By Loren Coleman, MSW
This article is brought to you by The Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI). Visit their website: www.riskinstitute.org
Today’s frenzied style of news coverage with its wall-to-wall “live news,” “breaking news,” and “continuing coverage” has become a modern form of entertainment. The newsroom’s addiction for its own “reality programming” is a relatively recent phenomenon. It all began with CNN, the first news-only network on television, which has been around since 1980. Under Ted Turner’s leadership, CNN was a groundbreaking idea, but it soon became “traditional” in terms of its low-impact, factual reportage of the news. By the mid-1990s, other news services began to promote an even more graphic “breaking news” style that led to today’s MSNBC, Fox News, and other “news” networks. Fox News Network is a babe in these woods, evolving from the news department at Fox TV at the end of the 1996 elections. Everyone is now forced to compete for the latest, breaking horror story. The modern world has given the media just what it wants most.
“I JUST DON’T LIKE MONDAYS”
Media interest in adolescent suicide clusters reached a peak in 1987 with the Bergenfield incident. Then through the early 1990s, stories about teen suicides faded from the national television, magazines, and newspapers. But it was just a matter of time before the media would find a new, ever-more-sensational, youth-oriented death phenomenon. And that would be school shootings.
The “modern era” school rampages goes back to 1979 and Brenda Spencer, a 16year-old girl, allegedly addicted to violent films and killing birds with her bb gun. Her father had given her a .22 semi-automatic for Christmas. Spencer would later remark: “I ask him for a radio and he bought me a gun. I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.”
On January 29, 1979, Spencer pointed her gun out her bedroom window to San Diego’s Cleveland Elementary School across the street. She waited for the principal to open the school. At that point, Spencer began firing on the students who were coming to school. For twenty minutes, she had the students, teachers, and the crossing guard pinned down. During that period, Spencer killed the school principal and the school’s caretaker, as well as wounding nine students, aged 6 to 12. During the next two hours, Brenda Spencer talked to the police and press, before finally surrendering. Explaining to reporters what he had done, she said: “I just started shooting, that’s it. I just did it for the fun of it. I just don’t like Mondays.... I just did it because it’s a way to cheer the day up. Nobody likes Mondays.” She finally surrendered, and was convicted on two counts of murder. Brenda Spencer is serving two 25-to-life sentences.
The Boomtown Rats, an Irish rock group touring America at the time of the Spencer shooting, decided to write a song about the event. “I Don’t Like Mondays” became their most successful and most enduring hit despite the fact that many American radio stations refused to play it.
A decade would pass — almost to the day — before shootings at schools would start to be “news.” On January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy, also known as Patrick West and by other names, returned to the school he had attended 15 years before. But he wasn’t interested in a pleasant homecoming. Instead, Purdy, wearing a t-shirt with the word Satan on it, opened fire at the playground of the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, killing five children and wounding 35 youngsters and a teacher with his AK-47. All were the children of Southeast Asian refugees. Purdy then turned the gun on himself, and died by suicide.
Both the Purdy and Spencer incidents were atypical of the later school shooters pattern. Neither was current member of the student body they attacked, and Spencer was female; most school shooters who caused fatalities in the late 1990s were males who were suicidal. But the era of school shooters was dawning, and it would clearly follow a copycat blueprint attentively “followed,” if not fueled, by the media.
