About Us | Publications | Mailing List | Initiatives | Donations

Simon Castles

"When Children Kill We All Have Failed"

The Age

March 15, 2001

'He was telling us how he was going to bring a gun to school, but we thought he was joking. We were like, 'yeah, right'."

These words, from a shy 15-year-old from San Diego, echoed chillingly around the United States last week - around a nation getting uncomfortably used to teenagers who turn up to school and begin shooting indiscriminately at their classmates.

Santee, California, is now part of America's dark consciousness. It is like Littleton, Colorado. Or Springfield, Oregon. Or Jonesboro, Arkansas. It is the newest black spot on the map, like a fresh bullet hole in a target at the shooting range.

The tragedy at Santana High School followed the usual sad pattern: an alienated teenager, an explosion of violence, an unconfirmed body count, followed by the surreal reuniting - within a school yard overflowing with emergency personnel and television cameras - of distraught parents with their pale and trembling children.

But if the incident itself was distressingly familiar, the days after the tragedy took a slightly different course - different certainly from the days when violent school rampages were a shockingly rare occurrence. So common are shootings in American schools these days that attention seems to have moved away from why a teenager would decide to blow away his classmates, to why his friends didn't do more to stop him.

In other words, why didn't these kids tell police or school authorities that their friend was bragging about bringing a gun to school? If only they had done this, went the repeated cry, a tragedy would have been averted.

The teenagers at the centre of this tragedy could hardly have missed the message. It came at them from police officers, politicians, teachers, principals, parents, media commentators. The entire adult world, in other words, served up one almighty guilt trip to a couple of terrified teenagers.

Somehow I think the close friends of the accused were feeling traumatised enough last week without the world pointing the finger of blame at them. Without talk of legal action being taken against them. Without being reminded again and again that shootings of the sort that had shattered their school community had been foiled elsewhere, thanks to students who had spoken out about fears and suspicions.

I don't know about you, but I feel sorry for these friends of the accused. I see them being blamed by an adult world that has all but given up really trying to understand why these terrible things keep happening.

You can bet that if the accused boy, Charles Andrew Williams, had been a fan of Marilyn Manson or Eminem, his close friends wouldn't be coming in for the intense scrutiny and criticism they are. Shock-rockers and rappers are the easiest scapegoats of all.

In the absence of such pop-culture targets, a couple of teenagers have been dragged in to fill the breach. They have been made public enemies No. 2 and 3 for somehow aiding (through their silence) the shooting spree by public enemy No.1.

But those looking for easy answers about this tragedy should ask themselves a few bigger questions. On the day Williams was alleged to have said he was going to "shoot up the school", how many other high school students around America uttered something similar? Five, 10, 50? How many spoke in the language of violence about classmates they didn't like? How many employed the hallmark traits of a generation - irony and sarcasm - and talked of settling all their problems with dad's gun?

What we're really talking about here is semantics - and that's hardly reason enough to treat a couple of teenagers like criminals.

Whatever it is that's happening in American high schools today is much larger than a few students, or even the entire student population. And adults looking for scapegoats would do well to remind themselves of a simple but rarely stated fact: the world kids show us is simply the one we have made for them.

Or as the wise social critic Christopher Lasch once put it: "If young people feel no connection to anything, their dislocation is a measure of our failure, not theirs."