Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Why Blame Is a Bad Idea: Death at Cummings Middle School
Everything about this story is wrong.
Based on as yet very sketchy reports, here's what we know:
An 8th grader at Cummings Middle School in Brownsville, Texas, showed a gun in the hallways at school this morning. Police were called. They ordered him to drop the gun. He didn't. He appeared to aim it at them. They shot him. He died. The gun turns out to have been an air pellet gun.
When I say that everything about this is wrong, I don't mean to imply it's not true. It's just wrong. It doesn't fit the model of a good day at middle school, certainly, but it doesn't even fit the model of a bad day. A kid is either armed or he's not -- none of this pellet gun stuff. He either wants to die and kills himself or doesn't and puts down the gun. The violence is either threatened or real. This entire episode occupies this weird no-man's land between the possibilities our brains know how to deal with.
Given that , perhaps it's not surprising that everything about the press coverage is wrong, too. The headlines read things like, "Brownsville police kill teen at middle school." While technically accurate, it sure leaves a lot of important information out.
Whose fault is this? The kid, for bringing the gun in the first place and refusing to drop it and aiming it towards police? The police for shooting when the kid wasn't actually lethally armed? The school for calling the police? The parents for this kid having access to the pellet gun in the first place?
I don't think I've ever seen a case that both so clearly begs you to blame someone and so clearly illustrates why blame gets in the way of healing. Now that this incident is over, we can all point to numerous places people "should" have done things differently. But by "should," we mean "if they had, this probably would have had a different outcome." That's really different than saying that the outcome is their fault. It's so easy to confuse "should have" with "I wish they would have" or even "next time, I hope they don't."
This happened. Period. It will never have not happened. Everyone involved in it has to make peace with that fact. While preventing it in the future may be a priority, accepting it as part of the past has to happen, too. The messy question of whose fault it was can only get in the way of that process.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Suicide Among Our Finest
The story unfolded in the local media, posted on my Facebook page this afternoon. A major street was closed due to police activity. Police were investigating a possible suicide. A note had been found and the family called police. Officers on the scene were seen wiping their eyes. And finally, the news that the Chief of Police at Eastern Michigan University killed himself today.
This man was well known in the law enforcement community. In addition to the Eastern police force, he had been an officer in Ann Arbor for many years and quite recently did a brief stint at University of Michigan as their police chief. It's likely that most if not all of the responders to this scene knew him personally. My heart goes out to them.
The suicide rate among police officers is, depending upon whom you ask, either higher or lower than in the general population. A study in 2006 found that while the suicide rate for law enforcement was 52% higher than the general population, if you controlled for race, gender and age it was actually 26% lower than the general population. The discrepancy is caused by the fact that police officers are very disproportionately white males between 25 and 55, and that demographic has a suicide rate about twice the population average.
Not surprisingly, most cops who kill themselves do so with a firearm. Most civilians in that demographic do too. That's why men are so much more likely to kill themselves than women -- the method of choice is almost always lethal. Suicide is most common in groups with easy access to lethal weapons, cultural bias against asking for help and a lack of severe cultural bias against suicide. That last factor is what differentiates black males from white males.
Men don't like to ask for help. Cops really don't like to ask for help. So do a favor tonight, would you? If you know and love a cop, ask them how they're doing. If they're fine, fine. At least you've told them you're willing to have the conversation.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call, 24 hours, 7 days a week: 1-800-273-TALK (veterans press 1 at the prompt). Help is available. You just need to ask.
Friday, December 16, 2011
What Breaking the Silence Really Means
Just over a month ago, I was blogging, as was pretty much every other blogger out there, about the Penn State child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about how hard it is to know what you don't want to know and see what you don't want to see. I wrote about breaking the silence and creating a world where things like this didn't happen and children knew they'd be believed and supported if they did.
Today brings us a story that I would like to offer as exhibit A in my argument that this is a cultural phenomenon and that we as a society need to create a cultural context that does not allow it. At Rosemount High School in Minnesota they held a "pepfest" last week. During this, and organized by school officials, Captains of various teams were blindfolded and told they were going to get a kiss from "someone very special" and they had to guess who. Then each of their opposite-sex parents came out and started to kiss them.
Now, apparently this is a not uncommon prank, and generally mom comes out and gives sonny boy a peck on the cheek, and he thinks it's some girl, and he's embarrassed in front of his schoolmates. We can argue about whether that's a good idea, but it's not inherently evil. But that's not what happened here. In a video that has gone viral, we see the parents lock lips in passionate, make-out kisses. One parent rolls with their child on the floor. A mom can clearly be seen placing her son's hand on her rear end.