RAGE
Although it attracted little attention by the media at the time, America’s “first” modern school shooting took place on Groundhog’s Day, February 2, 1996, at Moses Lake, Washington State. The Moses Lake killings set the pattern for what would follow in America — a student (not an outsider) killing other students and teachers. This is the horror — the danger from within of students killing students — that appears to have captivated the media. On that day, Barry Loukaitis, 14, dressed all in black, with boots and a long coat that hid his father’s hunting rifle and two handguns, walked into his Frontier Junior High fifth-period algebra class at Moses Lake and started shooting. He has cut the pockets out of his long Western duster and was able to use the .30-.30 lever-action hunting rifle without taking his hands out of the long, black trenchcoat. Loukaitis killed two classmates (Arnold Fritz and Manuel Vela) and then severely wounded another (Natalie Hintz). Hintz, sitting beside the boys, was shot in the stomach, with the bullet traveling through her elbow and almost tearing her right arm off. Next, Loukaitis aimed at the back of his algebra teacher, Leona Caires, and killed her as she was writing an equation on the chalkboard. With the carnage around him and 15 students in the room crying hysterically, Loukaitis calmly turned toward them, smiled and said: “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” The line was a quote from the Stephen King novel, Rage. Physical education teacher Jon M. Lane then rushed into the room, knocked the rifle away from Loukaitis, and wrestled him to the floor to end the shooting.
Loukaitis’s mother told the jury at his widely reported trial that she had treated her son as a confidant, telling him everything. One of these things included her plans to kill herself in front of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, who she was going to kidnap and tie up on Valentine’s Day, 1996. Using advice from the book Rage, young Loukaitis talked her out of it, and encouraged her to write down her anger – “like a play” – thus following Stephen King’s lead. Despite this bit of mature intervention, Loukaitis decided to turn his own suicidal feelings into a homicidal fury based on various cultural clues he had picked up himself.
Loukaitis had planned the shootings carefully, getting ideas, he said, from the Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) book Rage (1977). In it, a troubled high school boy takes a gun to fictional Placerville High School, kills his algebra teacher “Mrs. Underwood,” another school adult “Mr. Vance,” and takes the algebra class hostage. Police would find a collection of Stephen King’s books in Loukaitis’ bedroom, including his well-worn copy of Rage.
The Rage scenario had been played out before in real life. At Valley High School, Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 19, 1982, after algebra teacher Clarence Piggot refused to cancel a public speaking assignment; 17-year-old Patrick Lizotte gunned him down. Patrick also wounded two other 17-year-old students during his rampage. He left the school and was killed nearby during a shootout with the police. On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, 17, took his senior English class captive at East Carter High School, in Grayson, Kentucky. He killed his teacher and a custodian. Pennington would tell investigators later that he only read Rage after the shooting. In 1997, Rage would be linked to another shooting. A copy of Rage was found in the locker of Michael Carneal, a high school shooter in West Paducah, Kentucky.
Stephen King discussed the role of Rage after the Loukaitis shootings and eventually King apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published. Finally in 1999, he told his publisher to pull it from publication and took it out-of-print. He told the Today Show’s Katie Couric: “I took a look at Rage and said to myself, if this book is acting as any sort of accelerate, if it’s having any effect on any of these kids at all, I don’t want anything to do with it, regardless of what may be the moral and legal rights and wrongs. Even talking about it makes me nervous.”
Other pop-culture items influenced the Loukaitis rampage. He had rented Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) seven times, and got the idea for the long black coat and black outfit from that movie. From A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, he crafted his hardened personal desperado manner. During the month-long trial that began on August 24, 1997, the focus was on what became known as the “Pearl Jam Defense.” Loukaitis had memorized the words and overly identified with the character in the rock video, “Jeremy.” The 1992 video, played often on MTV, showed a shirtless boy who comes to school and leaves his classmates covered in blood. The video and song were based on an actual 1990 incident, in which Jeremy Wade Delle, 15, of Richardson, Texas, walked into an English classroom at Richardson High School, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger, dying by suicide in front of 30 students. “Jeremy spoke in class today” became the famous line from the award-winning Pearl Jam video (the 1993 MTV Video of the Year) that young people across the country would say to each other. The media noted that the Delle suicide of January 8, 1990, appeared to come during the tail end of a media feeding frenzy on teen suicides. Where teen suicides ended, school shooting picked up.
