Eight Years After Columbine

In the many hours devoted to analyzing last fall's school shootings, one of the most notable features of the national media conversation was that as a society we were yet again unable--or unwilling--to acknowledge a simple but disturbing fact: the shootings were an extreme manifestation of one of contemporary American society's biggest problems--the ongoing crisis of men's violence against women.

Let's take another look at those horrific cases. On September 27, 2006, a heavily armed 53-year-old man walked into a Colorado high school classroom, forced male students to leave, and took a group of girls hostage. He then proceeded to terrorize the girls for several hours, killing one and allegedly sexually assaulting some or all of the others before killing himself.

Less than a week later, a 32-year-old man walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and at gunpoint ordered about 15 boys to leave the room, along with a pregnant woman and three women with infants. He forced the remaining girls, aged 6 to 13, to line up against a blackboard, where he tied their feet together. He then methodically executed five of the girls with shots to the head and critically wounded several others before taking his own life.

Just after the Amish schoolhouse massacre, Pennsylvania police commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said in an emotional press conference, "It seems as though (the perpetrator) wanted to attack young, female victims."

How did mainstream media cover these unspeakable acts of gender violence? The New York Times ran an editorial that identified the "most important" cause as the easy access to guns in our society. National Public Radio aired a program focusing on problems in rural America. Forensic psychologists and criminal profilers filled the airwaves with talk about how difficult it is to predict when a "person" will snap. And countless commentators--from fundamentalist preachers to secular social critics--rushed to weigh in with metaphysical musings on the incomprehensibility of "evil."

Incredibly, few prominent voices in the broadcast or print media called the incidents what they were: hate crimes perpetrated by angry white men against defenseless young girls, who--whatever the twisted motives of the shooters--were targeted for sexual assault and murder precisely because they were girls.

More than a week after the second shooting, the Dallas Morning News published an op/ed I wrote that made this very point, and a few days later, The New York Times ran a widely circulated column about the shootings by Bob Herbert, "Why Aren't We Shocked?," that catalogued widespread misogyny in our culture. But these articles were rare exceptions; most of the media chatter about the murders was notably devoid of any honest discussion of gender politics.

What is it going to take for our society to deal honestly with the extent and depth of this problem? How many more young girls and women have to die before decision-makers in media and other influential institutions stop averting their eyes from the lethal mix of deep misogyny and violent masculinity at work here?

In response to the Colorado and Pennsylvania shootings, the White House hastily organized a gathering of experts in education and law enforcement. The goal of the conference was to discuss "the nature of the problem" and federal action that could assist communities with violence prevention. This approach was--and remains--misdirected. Instead of convening a group of experts on "school safety," the president should catalyze a long-overdue national conversation about sexism, masculinity, and men's violence against women.

For us to have any hope of truly preventing not only extreme acts of gender violence, but also the incidents of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence that are a daily part of millions of women's and girls' lives, we need to have this conversation. And we need many more men to participate. Men from every level of society need to recognize that violence against women is a men's issue.

A similar incident to the Amish schoolhouse massacre took place in Canada in 1989. A 25-year-old man walked into a classroom at the University of Montreal. He forced the men out of the classroom at gunpoint, then opened fire on the women. He killed 14 women and injured many more before committing suicide.

In response to this atrocity, in 1991 a number of Canadian men created the White Ribbon Campaign. The idea was for men to wear a white ribbon as a way of making a visible and public pledge "never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women." The White Ribbon Campaign has since become a part of Canadian culture, and has been adopted in dozens of countries.

After last fall's schoolhouse horrors, the challenge for American men is clear: will we respond to these tragedies by averting our eyes and pretending that none of this happened? Or will we at long last break our complicit silence and work together with women to turn these tragedies into a transformative cultural moment?

Less than two weeks after the Amish schoolhouse murders, the town's leaders had the schoolhouse demolished. While the community continued to mourn, the demolition was a symbolic attempt to move past the tragedy. This was an understandable response from a small, grief-stricken community. But what about the response from the rest of our society? How long can we continue to lurch from one tragic moment to the next, each time wiping the slate clean and pretending that these are all just a series of "unrelated incidents"?

Jackson Katz is a leading advocate in gender violence education and a member of the advisory board of the Men's Resource Center for Change and Voice Male magazine. He is a cofounder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), and cocreator of the video Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity. His book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help was published in 2006.