Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Gender ratio of victims of latest school massacre

There has been a school massacre in Finland, quite close to Sweden. Ten students were killed by a 22-year-old man. The shooting happened on Tuesday morning, but it wasn't until Wednesday night that authorities released information about the gender of the victims. It turns out that eight of the ten victims were girls.

What does that prove? Well, not that all school shootings always produce an excess of female victims, because that is simply not true. I don't think there were more female than male victims at Virgina Tech, and I'm sure that there were not more female than male victims at Columbine. Rather the opposite.

However, I will insist that most school massacres produce an excess of female victims. And yet I never see that discussed in the media as a problem in itself.

Imagine that most school massacres produced an excess of victims belonging to certain ethnic groups. Imagine that even though the perpetrator was almost always a Caucasian, the majority of his victims were blacks, Hispanics or Jews. I think that that would have been regarded as a problem in itself, and I think it would have been seen as a sign of troubling racism in our societies. And I can't believe that this "racial skew" of the victims of school massacres wouldn't have been widely discussed in the media.

But I have never really seen the media try to explain why most school shooters mostly kill girls. Perhaps this fact isn't regarded as important? Or perhaps it is seen as a fact of life? Boys will be boys, right? And boys will establish their superiority over girls by, occasionally, using some force against them. So if a guy is totally off his rocker, maybe it is normal that he will go overboard in his demostration of his superiority over girls. Maybe his aggression against girls is just normal? Maybe the problem isn't that he is killing girls? Maybe the problem is just that he is killing?

So reporters and editors produce articles and documentaries about teen depressions and inadequate parenting and unsafe schools and subcultures on the internet and dangerous music and the pros and cons of existing gun laws. When they have discussed all that, there is little if any energy left to discuss the gender of the victims. And maybe that is not something to discuss in the first place.

Is it?

Ann

Ann, I have no idea, but there is something I remember from a Design class or something way back at school.

Ads designed to attract males often use eye-catching females to transport the message, and the message is often located strategically on the ad so it attracts the male eye.

Could it be as simple as the shooter training his weapon where he looks and could it be that the girls catch his eyes more easily than the guys?

Just an uneducated guess

Michael

Yes, that's possible, Michael.

But I just got a PM which suggested that I don't need to tell the members of these boards about these things any more, since I have already told everybody here so many times. And that is right, of course. So I'll try to restrain myself. And I have nothing more to say about the case in Finland.

Ann

Ann, don't be discouraged by that PM.

You raise a good question when you ask *why* the pattern exists. Both your post and Michael's added a new dimension to that question for me because the MSM has tended to focus its discussion of the pattern on the emotional psychology of the shooter.

Nevertheless, it's a very troubling issue, and perhaps some people find it more comfortable not being reminded of it.

c.

Another thing to think about would be the ratio of students enrolled in a school or a given class. Are there more females than males? Also, from a forensic and psychological standpoint does seating have anything to do with it? I seem to remember a study some years ago (and with my old mind I can't count on accuracy) that talked about girls often sitting closer to the front in classrooms. That would certainly impact the ratio if someone enters a room whose door is located near the front of class and opens fire.

Just a thought.

Thanks for your support, Carol!

And Michael and Michael, thanks for joining the debate. As for myself, however, I'll keep my promise not to post any more musings in this thread.

Ann

Do you have any statistical evidence supporting your contention, Ann? Have you, or has anyone else, examined not only the gender mix for all victims of school shootings across the globe but the gender ratio for the entire school and/or for the specific class under attack? Has anyone examined the pathology of the attackers to determine whether or not they suffered from any psychological or physical disorder that would cause them to target females over males?

I haven't seen anything along those lines. I've not heard or read of any statistical research done on this subject. If you have any such information, Ann, I'd greatly appreciate seeing it. If such a study (or series of studies) supports your contention, then I will join your chorus and insist that something be done.

But if no such information exists, or if no completed statistical analysis supports your assertion, I cannot support your conclusion. Without such supporting documentation, all you have is your feelings, and while they are perfectly valid, they are NOT proof or even evidence. Without such evidence, your insistence is meaningless.

Show us the numbers, Ann. Give us the evidence to support your contention. Then let us decide this issue based on the facts and not based on your personal feelings.

Since you ask me about what specific information I have, Terry, I feel obliged to answer.