In Teenage Rampage, British crime author Antonio Mendoza reflected on the fact that violence in American schools was really nothing new, but it changed with the Barry Loukaitis incident: “Loukaitis’s rampage at Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington, was the first in a series of school assaults in rural communities during the late 90s that were chillingly similar and fearfully effective. All perpetrators were excessively well-armed, white, middle-class youngsters and their meticulously crafted plans of attack yielded increasingly higher body counts. Their rosy cheeks, freckled faces and seemingly ‘boy next door’ looks made the perpetrators objects of worldwide media attention, changing forever the concept of school shootings.”
IN THE WAKE OF BARRY
The Loukaitis shootings reverberated in Moses Lake for some time and became the national model for future school rampages. Six months after the incident, a local 14year-old broke into a home, yelled the name Loukaitis, shot off rounds from a hunting rifle, held a man hostage, and then gave up to the police. And almost year after the Loukaitis killings, victim Arnold Fritz’s cousin, Aaron Harmon, 14, a 9th grader at Chief Moses Junior High School, shot and killed his 9-year-old stepsister, his mother, and himself at their Moses Lake home on December 7, 1996. Distressed over the death of his cousin – whom he considered a brother — at the hands of Loukaitis, Harmon decided to employ the same method for his rampage, a hunting rifle.
About a week after the Loukaitis shootings, on February 8, 1996, Douglas Bradley, 16, a student at Mid-Peninsula Education Center, a high school in Palo Alto, California, drove his car onto an outdoor basketball court, threw money out the window so a group of students would gather, and the fired on them with a .38 revolver, injuring three. He then turned the gun on himself, and killed himself. On March 11, 1996, just before taking a quiz in an algebra class — a subtle link to Loukaitis — at the North Stanly, New London, North Carolina, Jamie Hurley, 15, took his own life with a 9mm pistol that he had hidden in his coat.
Two days later, a copycat occurred overseas. On March 13, 1996, in Dunblane, Scotland, “loner” Thomas Hamilton, 43, entered a school kindergarten class and killed 16 children, the class’s teacher, and then himself. Hamilton, a dismissed local Boy Scout leader who had a history of unstable behavior, took four minutes to commit this rampage, one of the worst in the United Kingdom’s history. Hamilton’s age was atypical of the copycat pattern of school shootings. Then on September 25, 1996, David Dubose, Jr., 16, at the Dekalb Alternative School, Scottsdale, Georgia, used a .38 revolver to kill English teacher Horace Morgan.
After the Loukaitis incident, the next “nationally publicized” shooting took place on February 19, 1997, at Bethel Regional High School in Bethel, Alaska, which had been a hotspot of suicide clusters a decade earlier. When student Evan Ramsey, 16, was feeling suicidal in 1997, he went to two 14-year-old friends and asked them what he should do. The boys said that if he was going to kill himself, he should take some people with him. On February 19, Ramsey did just that, killing a star athlete, Joshua Palacios, and wounding two others, with a 12-guage shotgun. Then Ramsey went to the administration office and shot and killed the principal, Ronald Edwards. State police arrived and ended the rampage; they also arrested as accomplices the two friends who had discussed Ramsey’s plan with him.
RURAL RAMPAGES
By the fall of 1997, school shooting would become horribly routine, almost as if some kind of copycat contagion was occurring. Of course, it was.
On October 1, 1997, in Pearl, Mississippi, Luke Woodham, 16, a self-styled Satanist and Adolph Hitler worshipper, stabbed his mother to death in the morning, and then drove to his Pearl High School. There he used a rifle to kill two students, former girlfriend Christina Menefee, 16, and Lydia Dew, 17, and to wound seven others. He only stopped because he ran out of ammunition. When he returned to his car for his other gun, the assistant principal disarmed him. Two members of his “Hitler” group were charged as accessories to murder; others were arrested on the basis of a conspiracy, but these charges were later dismissed.
