Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

For the last six days, the man responsible for the bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people in Norway last July has been testifying at his trial. He admits that he was the person who carried out the attacks -- there is no question or controversy about that. This trial is being held to determine whether what he did was a crime and, if so, whether he was sane at the time he committed it.

The shooter's view is that this was not a crime. He has an elaborate and fairly paranoid political ideology which, he believes, justifies the attacks as part of a war against Muslims and multiculturalism. Since he was defending his people, he claims, this was not a crime. As far as I can tell, no one expects this argument to win the case.

The question of whether he is -- or was at the time of the attack -- sane is somewhat more complicated. There are two psychiatric reports in play. One says that the shooter has paranoid schizophrenia and was unaware of reality when he committed the crime. The other says that he is a narcissist, but he knew what he was doing and is responsible for his actions. The shooter, for his part, says he is sane.

This case points out some of the big problems with legal discussions of sanity. "Insanity" is a legal term, not a medical or psychiatric one. There are millions of people in the world at this very moment who have a disorder that is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) right along with paranoid schizophrenia, and they are legally sane. That is, they know right from wrong and can appreciate the consequences of their actions. In fact, there are millions of legally sane people with paranoid schizophrenia.

In fact, one of the mental disorders listed in the DSM is narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, both psychiatrists who have evaluated this man think he has a disorder. What they disagree about is which one, what type (personality disorders are considered to be in a different group or "Axis" from other mental disorders) and whether it impacted his ability to know right from wrong. (In another high profile case, the man who kidnapped and repeatedly raped Elizabeth Smart was found legally sane in part on the basis of a report that said he had narcissistic personality disorder as well.)

On an intuitive level, most of us have a sense that you can't be all there and do what this man did. You'd have to be "sick" or "crazy." But those aren't medical terms either. And obviously your view of right and wrong has to be pretty messed up to think this is OK. But most people who commit murder are legally sane, and most legally insane people don't commit murder.

Where is the line between wrong or bad or evil and insane? Where do messed up values and priorities cross the line into not responsible for your actions? I think that's a question that doesn't have an answer. We have legal standards, and we hope we'll know the difference when we see it.

In my next post, I'll take a look at the impact of the trial on the families of those who died. Stay tuned.

Frequent quarterbacker Alan (who blogs over at Poor Mojo) shared a new Time column today about Etan Patz, the New York City first grader who disappeared in 1979 in New York City. The case is in the news lately because police in search of clues have recently been digging up a basement near where the boy lived. The column talks about the ways we have come to expect that we can prevent bad things from happening to our children, be they stranger abductions or broken bones.

Alan comments,

The fact is your child is far more likely to die young in a motor vehicle accident than to be kidnapped by a stranger and murdered. Tens of thousands of times more likely. But car accidents are quotidian and kidnappings are good copy and so we live in terror.

I agree with Alan. We tend to vastly overestimate the chances of a child being abducted by a stranger (about 115 cases a year, with 60% surviving and only 4% remaining unsolved) and vastly underestimate their chances of being killed in a car crash. And car crashes are, indeed, "quotidian" (which I had to look up -- it means mundane or every-day). I suppose that kidnappings also make good news stories. But that begs the question, why do they make good news stories? And why don't car crashes make good stories, too?

First of all, the news tends to cover things that are unusual. If they covered everything, we'd never do anything but watch the news. This is why there is a real dearth of "good news" on as well. Good news -- or at least neutral news -- is actually much more common than bad news. For the most part, if good news is about something common, we don't expect to see it covered. There are no stories about your kid's birthday party, or the lovely bike ride you took last weekend. That's common.

Second, we also expect to see news that affects us, and this is where it gets complicated. Most of us, because it is common, are aware of the risk of traffic accidents. We believe, however, that we can master those risks. Those accidents happen to someone else -- someone not being careful, not wearing a seat belt, under the influence or otherwise foolish. We know what is dangerous about driving a car, and we don't do those things.

We also believe that we can master the risks to our children. We give them bike helmets and put them in car seats. We don't let our toddlers have small toys. We take them to the doctor. For the most part, in fact, we are right. Kids get hurt, sure, but most kids don't get killed in this country.