First of all, I don't have any specific overall information about the gender ratio of victims of school massacres. I have tried to find it on the web, but I have been unsuccessful. The closest I have come is this article:

School-Associated Violent Deaths in the United States, 1994-1999

According to this article,

However, the article also says,

I don't think that is generally true for typical school massacres.

The article also says,

The way I see it, a school-associated violent death event that claims only one victim is not necessarily a typical school massacre. We have had two such events in Sweden. In one case, two young men came into a school to look for a student who owed them money in a drug-related case. They found the student, forced him into a school toilet and stabbed him to death. The other case was a young man who stalked his ex-girlfriend and stabbed her to death in a classroom. Neither case is your typical school massacre. Therefore, the statistics presented in the article I provided a link to may not describe the typical victims of school massacres.

I have not been able to find better statistics about the gender ratio of the victims of school massacres. All I have, therefore, are individual examples. First, though, I will quote a snippet I found about typical perpetrators in this article:

As you can see, this article suggests that it is common for school shooters to target women.

Let me present some indiviudal cases:

In 1989 in Montreal in Canada, Marc Lepine entered École Polytechinique, an engineering school whose students were likely predominantly male, separated the male and the female students in a classroom, and shot and killed nine women. All in all he killed fourteen people at that school, all women. See Wikipedia .

In 1998 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, one eleven-year-old and one thirteen-year-old boy armed themselves and lay in ambush outside a school. When the school children left their classrooms for a break, the boys aimed at girls in the school yard. They killed four eleven- and twelve-year-old girls and one female teacher. See Wikipedia .

In 2006 in Pennsylvania, a man entered an Amish school and ordered the boys to leave the classroom. He then shot and killed five girls, wounding still more girls. See Wikipedia .

I don't think there has been any school shooting at a co-ed school which has claimed at least five male victims but not a single female one.

There have been other cases where there have been both male and female victims, although there has been a significant surplus of female victims.

In Dunblane in Scotland in 1996, a man shot and killed sixteen children, five boys and eleven girls. I remember from when the case was reported that the only uninjured child in the class was a boy, and the most severely wounded of the surviving children was a girl. See Wikipedia .

In Osaka in Japan in 2001, a man entered a school and stabbed eight children to death, one boy and seven girls. See Wikipedia .

And now in Kauhajoki in Finland last Tuesday, a young man entered a vocational school which has at least as many male students as female ones. He went from classroom to classroom until he found one he liked, where he killed nine students, one male and eight females. Another female student was critically injured.

Like I said before, we have not have any "school massacres proper" in Sweden. But in 1994 a young Army officer ran amok and shot and killed five young women he didn't know, severely wounding yet another young woman. Only when he had killed the women did he shoot and kill two men. The same year, in 1994, two criminal men wanted to get back at a bouncer who had denied them access to a nightclub in Stockholm. The two men shot the bouncer, but at the same time they also shot and killed three young women whom they didn't know, and who were unrelated to the bouncer.

I vaguely remember several rather 'unremarkable' school shootings, where there may have been just one victim, who, however, often seemed to be a girl. But since these cases didn't receive a lot of attention, precisely because they claimed so few victims, I can't remember the time or location of them, and I can't look them up. I do remember one horrendous school shooting at Erfurt, Germany, where there were very many victims, mostly teachers. But I have been unable to find out about the gender of the victims.

What does all of this prove? I don't know. I just see a pattern here.

Ann

All right. I found some better statistics. According to a Wikipedia article of school shootings, there seemed to be a definite excess of male victims of school shootings up until the mid nineties. Since then, there appear to be a slight overall excess of female victims over male victims in American school shootings:

Gender ratio of victims of school shootings

School Perpetrator Male victims Female victims

Richland High Male 0 2

Frontier Junior High Male 2 1

Hetzel Union Building Female 0 1

Bethel High Male 2 0

Pearl High Male 0 3

Heath High Male 0 3

Westside Middle Males 0 5

Parker Middle Male 1 0

Thurston High Male 2+1 0+1

Columbine Males 9 4

Buell Elementary Male 0 1

Santana High Male 2 0

Appalachian School Of Law Male 2 1

Red Lion Area Junior High Male 1 0

Rocori High Male 2 0

Red Lake High Male 3 4

Campbell County High Male 1 0

Platte Canyon High Male 0 1

Weston High Male 1 0

Amish School Male 0 5

Virginia Tech Male 18 14

Delaware State University Male 0 1

Louisiana Tech Female 0 2

E. O. Green School Male 1 0

Northern Illinois University Male 1 4


Total number of victims: 49 male victims, 53 female victims

The Wikipedia link is here . And I don't guarantee that I did my math correctly.