Exactly two months later, on December 1, 1997, at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal, 14, killed three students (Jessica James, 17, Kayce Steger, 15, and Nicole Hadley, 14) and wounded five as they participated in a prayer circle. Another student tackled the black-attired Carneal, and the police found that he had a pistol, two rifles, and two shotguns, along with 700 rounds of ammunition, all of it stolen. A copy of Stephen King’s Rage was found in his locker at school.
On December 15, 1997, a similar scenario unfolded in Stamps, Arkansas. While hiding in the woods, Joseph “Colt” Todd, 14, shot two students as they stood in the parking lot. This appears to have been the direct model for the next shooting, also from Arkansas. On March 24, 1998, at Jonesboro, Arkansas, at the Westside Middle School, Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, both wearing camouflage, used rifles to shoot at their classmates and teachers from the woods. Four students (Natalie Brooks, 12, Paige Ann Herring, 12, Stephanie Johnson, 12, and Britthney Varner, 12) and one teacher (Shannon Wright, 32) were killed, while ten others were wounded outside as the school emptied during a false fire alarm set off by Golden. The boys had a van stocked full of ammunition and guns, which they took from their relatives. The next day (March 25) in Coldwater, Michigan, and almost a week after (March 30) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a 18-year-old male, and a 13-year-old female, respectively, shot themselves to death with guns at their separate schools.
About a month later, on April 24, 1998, Andrew Wurst, 14, killed teacher John Gillette and wounded two students and another teacher at the eighth-grade graduation dance at James W. Parker Middle School in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The banquet hall owner went after him, disarmed him, and held him for police, but the boy acted as if the whole thing was a big joke. On May 19, 1998, at Fayetteville, Tennessee, one student was killed in the parking lot at Lincoln County High School three days before he was to graduate. The victim was dating the ex-girlfriend of his killer, 18-year-old honor student Jacob Davis.
The imitation occurring in these copycat events was taking place both on the large scale and the small scale. On the macro level, the shootings were largely taking place in rural setting — in Washington State, Alaska, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Arkansas. And at the micro-level, all involved suicidal-homicidal young males with guns.
Three days after the Fayetteville incident, on May 21, 1998 at Springfield, Oregon, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel used a semiautomatic rifle to kill two students (Mikael Nikolauson, 17, Ben Walker, 16) and wound 22 others in the cafeteria at Thurston High School. He was disarmed and taken to the police station, where he withdrew a hidden knife. He claimed he wanted to die. Police officers who went to his home discovered that he had killed both of his parents and had booby-trapped the house with five homemade bombs - one of which he’d placed underneath his mother’s corpse. His classmates had once dubbed him the student “most likely to start World War III.”
On the same day, May 21, 1998, 200 miles due south, at the end of the school day, Miles Fox, 15, a student of Onalaska High School, Onalaska, Washington, took a young woman hostage from his bus to his home, and died by suicide from a shot to his head. As the story aired on the radio and television, Ricardo Martin, 15, shot himself with a .38 caliber pistol and died on the campus of Rialto High School, in Rialto, California.
As the school year was ending, on June 15, 1998, a 14-year-old boy wounded one teacher and a guidance counselor in a school hallway in Richmond, Virginia, Both survived.
The fall of 1998 would be relatively calm, though copycat suicides would pop up in Texas again. A 15-year-old shot himself on January 1, 1999, in the locker room at Richland Hills High School, in Fort Worth. Then on January 21, 1999, in the locker room at Richland High School in North Richland Hills, Texas, 15-year-old Randall James fatally shoot himself. Meanwhile, on April 16, 1999, Shawn Cooper, 16, of Notus, Idaho, rode the bus to school with a shotgun wrapped in a blanket. He pointed the gun at classmates and a secretary, and then shot twice into a door and at the floor. He had a death list, but told one girl he wouldn’t hurt anyone. He surrendered.