Stranger abductions make the news because they bring to our attention something that we don't want to admit. About 115 times a year, parents just like us have kids who are abducted. Those parents also had helmets and car seats and medical care. They kept an eye on their kids as best as they could. And someone took them anyway. They didn't master the risk. We want to know what they could have done differently so we can.

Etan Patz's story is compelling because it has to do with a child, because it was the first case to appear on a milk carton, and because it is unsolved. It is also compelling because he disappeared walking to the school bus alone for the first time ever. We all make that decision for our kids at one point or another. We all know it's a risk. We don't read about Etan because it's sensational. We read because we want it to be different for our kid.

Leiby Kletzky won't be home for Shabbat dinner tomorrow night. He won't be home next week, or the week after, or for any Shabbat or holiday or regular dinner ever again. Leiby was 8 years old when his parents let him walk alone, for the first time, from his summer camp in Brooklyn, NY to meet them a few blocks away on Monday. He took a wrong turn and asked a stranger for directions. Leiby Kletzky is dead, and that stranger has reportedly confessed to killing him and dismembering his body.

There are news stories that upset me. There are news stories that scare me. There are news stories that make me angry. There are very few news stories that make me physically ill. This is one of them.

I've been trying to identify just what it is that has made me feel like I was going to throw up since the moment the details of this case came to light. I've been doing crisis work for a long time, and I've heard some pretty awful stories. The murder of children is always particularly poignant, but this one is different.

I think there are two aspects to this case that cause me to feel that connection in a particularly personal way. The first is that, this week, I sent my own 6 year-old son on a plane as an unaccompanied minor to visit his grandparents in Washington, DC for the first time. We've done this countless times with his oldest sister and it has always gone smoothly.

We are careful, or so we think. We make sure not just that the airline has the information they need to keep the kids safe, but that they know what to do if someone isn't there to pick them up, if their seatmate is bothering them or making them uncomfortable, if they get lost or if someone other than an airline employee offers to take them someplace. We trust that these precautions, coupled with the help of the airline and the common sense of our kids, will keep them safe.  Leiby Kletzky's parents thought there wasn't much that could go wrong, too. They were a few blocks away. He would walk right to them. What could go wrong?

Today, when I went to pick my son up at the airport, I got stuck in traffic. His plane arrived early. The line to get a security pass to go to the gate was slow. The security line was long. I knew that he was off the plane, and I found myself in a panic. We had a plan for this. All he had to do was stay with the airline employees. But what if he didn't?

One of the deeply held beliefs about the world that we have as parents is that we can keep our children safe. My kids will tell you that I often say that that is my most important job as a mom -- keeping them safe. Leiby's parents were doing that job as best they could with the information they had. And it wasn't enough. That shakes my own belief in a world that will work the way it should.

The other poignant piece of this case for me was that it occurred in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn. I am not Hasidic and have never been. I lived for a while in a heavily Jewish section of Pittsburgh, PA that had many Hasidim, and as a Jew I feel a connection to that part of my roots. Hasidic communities are famously close knit. You can see this in the sheer number of people who turned out within an hour or two after Leiby went missing to look for him. It may be Brooklyn, NY, but it is a small shtetl in many ways. This isn't supposed to happen. The fact that the accused killer is also an Orthodox Jew, albeit not a Hasid, makes it even worse.

Of course, no one should do this to anyone else. The fact that Leiby was Jewish or Hasidic doesn't make his death any more or less important than that of any other child. But just as it would affect me if it happened on my street more than two miles away, I feel that sense of shock not just that a child was murdered, but that it happened in "our" community. Reading the comments on various blogs around the net, I realize that there is a cultural context to this case that I can't put into words and the commenters clearly don't get. This perpetrator was able to do what he did to this boy precisely because they had a connection and a similar understanding of what their community was like. This didn't just violate the law and human decency, it violated a communal sense of trust. I can't explain it any better than that.

Leiby won't be home for Shabbat tomorrow. In Judaism, we say that the memory of the righteous is for a blessing. May his family be comforted among the mourners of Zion.

Thanks to frequent Quarterbacker Jim for suggesting that my take on this might be a little different than others and that I should blog about it. I needed the noodge.