Ann

Actually it's 49 male victims and 52 female victims. This doesn't seem to me like there is a skew towards any gender. In fact based on this evidence, I'd hypothosize that the ratio would be about 50/50 given that according to the data you have given Ann male victims make up 48% of the total number of people who had been killed while the female victims make up 52%.

Like Michael mentioned demographics play a part. The high school I went to had a higher percentage of boys. I can tell you now that when I finished primary school (equivalent to elementary in the US) I was only one of six girls and there were double the amount of boys.

While you have provided a good framework to discuss this I still fail to see any specific pattern.

At the end of the day though events like these are terrible and shouldn't happen whether or not the victim is male or female. I like to think that rather discussing any gender bias that people think of the fact that a family has either lost a son, daughter, brither or sister.

That's not to say that if I found compelling evidence that there is a gender skew towards females being the more likely to be murdered during a school massacre, I wouldn't be outraged because I definitely would. My closest friends reckon I can be such a hard lined feminist because of my views of a woman's place in the world. I am however trying to keep an open mind about this.

Like I said before regardless of whether the victim is male or female it is a terrible thing to happen and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I also believe that rather than debate about gender skewing or gender bias we should be looking at ways to prevent such tragedies from ever occuring. While I know that it has the potential to be an improbability and I'll be the first to admit that it probably is, but we can all at least try to make this world a better place.

I'm sure you are right.

Not much of a skew, no. But it is a far cry from what the study found that I quoted in a previous post. That study looked at the years 1994-1997 and made this conclusion:

Whatever you can say about the figures I found, they most certainly don't show that male students are more than twice as likely as female students to be killed during school shootings.

It is worth bearing in mind that more than twice as many male students as female students were killed by school violence in America between 1994 and 1997. The excess of male victims suggests to me that much on the violence was 'ordinary' male-on-male violence that got out of hand. Boys fight each other because they are peers and equals, pretty much. They fight each other for status and pecking order and sometimes for girls or for turf. We see that sort of thing among so many animal species, too: the males fight each other. It is nowhere near as 'natural' for boys to use violence against girls, or at least I don't think it is. And indeed, in the school shooting incidents listed by Wikipedia that took place between 1966 and 1992, there were few if any cases were there was even an equal number of male and female victims. Back then, even in school shootings, the male perpetrators primarily targeted other males. Their school massacres might be seen as a catastrophic extension of the competition between males that society accepted, even blessed.

But something has happened. What has happened is not that all male school shooters have given up targeting other males, and started killing only girls instead. It is also not true that all school shooters have become 'equal opportunity killers', taking care to kill about the same number of males and females. No, we still have the boys who kill other boys, like they used to. And we still have those who kill without regard to gender or ethnicity, like the Virginia Tech killer seemed to do. Also, we have those who kill their principal, because the principal is the most important symbol of the school these killers hate. And in the list of school shootings that I found, the murdered principals were always men.

But we now have a new group of killers that, I think I can say with some confidence, didn't roam schools before. These are the ones that exclusively or primarily kill females. We didn't have those school killers before.

Ann

Wouldn't you need more than just raw numbers to determine gender bias? Such as, what is the gender ratio at the schools? Where did the shooter open fire and why? If, say, it was a guy at a school where the gender ratio is 5 women to every 1 man and he's taking a class that women tend to take more than men and he opens fire there, then he's going to shoot more women then men. If, on the other hand, he were to start shooting at the men's football practice, he'd shoot more men, regardless of the male to female ratio.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

You have to look at the broader picture, imo.

Tara

So if I find that today the ratio between male and female victims of school shootings is about 1:1, where the ratio between male and female victims of school violence used to be more than 2:1, then that doesn't mean anything? It is not suggestive of anything, of any change?

Is it likely that these days, school shootings usually take place at schools where there are many more female students than male ones? I find the idea just incredibly far-fetched, I'm sorry to say. I don't mean that there are no schools where there is an excess of female students. Of course there are. But why should such schools be so extremely prone to school shootings, compared with all other kinds of schools? Give me one reason to believe that that might be the case.