COLUMBINE
Then the nightmare of April 1999 occurred.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed one teacher and 12 students and wounded 23 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Focusing their attack on the cafeteria, Harris and Klebold spoke German and worn trench coats, as they reenacted scenes from Matrix and The Basketball Diaries in the nation’s deadliest school shooting. They had plotted for a year to kill at least 500 and blow up their school. At the end of their hour-long rampage, they turned their guns on themselves.
Harris and Klebold appeared to have deliberately chosen the anniversary date of Hitler’s Birthday for their attack. At one point, Harris and Klebold had considered the highly important date of April 19, too – the anniversary of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing – but transportation problems forced a delay in their plans. They finally carried out their attack on the 20th – speaking German and “honoring” Hitler. (They had also discussed that after the attack, they would hijack a jetliner, fly it from Colorado, and crash it into Manhattan. This was two years before the terror of 2001.)
In the wake of the shootings in Littleton, the nation’s schools were under attack by copycats. Some 400 related incidents were reported in the month following the killings. “Across the nation after the 1999 Columbine tragedy,” noted Court TV’s Katherine Ramsland, “other kids called in bomb threats, wore trench coats to school, or used the Internet to praise what Klebold and Harris had done. Only ten days later, on April 30, people feared the eruption of some major event because that day marked Hitler’s suicide in 1945. Schools in Arizona, New Jersey, Michigan, North Carolina, and DC closed to investigate potential threats. It wasn’t Paducah, or Jonesboro, or Springfield that they wanted to imitate; the mantra was ‘Columbine.’”
One week after Columbine, on April 28, 1999, one student, Jason Lang, 17, was killed, and one wounded at W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta, Canada. This was the first fatal high school shooting in Canada in 20 years. The shooter was a 14-yearold boy. Exactly a month after Columbine, on May 20, 1999, at Conyers, Georgia, six students were injured at Heritage High School when classmate Thomas Solomon, 15, opened fire. No one died. Witnesses reported that Solomon placed the revolver in his mouth as if to shoot himself, but he did not pull the trigger.
On November 19, 1999, Victor Cordova Jr., 12, shot and killed Araceli Tena, 13, in the lobby of Deming Middle School in Deming, New Mexico. At Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, on December 6, 1999, four students were wounded as Seth Trickey, 13, opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun at Fort Gibson Middle School.
A year later experts began to reflect on Columbine and its aftermath. “It used to be the most common type of this violence was in the family,” mass murder expert James Alan Fox told the New York Times. “Now it’s no longer true. It’s in the workplace and in the schools.”
Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, commented: “The link between suicide and homicide is a very real one, and it hasn’t been studied nearly enough. It has always struck me about Columbine, people forget they died by suicide. And that’s understandable — it was the least important thing from the public point of view.”
Pondering Columbine and the murder-suicide rampages, Philip Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University, who has studied social contagions, told the New York Times: “The transmission mechanism seems to be nothing more or less than that it’s an idea that’s in the air. So you have these kind of catastrophic consequences from what seems a minor change in the environment.”
“Why do you get a lot of people doing the same thing?” said Joseph Westermeyer, a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota who has studied epidemics of explosive murder in other cultures. “I think there is this copycat element.”
COLUMBINE GOES INTERNATIONAL
After Littleton, the copycat effect involving school shootings went global. On December 7, 1999, in Veghel, Netherlands, a 17-year-old student wounded one teacher and three students. During March 2000, in Branneburg, Germany, one teacher killed by a 15-year-old student, who then shot himself. The shooter has been in a coma ever since. On January 18, 2001, two boys, ages 17 and 19, killed a student in Jan, Swedden in an unusual school shooting that shocked that usually nonviolent country.