Last June, 7-year-old Kyron Horman disappeared from his elementary school without a trace. All eyes have been focused for quite some time on his stepmother in connection with his disappearance, but no arrests have been made and she remains a free woman and, for all I know, an innocent one. Now there is a push to put surveillance cameras in all elementary schools in Oregon, under a proposed law dubbed "Kyron's Law." Kyron's own school got cameras shortly after he disappeared, funded by a private citizen.

As a school administrator, there have been many times I wished I had video footage of an incident. The "he hit me first" thing gets very old, very fast. As more and more kids have cell phones, there have even been a couple of times when kids recorded an incident themselves, although more often than not the person recording was doing so to post it on YouTube, not to aid in the investigation.

One might argue that, had their been cameras in Kyron's school the day he disappeared, he might have been found by now. But I think that those who advocate for putting in surveillance cameras would go a step further, arguing that either he wouldn't have disappeared or that he definitely would have been found right away. That is, most likely, not true.

Surveillance cameras in schools give people, and particularly parents, a false sense of security. Because they might prevent some problems, we think they prevent all problems. But surveillance cameras are problematic themselves.

First of all, no matter how many cameras you install, there will most likely be someplace the cameras aren't. This is how most of us want it, because as much as we want to protect our kids, we don't want someone filming them in the bathroom or the locker room. This raises a larger issue, which is that there is a need to balance privacy with safety, and parents tend to be a stickler for both.

Second, if there are cameras and someone wants to snatch a kid or otherwise harm him, that person will go where the cameras aren't. That means that while the hallways and classrooms and buses may be safer, the bathrooms and locker rooms are more dangerous. In the case of Kyron Horman, if indeed his stepmother is responsible, she simply would not have used the school as her "alibi."

Third, and this is the toughest one for parents to wrap their heads around, we can't watch our kids 24/7. We do our best to keep them safe, and at some point we have done all we can. At night, when my kids are asleep in their rooms, I assume they are asleep in their rooms. I don't have a camera there, I don't sleep on the floor, and I don't check on them all that often. Could they disappear? Yes. Is that likely? No.

The fact of the matter is that Kyron's disappearance made the news because it was so rare. Kids do not disappear from school in the middle of the day. They disappear, if they disappear, from the neighborhood or the bus stop or walking to or from school, or even from their homes. But they don't go missing from their schools because that is actually a pretty hard place to snatch a kid. And putting in cameras may make it even harder, but is that really where you want that money to go? You can almost certainly do more to protect children by putting another layer of wood chips on the playground of every school, or posting another adult on their walking route. And that doesn't even take into consideration what educational use that money could be put to.

Once again, we, as parents, have to face up to the fact that dropping off our children at school is an act of faith. We also have to face the fact that parents are really not any better at protecting children than schools are. If Kyron's stepmother harmed him, the greatest risk he faced was not going to a school with no cameras, it was living with a family with her in it. And while cameras might have brought her to justice, they wouldn't have changed that risk factor one bit.

Jonathan Foster was a 12-year-old boy living with his mother in Houston.  Two weeks ago, a family friend and her child moved in after the friend separated from her husband.  Last Friday, Jonathan stayed home alone while his mom and her new roommate both worked.  When his mother came home, he was gone.  Initially, it seemed like Jonathan might have run away from home, but on Tuesday his body was found, burnt, in a ditch.  An acquaintance of the roommate has been arrested and charged with his murder.

I can't imagine anyone reads a story like this and thinks anything positive.  This is not a feel good news story.  There are some of you out there who read this and think something like, "that's too bad" and move on.  There are others who read this and feel a punch in your stomach.  I am definitely of the latter category.

So, am I an inherently more sensitive person?  Am I morally superior because I notice and care?  Am I weaker, because I am more easily affected?  Is it a female thing?  I'll say it's "none of the above."

This story punches me in the gut for the simple reason that I have a 12-year-old child of my own.  Sometimes she stays home alone while I work.  We have gone over and over various safety rules for when she's alone, and I believe she follows them.  I also recognize, however, that Jonathan probably broke the one that's hardest to remember -- don't open the door for an unexpected visitor even if you know them.  Even if you know them.  It's easy to say in theory, but how may 12-year-olds would find it easy to keep the door closed if the neighbor, an aunt, or a family friend stopped by?  There's the rule, and then there's common courtesy.