Let's look at some of the cases where there was a real excess of women or girl victims. Marc Lepine shot fourteen women at an engineering school, where there is almost always an excess of male students. Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson lay in hiding outside a middle school and took aim at the persons they wanted to kill: they killed four girls and a female teacher. Charles Carl Roberts IV ordered the boys at the Amish school to leave the classroom, so that he could kill the girls he wanted to murder without wasting any bullets on the boys. How can any of those cases have anything to do with an excess of girl students at the school in question?

And now in Finland, Matti Saari killed ten people at a vocational school, whose students are primarily male. Yet eight of Saari's vicitms were young women. How can that have anything to do with an excess of female students?

In the cases I have cited, the killers carefully decided who they would shoot and then they killed them, execution style. Other killers at other school shootings have also killed execution style, but to my knowledge, none of them have ever so carefully singled out male victims and allowed the females to escape. The closest example I can think of is in fact the Columbine massacre, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed as many as nine males, but only four females.

As for the idea that killers may make a habit of killing at the men's football practice, that would produce a marked increase of male victims, which is of course the opposite of what we see. Nevertheless, there really was one killing that took place in the men's locker room, although I don't remember which one. There were no killings at locations that only girls were allowed to visit. The only possible case where the perpetrator killed an excess of females - in fact, exclusively females - and yet might have had another motive than killing females, is the Heath High School shooting. The perpetrator, Michael Carneal, opened fire on a group of praying students, and therefore he might have been targeting Christians rather than girls. However, in view of the fact that the murderer shot three girls and no boy, and wounded another three girls and two boys, I find it hard to believe that he didn't find it particularly satisfying to kill some Christian girls rather than some Christian boys.

So I will insist that if you say that a probable reason for the growing number of female victims at school shootings is that there is usually an excess of female students at the schools where those killings take place, or that the killings usually but quite by chance take place at locations where girls but not boys will be found, then you are lying to yourself. Particularly if you say that without having any sort of evidence to back up your claims, and without taking any notice of the arguments I have presented to suggest that that is not the case.

Ann

Ann,

I'm not sure how you got that from what I said. Maybe you're responding to other posts, too? Because I said we needed more information.

Tara

Ann,

I was an engineering student and as far as the gender ratio is concerned it was about 60/40 in my course alone and in later years it went to about 50/50 because some people dropped out. In fact in the department as a whole, it was largely even in terms of the male/female ratio.

So maybe the gender ratio of men and women in that engineering school in Montreal was really 50-50. That doesn't explain why the gender ratio of male and female victims at that school was 0-14.

I said I wouldn't comment here, and I keep commenting all the time. I'm sorry. But I get irritated when I feel that people try to dismiss my points with the help of irrelevant arguments.

Ann

Ann, you do have to remember that what seems irrelevant to Person A may seem very relevant to Person B when discussing the very same issue. It's all a matter of perspective. You are looking at this from your POV which, although it may have a lot of points in common with others, is still unique to you. As does every single person who comments on these boards.

I was living in Montreal at the time this occurred, although I don't remember very many details now. I have no idea about the gender ratio at the Ecole Polytechnique at the time, but there is no denying that this particular instance was a case proving exactly the point that you want to make, Ann. From the Wikipedia link you provided:

"His suicide note claimed political motives and blamed feminists for ruining his life."

Lépine made a point of seeking out female victims. I don't know if this is true in any or all of the other cases you cited, but that was established in this case.

Let's assume for a minute that you are correct, Ann. Certainly I don't know of any instances where a person systematically sought out male victims that would counterbalance the Lépine incident. So what now?

We know that males tend to be more aggressive and violent than females due to higher testosterone levels. So it is not surprising that there are more males committing these violent crimes than females. This is not something that I keep track of. Have there been any females shooting up a school/business/etc?

Lépine blamed women for his problems, so it was logical - to him - that he targeted them. Other criminals on these rampages may also have deep-rooted issues with women (eg. a relationship gone bad might sour one of these unbalanced individuals against the whole gender). Also, due to their very nature, females are more likely to scream and run about when threatened with a shooting like this - if the perpetrator wants to feel power by seeing fear and panic in his victims, he might get a bigger surge from females than males.