In 2002, Europe was rocked with massive school shootings. In Germany, on February 19, 2002, a young man at the factory from which he had been fired killed two in Eching. He then traveled to Freising and killed the headmaster of the technical school from which he had been expelled. He also wounded another teacher before killing himself. On April 26, 2002, at Erfurt, Germany, Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, stalked the halls of the Johann Gutenberg secondary school, pinpointing certain teachers. Before he was finished, he had killed 13 teachers, two students, and one policeman and wounded ten other people, then killed himself. (Six weeks later, a student that was in the school and who witnessed Steinhaeuser’s rampage, died by suicide, according to German press reports of June 14, 2002.)
The German media would report that the Erfurt killings were not as impulsive as originally thought. Steinhaeuser deliberately chose the date of Rudolf Hess’s birthday for the Erfurt school shootings. Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, was born on April 26, 1894, in Alexandria, Egypt. Hate groups throughout Germany, especially neo-Nazis, celebrate April 26th because it is Hess’s birthday. Hess has become a hero of neo-Nazis. Today, more neo-Nazis come to Hess’s grave on August 17th, than come to Hitler’s grave on his birthday, April 20th. The date of Hess’s suicide, August 17th, has also witnessed increased neo-Nazi activity (in the form of parades and demonstrations) in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and other European countries in recent years. On August 17, 2001, for example, about 800 neo-Nazis marched through the Bavarian birthplace of Rudolf Hess, Wunsiedel, to mark the 14th anniversary of his death. Several of these banned marches have turned into confrontations with the police.
Three days after the Erfurt shooting, Dragoslav Petkovic, 17, killed one teacher and wounded another before killing himself in Vlasenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Then, on July 1, 2003, a 16-year-old pupil killed himself in a German school classroom after shooting a teacher in the thigh. No other children or staff were injured in the incident in the secondary school in the northern Bavarian town of Coburg.
The international trend continues. On January 13, 2004, an economics teacher and deputy headmaster was shot in the head and killed at the Terra College school canteen in The Hague, Netherlands. The unidentified 17-year-old shooter was said to be a disgruntled student who had been suspended from school, according to a Radio 1 newscast. The country was in shock; this was the second school shooting of the new year in the Netherlands.
AMERICAN SCHOOL SHOOTINGS INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
School shootings continued in America after Columbine. The deaths by school shootings showed a gradual increase from 1996 to 1999, and then a sudden jump. In the post-Columbine era, school and city officials realized for the first time that dealing with at-risk youth – whether suicidal, angry, or impulsive – might prevent more school shootings. After Columbine, the United States Secret Service studied school shootings, and in March 2001, declared that zero tolerance punishments, such as expelling students who worn trench coats, was the wrong approach. That simply sent the youths out of schools, only to return later with guns and cause a rampage. The US Secret Service study mentioned that a majority of the student shooters were suicidal and knew about previous shootings.
Youth advocates began to discuss the excessive, and often irresponsible, coverage of school shootings. Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice president Vincent Schiraldi told Youth Beat reporters LynNell Hancock and Donna Ladd in 2002 that the media are creating youth-violence connections where they do not exist and giving the public a distorted picture of young people in America. “The media really have no clue as to how to deal with this at this point. And I’m not sure many in the media are concerned,” he said about the “wall-to-wall coverage” of the school shootings. “What’s the plan here, guys?”
Suicide prevention trainings increased, but the copycat factor received little attention. Before September 11, 2001, media attention seemed focused on what school shooting might be next. When the terrorist attack occurred, a virtual media blackout kept other violence out of the news. But, in fact, there were no shooting rampages in American schools during the entire scholastic year 2001-2002. Little did the media notice or comment on the fact that school shootings had decreased so precipitously when they weren’t reporting on them.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The media remain under-educated or uninformed about the copycat effect and what they can do to prevent it. As clinical psychologist Madelyn Gould noted in the American Behavioral Scientist in 2003, while discussing a recent survey of journalists, “Many reporters did not appreciate the potential for suicidal contagion as a result of newspaper stories. Those who had heard about the phenomenon expressed doubts about its validity.”