I feel a punch in the gut because there is nothing in this story that makes me believe this could not happen to my family.  There is no, "I would never let my child do that" or "My child would never do that" for me to fall back on.  What separates my family from Jonathan Foster's family is depending on how you look at it, dumb luck or the fact that, as far as I know, I'm not acquainted with anyone who would kidnap and burn my child.  That I know of.  I'm sure Jonathan's mother thought the same thing.

Our minds are wired to look for patterns in stories like this.  We look for signals that can help us either know how to prevent such an incident from happening to us or can help convince us that it couldn't happen to us.  The punch in the gut isn't from being caring or sensitive or weak or female.  It's the result of the realization, conscious or not, that the signals, rather than protect or reassure us, are telling us we can't prevent this at all.

On April 15, a 7-year-old girl in Stevensville, Montana was walking along the sidewalk when a man in a car yelled, "I'm going to kidnap you!"  Police were called, and the girl helped a sketch artist create a picture of her assailant.  Flyers were posted around town, and on Monday an 18-year-old man turned himself in, and today he pled guilty to disorderly conduct and was given a $185 fine and a 10 day suspended jail sentence.  He says he was just joking when he shouted at the girl.

This is not a big story.  It merited three paragraphs in the Associated Press today, and nothing when it originally happened.  It lies on a continuum, somewhere between stories of kids walking along the sidewalk uneventfully and kids being kidnapped off the sidewalk.  The sentence here clearly takes into consideration the man's intent.  He did not intend to kidnap the girl, just to scare her, and the sentence reflects that.  The AP headline,

Montana Teen Fined for Trying to Scare 7-year-old

also reflects the man's intentions. 

Our legal system cares about intent.  That's why attempted murder is different than assault.  Possession with intent to distribute is different than possession.  Hate crimes carry a different punishment than other crimes because of what motivated them.  On the whole, Americans accept that what you were trying to do when you committed a crime matters.  We therefore understand that there's a big difference between threatening to kidnap someone because you think you're being funny and threatening to kidnap someone because you're actually going to try.

But should it be this way?  Imagine you're a 7-year-old girl, walking down the street, and a man yells that he's going to kidnap you.  You run, someone calls the police, they start looking for the man.  In terms of how scared you are, is there any difference at all between someone trying to be funny and yelling this at you and someone who actually was going to kidnap you yelling it?  Will you have fewer nightmares, less regression in your behavior, and fewer fears from one than the other?  Of course not.

Clearly scaring a little kid like this is not the same as actually kidnapping her.  There is and should be a continuum.  The notion that we take into account intent, however, should be recognized for what it is -- a cultural construct.  Our system has decided to punish people based on intent.  Another system might punish based on the effect of one's actions.  There are pros and cons for each, and each will have some citizens who are more comfortable with it than others.

Several times a month, on the playground or in my office, I wind up talking to a child or a group of children who have been "play-fighting."  The difference between play-fighting and actual fighting, in terms of actions, is basically zero.  These are usually younger kids, and often the playing ends with a bloody nose or someone in tears.  All of them are baffled.  "We were just playing."  Similarly, I wind up talking to older kids who have said some really vile things to each other and someone has gotten mad.  "It was just a joke."  I hope, while I still have some sway over them, they learn some simple lessons:  when someone gets hurt, they are still hurt whether you meant to hurt them or not, and something's only a joke if both the speaker and the listener think it's funny.  Obviously, this young man never got the message.

Two high profile cases are in the news today. The first is the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the 11 year old who was kidnapped, raped, and held in a California backyard for 18 years. The second is the discovery of at least 11 women's bodies at a house in Cleveland. If I asked you who is to blame for Dugard's kidnapping, you would probably say her kidnappers are. If I asked you who was to blame for the murders in Cleveland, you would probably pin them on the serial killer. Yet today's coverage points the finger squarely at law enforcement in both cases.

A report from the California Inspector General, which was issued today, says that parole officers had numerous opportunities to discover Dugard during the 10 years they were in charge of supervising her alleged captor. They failed to follow their own procedures in some cases, and in others failed to have decent procedures in the first place. In the Cleveland case, neighbors are coming forward to say that they reported assaults by the alleged perpetrator on their street, and the police did not take them seriously. They also say that there was an odor -- presumably of decomposing bodies -- coming from the property, which was reported but never addressed. At least today, it seems like the answer to whose fault these crimes were is not the perpetrators at all, but law enforcement officials.

