MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Shootings in and around schools have become all too common in the U.S., and they're always horrifying. And another thing about them that stands out - the shooters are almost always boys or young men, which is why, as we think about yet another gun-related tragedy, we're also focusing on the fact that the teenager who killed two people and seriously wounded several others at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, Tuesday was identified as a 15-year-old girl. We wanted to think more closely about this, so we've called Jillian Peterson. She is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. Good morning, professor.
JILLIAN PETERSON: Good morning.
MARTIN: So how common is it for females to be implicated in shootings overall? And do we know how many girls have been implicated in school shootings in particular? My sense is it's actually pretty rare.
PETERSON: You know, it is quite rare. When we look at all homicides, it's - over 90% are committed by boys and men. And when it comes to homicides committed at K-12 schools, I have a database going back to the year 2000, which has about 350 incidents in it. Of those 350, only 12 were committed by girls or women. So it's about 3%.
MARTIN: And do we have a sense of why that huge gender disparity exists?
PETERSON: It's kind of a complicated question. Some people say biology or evolution. Certainly, things like culture and socialization are implicated. From a psychological perspective, we know that boys, when they feel stress or overwhelmed or anger or sadness, they tend to externalize those feelings - so more anger and aggression. Girls have a tendency to internalize those feelings - so things like depression, anxiety and self-harm.
MARTIN: Mmm hmm, self-harm. So, you know, we are learning now, in part because of researchers like you, that these attacks tend not to come out of nowhere - you know, that people are planning. They're not impulsive in the sense that - you know, people won't just wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to do this, but there are warning signs. So what I'm wondering is, if they - and we've been sort of learning about what these warning signs might be - but do you have a sense of whether these warning signs might be different for women and girls, in the same way that some other sort of phenomenon present differently in women and girls?
PETERSON: Yeah, we do know a lot more about the warning signs. So we know that this is a long, slow build over time - that perpetrators of school shootings tend to come from childhoods with a lot of violence or trauma. They tend to be in crisis, isolated, angry. They study other shooters. They're actively suicidal. And from what's emerging sort of early on, this seems to follow that same pattern in terms of the warning signs. We know that perpetrators tend to tell other people they're thinking about doing this. However, female perpetrators are so rare that we really just don't have the data to look for patterns - to say, does it present differently in this group?
MARTIN: Is there anything else about this incident that's stood out to you so far?
PETERSON: One thing that struck me is that school mass shootings tend to happen at really large suburban high schools, I think where it's easier to get lost and be unnoticed and slip through the cracks. So the fact that this occurred at a small religious institution, where it seems like it was really a close-knit community - that is really unusual. And I'll be curious to understand more about sort of why that is and what happened in this case.
MARTIN: Well, yeah, to that end, I mean, I don't know the school. But what I've been hearing so far in the reporting so far is one of the things that some of the parents have said is one of the reasons they send their kids there - is that it was a place that was welcoming, where people who felt rejected elsewhere had felt welcome and included. And that does sort of stand out. Before we let you go, why does that matter - that people feel kind of welcome, included and seen?
PETERSON: Well, we know, in a lot of these cases, school mass shooters are really isolated, really disconnected. They don't feel like anyone sees them. They're actively suicidal, which - they tend to plan these to be suicides in addition to homicides. They're kind of these angry suicides meant to get a message out to the world. And so one of the best strategies we have for prevention is to really pull kids in - to make sure they're seen, to make sure they're connected, to notice when kids are in crisis or when they're suicidal and to intervene early in those cases. And so it just makes you wonder - what is the pathway in this case, and sort of what happened?
MARTIN: That is Jillian Peterson. She's a professor at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center there. Professor Peterson, thanks so much for sharing these insights with us.
PETERSON: Thanks so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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