard Civil Rights
project found that suspensions increased from 1.7 to 3.1 million
from 1974 to 1997, and that black and Hispanic children were punished
at far greater rates than their white peers.
Not
all the coverage has had a punitive effect. Many of the stories
led to constructive soul-searching on the part of schools, parents,
and communities. Features following the Columbine massacre often
tackled the root causes of violence. "More reporters asked why,
not just what," says Dorfman, who studied juvenile violence stories
for a year after Columbine. The community discussions went beyond
improving law enforcement to such subjects as establishing open
school environments, controlling guns, and increasing mental health
services for adolescents. Schools developed emergency plans that
included aerial maps and a network of counselors.
Santana
High School was one of these. Yet after the two children died
there, The New York Times reported on the following Sunday
that Santee's citizens, and the public at large, had become strangely
inured to the specter of teens mowing down their fellow students
in a hail of gunfire. Reporters James Sterngold and Jodi Wilgoren
wrote that public consciousness had shifted from disbelief to
"a macabre sense of expectation and routine." In Santee, police
and school officials reportedly were already planning a training
video, "to help them get ready for next time."
If
the people of Santee believe that the statistically improbable
horror that visited them in March is likely to occur there again,
then the media have already wreaked significant collateral damage.
LynNell Hancock, a former reporter for the
New York Daily News and Newsweek,
writes on education and children's issues and teaches full time
at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her spring
seminar on Covering the Youth Beat can be found at www.jrn.columbia.edu/
children/.
