Motives for Killing and Bullying

          A few days ago in the US and in Cleveland, Ohio, a student brought a gun and shot a number of other students. His act injured a couple of students enought to cause them to be hospitalized. And three other students lost their lives, one succumbing to his injuries and being declared "brain dead" when he reached the hospital. The suspect, a thin, sad-looking young man, did not seem to anyone who knew him, to be "the type of person who would do a thing like that." People who knew this young man described him as a "quiet guy," a "loner who kept to himself" and that he "always had a sad look in his eyes." He had been attending an "alternative school" for "at-risk" youth. He had been living with his grandparents. What is the suggested motive for this suspect's murder? It was suggested that he was a bullied outcast who had "snapped" and let his pent-up anger and hurt at his past boil over, spilling over onto innocent students who had nothing to do with his original pain.
          This sound like another, even more far-reaching mass murder that took place in April 1999, at Littleton, Colorado at Columbine High School. Two deeply troubled youth brought guns and pipe bombs into their school, to carry out a crime that they had planned a year in advance. They had intended to kill many students; however, one teacher and 12 students actually lost their lives. Then the two gunmen ended their own lives. What was the motive for this horrific murder-suicide? The two deeply troubled young men had been outcasts who had been bullied by classmates and theit pent-up hurts and anger spilled over and causes them to "snap" and "more than level the playing field" by becoming the bullies who also "checked out." Sadly, this is not the only such story. Months ago, I pulled up a link on Facebook and read a sad article about a boy who was on trial for the crime of raping his younger sister. What was the motive for this crime? Again, the defense was that this boy had been bullied at school and he finally "snapped" by taking out his anger and hurts on his younger sister, raping her. And weeks ago, I viewed a few episodes in a series that was designed to raise awareness about stalking. In the episode in question, the stalker was a young man and his victim was a girl who befriended him because she felt sorry for the way that other students bullied him. Their friendship started as a true friendship but something happenened one day that ended this all abruptly. He had tried to get this girl's attention that day or something; when he could not get that attention, he demanded, "So you think you are too good to speak to me now?" Then he began to stalk her and threaten her; fearing for her life, the girl avoided him. He grew worse until she reported him to authorities where he was arrested, tried and imprisoned. The motive for this young man's crime was clearly rage over an unresolved past of anger and hurt over years of being excluded and bullied by his peers. He was "getting even" by becoming the bully, the stalker. There have been quite a few other crimes that have been committed, especially in schools and in workplaces, that have had as their stated motive unresolved hurt and anger over pasts of being excluded and bullied.
          I'm not condoning these young people's crimes or excusing them for what they did. Being bullied and excluded, even repeatedly and without adult involvement, no more justifies crime any more than any other adversity would. The point? Over and over, we should by now see, by the bullycides and bullying-motivated homicides, that bullying affects young people and affects their emotional development more than we have realized. And yet bullying shows no signs of going away, whether in schools or in the community, among children or among adults. We can be thankful for all the resources and awareness that are being poured into the prevention and ending of bullying. Because of all this advocacy, bullying is no longer seen as a "rite of passage" and victims are seen and treated with empathy rather than blame. And yet bullying is getting worse as well as how young people react to it so often, by bullycide or by bullying-motivated crimes. What explains this? It's the fact that respect for life, from conception to death, has declined dramatically, as the young are often not learning good morals, empathy or self-control. It's harder to pass traditional values of morality, empathy, self-control, compassion, conviction and respect for life to the next generation.
          When I was growing up, I indeed endure much bullying and terrible teasing and the focus was on what I was doing to "bring on the bullying" and I did not see that my bullies experienced consequences or that I was taken seriously. Much of this bullying was done to me because of my differences that I'm certain would have gotten me an autism spectrum diagnosis via today's current DSM-5, had I grown up during these times. It was awful and scarring and the effects of growing up with unexplained differences and then being bullied by peers and widely misunderstood by adults, remains with me to this day. Yet because respect for life, moral values, empathy and self-control had been instilled in me and just a couple of years in a church-based school where God was central in the curriculum, had a big effect on me, ultimately. Faith-based values give hope in bad times; today, our culture does not help us instill such values in the young that would give them what they need to survive and so we keep hearing about more and more crimes being committed by young people, and more youth suicide. We can blame much of that on the fact that God has been driven out of so many of or schools and out of the public square. I have observed in so many of these bullying-motivated crimes and bullycides that the young people in question seemed to have little spiritual foundation. Or if they did, it was not passed on to them, as the values of love, compassion, empathy, self-control, hope and faith in God start first in the home.
          These bullying-motivated crimes seem to be the saddest of all as they could have been prevented in the first place. Was the prior bullying that motivated these young people's crimes taken seriously? I doubt it. I know that educators, especially teachers, have hard jobs and that it is probably easier to ignore bullying or not take it seriously. We parents find it easier to ignore bullying, not only denying that our young are being bullied but that they can be the bullies. As for bad parents who neglect or abuse they young, they are not only hurting their children but they are also hurting society by inflicting on the rest of us young people who will likely bully our children and, if not helped, will "graduate to adult lives of crime. This is just one more reason to prevent and end child abuse.
          Now there is one young person who, because he "snapped" because of a painful past, which also included a bad home life, will probably spend the rest of his life in prison and will be hated and feared by society. The lives of those three families who have to bury beloved children, the students who are injured and their loved ones, will never be the same. And the lives of the suspect's family will never be the same. They are no doubt devastated and shocked and had no idea that their loved one would do such a thing. The boy who raped his younger sister will also probably spend the rest of his life in prison and likewise be hated by society; his family are no doubt in incredible emotional pain. I don't need to go into all the lives that were destroyed as a result of the mass murder-suicide at Columbine High School or other school or workplace shootings. Shouldn't all these cimes, so often motivated by pasts of bullying and exclusion, not to mention all the bullycides of young people, convince us that bullying can kill or scar one for life?
          And where do these young people gain access to guns or other weapons of destruction? This is almost never talked about but it should be, as these weapons are used in the act of murder. Don't adults in the home have a responsibility to deny youth all access to guns or other weapons that can kill? Does anyone but me see the obvious, that these school shootings and other crimes by teens and children, would have been prevented if they had had no access to the weapons that they managed to access? This inceasing availability of guns and other killing weapons may be just an aggravating factor in these crime, but it is an important one.
          We can conduct all the bullying awareness projects and campaigns we want, but unless hearts are changed and values are instilled in the young that will result in empathy, respect for all life, compassion, faith in God, self-control, and conviction, these efforts will have limited impact. I would like to see less focus in schools on the "higher math" and other subjects that students will probably never use; I would like to see these repaced by classes in anger management and classes teaching kindness, social skills and assertiveness. We parents need to both model and teach the next generation the values of respect for all life, integrity, empathy, compassion and faith in God.


http://www.stopbullying.gov/
This is a government-sponsored website to educate the public about how to prevent and end bullying.

http://www.stompoutbullying.org/
This website is for a nonprofit organization that provides comprehensive services to prevent and end bullying, including a hotline for bully victims. Whenever I visit this site, I think: How I could have used such services growing up!

http://peerabuse.net/
This is one website that is devoted to those among us whose bullying was bad enough to leave lifelong scars.

http://bullyinglte.wordpress.com/
This website is a forum for those who want to share their bullying stories to prevent and end bullying and to heal themselves and "let go."