Despite the atmosphere of media denial and skepticism, attempts have been made to get a handle on the media’s propagation of copycats. In 1989, groups of prevention experts gathered to make recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control, beginning with the media guidelines that might help diminish the contagion when reporting suicides. Many of the strategies they proposed apply just as well to all the violent acts of the copycat effect. From those early meetings, of which I was a part, in 1994 project director Patrick W. O’Carroll, M.D., M.P.H. Office of the Director Office of Program Support of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) formalized a series of copyright-free government recommendations (“Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide”) that were published and reproduced widely, so that members of the media would be aware of them and hopefully follow them.
These recommendations, for example, pointed out that certain types of coverage (graphic, photographic, sensational) stimulated copycat suicides, and that responsible mass media might do well to minimize such representations. The guidelines indicated that it was undesirable for the media to present and report “how-to” descriptions of suicides, and describe technical details about the method of suicide. Glorifying suicide or persons who commit suicide, the CDC concluded, often leads to more suicides.
Out of these findings, in 1995 the CDC, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, American Association of Suicidology, and other prevention organizations, issued more specific recommendations for the media, noting, for instance, that the language the media used to describe suicides could contribute to “suicide contagion” or “copycat” suicides.
The World Health Organization then adapted many of the recommendations of the CDC, Gould, and others, and came out in the late 1990s with further guidelines aimed at the media. They felt the media could play a proactive role in helping to prevent suicide by publishing many of these recommendations, in addition to listing helpline phone numbers and focusing on messages of sympathy for the grieving survivors.
Despite hopes that these media guidelines would be rapidly implemented, the reality was otherwise. Suicides are still sensationalized by the media, and suicide clusters have continued to occur in 2002 and 2003 from California to Connecticut, and from Maine to Florida.
The worth of such guidelines has been confirmed, unintentionally, by “accidental censorship” events like news strikes. Several studies conducted by suicidologists in the 1980s and 1990s found that age- and gender-linked suicides do decrease during “suicide blackout periods” caused by newspaper strikes. Strict implementation of media guidelines, in a case that verges on censorship, works also. Finding itself in the middle of an “epidemic” of subway suicides in Vienna, Austria implemented media guidelines for suicide news reporting developed by the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention in 1987. During the first year, an immediate significant decline (7%) in suicide rates occurred. In the 4-year period following the forced removal of “suicide stories” from the newspapers, the overall suicide rate decreased nearly 20%, with an even sharper decline (75%) in subway-suicides (the specific focus of the media guidelines).
For a while in the wake of the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, when a virtual media moratorium occurred with regard to reporting school shootings and workplace rampages because the mass media concentrated mostly on terrorism and war, the number of copycat incidents of these kinds of rampage shootings dropped to almost zero in the United States. By 2003, however, the media had returned to reporting sensational stories of local violence, again feeding the copycat effect frenzies of the recent past.
Suicides, murder-suicides, and murders – the events that are at the core of the most negative projections of the copycat effect — will remain newsworthy in the eyes of the media in the foreseeable future and will continue to be reported. So what, short of self-censorship, should the media do to halt the contagion of the copycat effect? While the recommendations of prevention experts during the last two decades have applied specifically to suicides, I have generalized them so that they also apply to all forms of violence that fall under the media-driven propagation of the copycat effect.
Here then are my seven recommendations:
The media must be more aware of the power of their words. Using words like “successful” sniper attacks, suicides, and bridge jumpers, and “failed” murder-suicides, for example, clearly suggest to viewers and readers that someone should keep trying again until they “succeed.” We may wish to “succeed” in relationships, sports, and jobs, but we do not want rampage or serial killers, architects of murder-suicide, and suicide bombers to make further attempts after “failing.” Words are important. Even the use of “suicide” or “rampage” in headlines, news alerts, and breaking bulletins should be reconsidered.