So what's going on here? Why have we shifted from outrage at the people who did these things to outrage at the people who didn't catch them? I think what we're seeing is the evolution of people's world view as they try to cope with the horrible things that have occurred.

When the Dugard case first broke, for example, comments on blogs and news sites said things like, "I hope you rot in h*** you sick b*****d." This represented people confronting the idea that there are people out there who do evil things, and we don't know who they are. We heard about the case and conceived of the suspect as sick, twisted, mentally ill, or just plain evil. That scared us, because it seemed so random. If this man could be like this, couldn't anyone? If his neighbors didn't know, do we know about our neighbors?

If there are this sort of person, and/or the alleged murderer in Cleveland, in the world, and if we cannot know who they are, then the world is random. We don't like random. So, as we process these traumatic events, we must move on to the question of how this could have been prevented. If we can't know who is evil, we must rely on those whose job it is to know for us -- the police, the corrections department, etc. We may come to accept that evil people exist, but we don't want to accept that the police can't protect us from them. So now it is their fault.

It's not that there is no logic to investigating what went wrong in these cases. Obviously, we would like to prevent these things from happening again. But in our rush to investigate and prevent, we shouldn't take our eye off the fact that the people most to blame for these crimes are the people who commited them. No one else should suffer solely because we can't accept the randomness of what they did.

• So far, 34 people have died in today's earthquake.
• In the last 6 years, at least 300,000 people have died and 3 million have been forced to leave their homes because of their ethnicity.
• More than 1,300 children have abnormally high levels of lead in their system due to the malfeasance of 8 local factories.
• Five years ago this week, 334 people, 180 of them children, were killed following a three day hostage-taking standoff at a school.
• A kidnapped girl reappeared after being missing 18 years.
  

Now, let's be honest.  Which one of these incidents did you instantly recognize?  Which ones did you say, "Wait, where did that happen?"

"Where did that happen," is often our instant reaction to bad news.  And, on the whole, that's not an unreasonable question.  If there is a major earthquake at my parents' house, for example, I really would like to know that (and it would really be big news, since major earthquakes are not frequent in Massachusetts).  It seems straightforward and understandable that we want to know whether people we know and love may be in trouble.

If you don't have any relatives or friends in, say, California or Indonesia, for example, why do you care where today's earthquake was?  But you probably do.  There are two explanations for this phenomenon, one more palatable than the other.

The first explanation is that you simply are trying to reassure yourself that not only are your loved ones safe, but that something like this will not happen to you or your loved ones in the future.  An earthquake in California makes us feel, somewhat irrationally, like an earthquake in Massachusetts is more likely.  Certainly a hostage siege in a school in California makes us worry about security in American schools.

The second explanation, which is a little harder to swallow, is that this is not actually about location, but about "alikeness."  When things happen to people "like us" it makes us feel less safe -- and less compassionate -- than when they happen to people who we think are not "like us."  On some level, we even come to imagine that events that would absolutely devastate anyone in this country are not so upsetting to people elsewhere, particularly in non-European, non-prosperous countries.  Somehow, "they" must be used to it.  We may not say these things out loud, or even think them consciously, but they resonate with us.  Call it racism, call it xenophobia, call it American self-centeredness, but we just do not care nearly as much about trauma that happens in other parts of the world.

• Today's earthquake was in Indonesia.  It's not even the top story on CNN as of 12:30 this afternoon.  Imagine what the coverage would be if it were in California.
• The genocide in Darfur, Sudan, is something we know about but which gets next to no daily coverage, nor most people's attention, in this country.
• The factories in China have been shut down until they comply with safety standards.  It's not a "top story" in this country.
• The siege in Beslan, Russia, caught our attention as it was happening and quickly faded from memory.
  
• Imagine what the coverage would be of Jaycee Lee Dugard's story if she were in Senegal, or China, or Belize.  Imagine what it would be if she were African-American. 
  

Distancing ourselves from tragedy is a natural survival mechanism.  Sometimes, unfortunately, we do it at the expense of recognizing the value of other human beings.