The most common reaction I've seen to this is something along the lines of "What the heck were they thinking?!?!" and I certainly echo that sentiment. But I want to put something of a closer focus on what is wrong here.
This "prank" involves parents doing something with their children that, if we saw them do in any other context at all, we would not only think was inappropriate, we would feel obligated to intervene. If one of these children told us that their parent had done this to them in any other context, those of us in education or human services would be obligated, by law, to report it to child protection authorities. If a teacher did this, they'd be fired.
Consider this. Statistics tell us that at least 5% of the boys and 15% of the girls attending this assembly have been or are being sexually molested. Some of them are being molested by a parent. They already feel like they can't tell, like no one will believe them, like no one will protect them. Then they go to pepfest, and see this, arranged by adults, condoned by adults and performed by adults. Can you imagine any stronger message that no one is going to help them or care what they're going through? And God forbid that one of the Captains is being molested at home. Now they got to have it happen in front of the whole school.
As long as we think that adults sexualizing teenagers is OK, or even funny, we are not going to be effective at protecting them from sexual predators. Saying that pedophelia is bad is not the same as stopping it. Child sexual abuse is about failure to respect boundaries between adults and children. We have to show our kids and our adults that we will enforce those boundaries every day in every way, period. If it's going to stop, it stops not just when a rape is in progress. It stops at pepfest, too.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Pepper Spray at UC Davis
Video is all over the Internet this morning of a police officer at University of California at Davis walking up and down a row of seated, passive protesters, spraying them in the face with pepper spray.
The video has sparked quite a bit of outrage in various circles across the political spectrum, including calls for an investigation and calls from the faculty association for the university's chancellor to resign. Last night, as the chancellor walked to her car, three solid blocks of protesters lined up on either side of her and stood in absolute silence as she walked past. That's quite a video to see, too.
This isn't the first, nor will it be the last, use of force against Occupy Wall Street protesters. That is a statement of fact, not a political commentary or even a critique of the police. It's gotten me thinking, though, about the affect on the protesters of being subject to or witnessing this violence.
On the one hand, by this point in the movement's history, protesters, even those who have no intention of breaking any laws, have to know that this is a possible outcome. That is especially true when you consider the following analysis, offered in the Associated Press:Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department's use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a "compliance tool" that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters. "When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them," Kelly said. "Bodies don't have handles on them." After reviewing the video, Kelly said he observed at least two cases of "active resistance" from protesters. In one instance, a woman pulls her arm back from an officer. In the second instance, a protester curls into a ball. Each of those actions could have warranted more force, including baton strikes and pressure-point techniques. "What I'm looking at is fairly standard police procedure," Kelly said.If this is standard police procedure, then it's not terribly hard to imagine a very docile protest getting to the point of pepper spray. One might argue, then, that it doesn't traumatize the protesters because they know it's coming or, to be more extreme, they brought it on themselves.
This seemed to be the take of the Chancellor, whose statement on the incident said:
We deeply regret that many of the protestors today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested. We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate their removal.Whether this is acceptable police behavior or not, and whether these protesters deserved it or not, however, is entirely beside the point when it comes to deciding whether it was traumatic. Blame and fault don't actually have anything to do whatsoever with trauma. You can be traumatized by something you did intentionally or by its consequences. What makes an event traumatic lies in the internal reaction of the person. If what happened is terrifying or horrifying to you, the question of whether you knew or should have known it was coming, or whether it was your fault, is irrelevant. That means that these students, and many protesters around the country in the last few weeks, may well need early trauma intervention services. My guess is that few are getting them, although I don't know for sure. Occupy Wall Street is organized by "working groups" that take on everything from cooking to PR to sanitation. I think OWS now needs a trauma intervention working group -- the OWS CISM team. Sign me up.
Friday, November 11, 2011
We Are Penn State
By now, you probably know what happened. At least eight young boys were allegedly sexually assaulted and/or raped in State College, Pennsylvania over the course of 15 years. The alleged perpetrator was an assistant coach for the Penn State football team, which, let's face it, is the only reason those of us outside of the area even know about it.
If the allegations aren't enough to outrage you, throw in the fact that two administrators were also arrested for allegedly covering it up and lying about it to the grand jury. They never even bothered to find out the name of the kid they knew had been assaulted. Joe Paterno, the head football coach, has lost his job for knowing about it, reporting it, but never questioning why nothing was done. The President of the college is out, too, for knowing something was up and not bothering to find out what.