The media must drop their clichéd stories about the “nice boy next door” or the “lone nut.” The copycat violent individual is neither mysterious nor healthy, or usually an overachiever. They are often a fatal combination of despondency, depression, and mental illness. School shooters are suicidal youth that slipped through the cracks, but it is a complex issue, nevertheless. People are not simple. The formulaic stories are too often too simplistic.
The media must cease its graphic and sensationalized wall-to-wall commentary and coverage of violent acts and the details of the actual methods and places where they occur. Photographs of murder victims, tapes of people jumping off bridges, and live shots of things like car chases ending in deadly crashes, for example, merely glamorize these deaths, and create models for others – down to the method, the place, the timing, and the type of individual involved. Even fictional entertainment, such as the screening of The Deer Hunter, provides vivid copycatting stimuli for vulnerable, unstable, angry, and depressed individuals.
The media should show more details about the grief of the survivors and victims (without glorifying the death), highlight the alternatives to the violent acts, and mention the relevant background traits that may have brought this event to this deathly end. They should also avoid setting up the incident as a logical or reasonable way to solve a problem.
The media must avoid ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural stereotypes in portraying the victims or the perpetrators. Why set up situations that like-minded individuals (e.g. neo-Nazis) can use as a roadmap for a future rampages against similar victims?
The media should never publish a report on suicide or murder-suicide without adding the protective factors, such as the contact information for hot lines, help lines, soft lines, and other available community resources, including email addresses, websites, and phone numbers. To run a story on suicide or a gangland murder without thinking about the damage the story can do is simply not responsible. It’s like giving a child a loaded gun. The media should try to balance such stories with some concern and consideration for those who may use it to imitate the act described.
- And finally, the media should reflect more on their role in creating our increasingly violent society. Honest reporting on the positive nature of being alive in the 21st century might actually decrease the negative outcomes of the copycat effect, and create a wave of self-awareness that this life is rather good after all. Most of our lives are mundane, safe, and uneventful. This is something that an alien watching television news from outer space, as they say, would never know. The media should “get real,” and try to use their influence and the copycat effect to spread a little peace, rather than mayhem.
© Loren Coleman 2004, 2006, 2007
NY: Simon and Schuster/Paraview Pocket, 2004.
Adapted from Chapter 11: School Shootings/Chapter 17: Recommendations
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Loren Coleman is an International Consultant on the Copycat Effect. He is the author, coauthor, and/or editor of over 25 books, including Suicide Clusters (Faber and Faber, 1987) and The Copycat Effect (Simon and Schuster, 2004). Suicide Clusters was a Psychotherapy and Social Science Book Club selection, and Coleman appeared on many programs, including “The Larry King Show” discussing it. His work on the suicides of baseball players, specifically Angels pitcher Donnie Moore, was covered in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and The Sporting News, plus on television programs such as ESPN’s Sports Center (in 1989) and ESPN Classics (in 2001). As a consultant to the State of Maine Gatekeeper Suicide Prevention Program, he has trained 11,000 professionals and paraprofessionals in the last decade. For more information on The Copycat Effect, please visit www.copycateffect.com.
In January 2006, PERI held a free online symposium to explore strategies for addressing violence in our nation’s schools. The program, entitled “Confronting Violence in Our Schools: Planning, Response, and Recovery,” offered practical advice for dealing with school violence — not just the high profile incidents that make headlines but the real issues of school violence that schools and communities face everyday.
The Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI) is a nonprofit research organization that provides education and training resources on topics related to risk management and emergency management. PERI’s website, www.riskinstitute.org, offers free E-Training programs and a Publications, Tools, and Resources library with information on emergency planning and response, disaster recovery, school safety, workers’ compensation, and other key topics in risk management. PERI’s also maintains a national database of public sector liability and workers’ compensation claims data for benchmarking and performance measurement. The Data Exchange is a voluntary program that allows participating organizations to compare their liability and workers’ compensation losses with their peers and learn from other jurisdictions.
