Wendy, I absolutely agree with you. Some groups of people are not seen as even potential victims, and I'm sure you are right that male victims of sexual assault may find it hopeless to find help anywhere. Because they are men, society 'assumes' that they can't be the victims of such things. Of course this is a horrible example of discrimination.
Kathy, I have to thank Pam for explaining what I mean. Pam is exactly right. I don't mean, believe me, that it isn't every bit as horrible for the mother and father of a son to lose their child at a school massacre as it is for the mother and father of a daughter to lose their child at a school massacre. And I don't mean, either, that it isn't every bit as bad for society to lose boys at school shootings as it is to lose girls at school shootings.
But the problem is, the way I see it, that society doesn't acknowledge that girls can be targets at school shootings because of their gender alone. I think it is extremely rare for boys to be victims at school shootings only because of their gender. There are definitely cases where the majority of victims at shool shootings are boys, but in those cases, I personally think that the the killer's choice of victims has more to do with his need to get back at other kids who have taunted him than it shows the killer's hatred of people of his own gender. If an aggressive girl attacks other girls, I definitely see it that way, at least until I get more evidence - I'm going to assume that she attacks the other girls because she perceives them as her rivals, and they have probably taunted her, or she thinks they have. It is a case of settling things with your peers.
Let's get back to Wendy's example. When it comes to victims of sexual assault, society is so sure that those victims are women that it has no resources left for the victims that don't fit that description. When it comes to this particular crime, society assumes that the victims are always female.
The situation is exactly the opposite when it comes to school shootings. No, I don't mean that society assumes that the victims of school shootings are male. Certainly not. No, but instead society assumes that victims of school shootings don't have a gender. And sometimes, I agree, they don't. Sometimes it seems obvious that the victims aren't targeted in the first place, and then gender doesn't play a role. In other cases, a male shooter seems to be getting back at other boys, who are probably his rivals or people that he knows and has a bone to pick with. It is a way for the shooter to of settle things with his peers.
But sometimes, as in the Jonesboro attack, the Amish school, the Kauhajoki shootings and the Winnenden shootings, girls have been particularly targeted. (There are other such cases too: a case in Japan caused the deaths of many girls and one boy, and at a school shooting in England or Scotland, eleven of the the sixteen dead children were girls, the most seriously injured of the survivors was a girl and the only uninjured child was a boy.)
What I find so absolutely frustrating about the denial of the targeting of girls in school shootings is that this denial goes hand in glove with the unsufficient recognition of the fact that women and girls are, sorry, more often specially targeted and victimized than boys and men. For example, when I grew up I knew that the special circumstances of girls were always seen as a bit less interesting than the special circumstances of boys. Unlike girls, boys were 'normal'. If there was going to be an illustration of the general concept of a child, the illustrator would draw a boy. When I was a child, the collection-box at the Pentecostalist church that my relatives belonged to was shaped like a little African boy, who bowed his head in thanks when you put a coin in the box. (I hasten to add that my relatives treated their daughters with exactly the same love as they treated their sons.)
When I grew up, however, I learned that the coins I put in that collection-box might have done more good if they had gone to girls instead of to the generic boy who bowed his head in thanks for them, and who might have got the lion's share of them, too. Often aid organisations in Africa have given most of their money to men, because they believed that the men would take the money home to their families. Later it has been found that many men use the money they receive this way to buy things for themselves, and the girls and women have been left wanting. I once read about a mysterious crippling disease that seemed to affect almost exclusively women an girls in a part of Africa. Researchers later found that the disease was caused by a combination of a lack of nutrition and a case of poisoning: when there was a shortage of food, the really edible food went to the males, and the females had to eat a kind of vegetables that were partly poisonous. And speaking about women's health: Now that HIV has become so dominant in Africa, girls succumb to aids far more often than boys. That is because girls are married off at a much younger age than boys, and their husbands are under no obligation to be faithful. Some help programs from the west have tried to stop the spreading of aids by teaching those who would listen - that is, the women - that they should stay faithful to their spouses. As if that would help, when it is a perfectly normal thing in this part of the world for married men to go to prostitutes. (Add to that the men will absolutely not use condoms, mostly because of their own dislike of it, partly because of various local superstitions about it and partly because a Catholic bishop in Africa teaches that condoms cause aids. Much better to have sex with an HIV-infected protstitue without a condom then, right?) Also, at many African schools, male teachers demand sex from their female students, otherwise the girls will not get their grades. Unsurprisingly, women have shorter life spans than men in men in most poor countries, and six out of ten children who don't go to school in the world are girls.
The plights of girls and women are not sufficiently recognized in relation to how much they do suffer. I don't mean to imply that the suffering of men isn't terrible. I'm just saying that there is a subconscious association between the English word 'man' as in 'a male person' and 'man' as in 'a human being'. A normal human being is a male person, just as the generic African child was a little boy in the Pentecostalist church of my childhood. Therefore, when society considers how to help people at home and abroad, women are often thought of as a 'special interest group', whereas men are so easily seen as the normal representatives of most people. And who do you want to help first, the normal people or the special interest groups? I'm not saying that society isn't helping girls and women, because it is. But I think that society's response is often inadequate. And I hate it when society won't admit that women are the special targets of a crime. The way I see it, school shootings that target girls are hate crimes, and the girls are targeted because they are girls.
Ann