If you have a strong stomach, you might want to read the grand jury report in its entirety (linked here). It gives you an understanding that "eight boys were molested" fails to capture. Two different people actually witnessed boys being raped and reported it, and nothing was done. The question in my mind, and probably a lot of yours, is not just how you can witness that and not stop it, but how you can sit back, knowing you've reported this, and, when nothing ever happens about it just keep it to yourself.
We're glued to this story because it's Penn State football. We're also glued to it because we want so badly to know that this couldn't happen if we were around. If we had seen it, if we had known, we would have stopped it. If it were our coworker, we would have stood up. If it had been our kid . . . it couldn't be our kid.
But let's look at the statistics. Estimates are that between 5% and 15% of men and between 15% and 25% of women were sexually abused as children. If you think about your circle of friends and acquaintances, however, it's unlikely you can think of that many who you know are survivors. That's because this is a crime of shame. Sexual assault -- on adults as well as on children -- is a crime that leaves the person who has been assaulted believing that there is something wrong with them. It is a crime of humiliation and degradation. So people don't tell.
We like to think, however, that telling is enough, and that's part of why the Penn State situation is so disturbing. If the secrecy is what let's this crime go on, then someone knowing about it should make it stop.
And yet, it can be a fine line. There are people who are creepy and inappropriate, who may well be abusers, but we don't have proof, or they're not abusers yet. And you can't ruin someone's life for being creepy. Being creepy is not a crime. Those cases, I know from personal experience, are agonizing.
In this case, though, it wasn't a fine line at all. People saw it happen. But the fact of the matter is, this situation -- that someone knew and nothing was done -- is far from an isolated incident.
I work with a lot of sexual abuse survivors. Whether by temperament or by training, I can listen to their stories with empathy without usually being traumatized myself. It doesn't generally get to me. But what gets to me, what I struggle with, is their stories about what happened when they tried to tell:
My mother told me to tell my father, but he was asleep so that was it.Time after time after time, people tell me that their safety was sacrificed for family cohesion, reputation, the safety of others or simply someone else would not have to deal with the unthinkable.
My grandmother asked me what I did to make it happen?
My dad said I must have wanted it.
My pastor said I was going to hell for talking about sex.
My mom slapped my face and told me never to lie again.
My mother let him do it to me so he wouldn't go after my little brother and sister.
My mother put me in foster care because she didn't want to leave him.
And is what happened at Penn State so different? People knew but did not want to know. They played a gigantic round of the game "telephone," downplaying a little more as the report went on, to the point that they convinced themselves not to do anything. They sacrificed the safety of young boys for the reputation of the University, its athletic program and its coaches.
We, all of us, need to know that not only can this happen in our neighborhoods, it is happening in each of our neighborhoods, and we can stop it. We need to believe that no reputation or family togetherness or peace of mind is more important than the life of a child. Let us all look back on this incident, on this week, and say that this was the time the silence and complicity ended, not just at Penn State, but everywhere.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Homicide Watch and Victim Identification
This week, the NPR show On the Media had an interview with Laura Amico, the founder of a website called Homicide Watch D.C. This website tracks every homicide in Washington, DC from the time the crime is committed through the investigation, trial and sentencing. It's a big job in a city that has already experienced 95 murders in 2011 (down from 106 at this point in 2010).
One of the things that makes Homicide Watch interesting is that they often publish information that has not been made public by the police department. Most notably, they publish victim's names before they have been released. The interview on NPR today focused on how they are able to do that.
If you think about it, it actually isn't all that hard. The fact of the matter is that, unless the person is truly unidentified, a large number of people know the identity of the victim immediately after a homicide. Friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, classmates etc. hear about it very quickly. These people, in turn, do two things: they go online looking for information about the crime, and they go online to talk about it.
When these folks go looking for information, they don't realize that public information tends to be very meager and come out very slowly. Chances are that they themselves already know more about what happened than is available in the media. They're looking, nonetheless. So immediately after the murder of John Smith, his friends and relations start googling terms like, "murder John Smith Washington November 7." One of the sites they are most likely to find themselves directed to is Homicide Watch D.C., even though it doesn't have any information for them.
Meanwhile, the folks over at the website have a preliminary police report that a male victim died of stab wounds on XYZ street. All of a sudden, the analytics for their website start showing that people are googling "murder John Smith Washington November 7." So the website folks go on Twitter and Facebook, looking for things like "RIP John Smith." When they find it, they can also often find additional information. For example, the full tweet might read, "RIP John Smith, stabbed to death tonight." That's a good clue that the victim is John Smith. Even better, they may be able to find John Smith's Facebook page, where people may be posting memorials and comments about the murder.