So there may be reasons for it, and perhaps a thousand others that I can't think of. But I'd like to know what to do about it.

How can we change this? How can we get the psychiatric help to these people who need it before they "lose it"? How do we restrict weapons to these people? I'm all in favor of stricter gun control, but I can't honestly say that that will make a difference. In 1989 the gun control laws in Canada were stricter than in the U.S., yet Lépine legally purchased his weapons. I know that laws were tightened after his rampage, but that still doesn't mean that this can't happen again.

I am not an activist. I don't set out to make change happen. If you view that as a bad thing, that is certainly your prerogative. But assuming that you are even halfway correct, Ann, I'm not sure what you expect me to do here.

Kathy

Thank you very much for your reply, Kathy.

And you ask the sixty-four million dollar question, too. What we can do about this problem.

I don't know. I so wish I did.

But as to why I keep posting these things here, it is because it troubles me so deeply that the problem of femicide is ignored. You can't imagine how much was written about that case in Finland last week. And yet it took quite a long time until it was revealed that eight of the ten victims were young women. And then, which was even more devastating to me, this fact provoked no reaction in Swedish media. It was mentioned in passing, once, and then not repeated. Nobody tried to ask what the reason was for the killer's particular targeting of women. No attempt was made to compare him with other killers of women.

I said earlier that we have had two massacres in Sweden, although not school massacres, one where a young Army officer shot six young women and killed five of them, and then, as an afterthought, killed two men. The other case was when a criminal wanted to get back at a man he thought had offended him, so he shot that other guy, and, as a sort of bonus, he shot and killed three young women, too.

Well, both the Army officer and the criminal survived. Both are in jail. And yet, no serious attempt has been made to find out why they targeted and killed women. The Army officer was asked about it, a very few times, and replied, 'I don't know'. The criminal was asked about it, a few times, and replied, 'It was an accident'. And those replies were treated as sufficient. No more questions were asked.

I wish I knew what to do about this problem. But I think that the first thing that must be done is to acknowledge that the problem exists. Which is why I keep pestering everybody here by posting and reminding everybody, when I'm feeling desperate. Not because I think that any of you caused the problem. That goes without saying, I hope you understand that. But I do it because it drives me up the wall to see this thing happening all over again, now in Finland, and nobody reacts.

Ann

I think we're talking about this from the wrong perspective. We have to remember that the people who initiate the school shootings (or mall shootings or parking lot shootings or whatever) are mentally unbalanced. It is therefore difficult to determine what is going on in their heads, especially since so many seem to die along with their victims.

Remember, the people pulling the triggers here (mostly male, if not all male) are usually sociopathic personalities. That, by definition, puts them outside the norm for civilized behavior, so their choice of victims will also be uncivilized. Remember that a firearm is sometimes viewed as an "equalizer," a tool to make up for real or perceived shortcomings on the part of the shooter. (We're talking about deliberate multiple or mass murderers here.) The boys at Columbine had been bullied for years. The Korean youth in Virginia was mentally unstable before he pulled the first trigger. The two middle-school boys in Arkansas were planning a Columbine-type massacre because they admired what those other boys had tried to do. It strains credulity to imagine that they were thinking clearly if they valued any human life so cheaply.

Your assertions that more girls are targeted than boys
isn't supported by the statistical evidence which you yourself have provided. And since we're not dealing with mentally healthy people in discussing why school shooters do what they do, your assertion that this is a societal problem is also invalid, unless you wish to make society at large responsible for the actions of these people.

I think, Ann, that you're showing an anti-male bias here. You lament the girls injured or killed in these horrific episodes, but you don't seem to feel the same depth of compassion for the male victims. Boys bleed the same color as girls do when they're shot. And they both cry out for their mothers as their lives slip away from them.

And what about the families left behind and the permanent void in their lives? What about the friends of the dead and the losses that they will feel for the rest of their lives? What about the injuries and scars and nightmares suffered by the survivors? I don't recall you mentioning those people. I believe that you are the one who is biased in this discussion, Ann, not the rest of us.

I think Terry has a very good point here. I have both daughters and sons and value them equally. If something were to happen to any of them it would destroy me.

These people who go crazy with a gun aren't normal. I don't think you can make any generalization about a bias toward or against either gender. Their purpose was to kill people. I doubt that they thought at all about who their victims were, other than that they were there.

Nan