At this point, they know the victim's name and they publish it, hours and sometimes days before the police release it. But should they? After all, the police hang onto that information for a reason, and if they have a good reason shouldn't the website have the same reason?
Let's start with why the police are slow to release the name. They want to be absolutely certain they have it right, and they want to be absolutely certain that no close relative will hear about the crime from the media before they are officially notified. The techniques the police department uses to identify victims and the standards they use for "absolutely certain," however, are very different than what Homicide Watch is using.
The police may be waiting on fingerprint confirmation. At a minimum they're waiting for a family member to come down to the morgue and identify the body. Homicide Watch presumes that if the family is tweeting and facebooking about it, they've already identified the body for their own purposes, if not for the police department's, and that's good enough for them. Homicide Watch also relies on the fact that if the murder has made it to Twitter and Facebook there is very little chance that any close relatives don't already know. Another way of looking at it is this -- the police wait until they have identified the victim to their satisfaction. Homicide Watch waits until they see evidence that the victim's family has identified them to the family's satisfaction.
In the end, I actually think publishing the name before it's released officially is something of a service to the relatives and loved ones of the victim. If you have ever been involved in a traumatic event, you have probably experienced the odd feeling that comes when you realize that your world has stopped turning and the rest of the world doesn't know it. Reading media that has no coverage of your event, or inaccurate or minimalist coverage, feels just plain wrong. At least with Homicide Watch, the next time someone googles for information, they will find some confirmation that yes, this awful thing did happen and yes, someone noticed. On balance, I think that's a good thing.
Monday, October 31, 2011
From the Files: A Halloween Crisis
Halloween in a school is always an adventure. The best advice for school personnel on this day was shared with me by a senior teacher early in my career: "Stay more sugared up than the kids." Whether or not the school has particular activities or parties planned, there's a certain level of craziness that infects most kids the day of the biggest candy fest of the year.
Several Halloweens ago, I was dressed as Greg from the Wiggles
for Halloween. For those of you unfamiliar, the Wiggles are an Australian children's music and television group. They dress in black slacks and solid colored shirts. Greg used to be the yellow one, before he got sick. My infant son was Jeff (purple) and my husband was Anthony (red). My daughter wisely refused to have any part in this.I arrived at the office at school that morning to find a witch and a mad scientist already hard at work answering phones and assisting kids. The day proceeded as Halloweens usually do, with a smattering more behavior issues than usual and a lot of cute costumes. Around lunch time, a bleeding tree frog entered the office.
The frog had had a collision with a pole on the playground and was sporting a cut on his forehead. There were no signs of a concussion, but he was bleeding pretty heavily. Greg the Wiggle took a look and immediately realized that the frog was going to need to be seen by a doctor -- the cut was pretty deep, and stitches looked like they were in the tree frog's future. The witch got out the emergency cards and started calling his mom.
With the mad scientist assisting, Greg donned gloves and cleaned the frog up. He was scared. He was only a third or fourth grade tree frog, and he'd never had stitches before. There was a lot of blood, and it hurt. Greg spoke calmly to the frog, explaining that the stitches would be quick, and that nowadays they sometimes even use glue to seal up cuts like this. Head wounds bleed a lot, she said, but it really wasn't that bad. The mad scientist held supplies and handed them over as Greg applied a butterfly bandage to the frog's forehead, pulling the edges of the cut together and stopping the bleeding.
Mom arrived and transported the frog to the emergency room, and the office returned to normal, or at least as normal as things can be in a school office staffed by Greg from the Wiggles, a witch and a mad scientist. We had our annual Halloween parade around the neighborhood, with 450+ kids trailing behind Greg in their costumes, scaring the neighbors. I called mom's cell phone that afternoon and learned they were still waiting in the ER, no news.
Around four o'clock, as I was finishing up for the day, the phone rang. It was tree frog's mom. She said, "He wants to talk to you. We're in the car on the way home."
Tree frog got on the phone and exclaimed, "Nothing!" I didn't know what he meant. "No stitches, no glue, nothing! The doctor said whoever put on that butterfly bandage did such a good job he wasn't going to touch it. So I want to know. What's your favorite candy?"
"Why do you need to know my favorite candy?" I asked
"'Cause I'm going trick or treating tonight and I'm gonna get a bunch of candy and I'm getting you some!" he replied.
The next morning, one of my students, sporting a big band-aid on his head, greeted me with a bag full of mini-snickers and a big smile. It may have been my best experience as an administrator ever, the Wiggles notwithstanding.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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