More than two decades after the first national nightmare of a school shooting at Columbine, the media has raised a generation of children whose trauma has been strutted out and weaponized for political expedience.
The school shooting question surely involves the debate about gun control. No one denies that looser access to guns, either legally or illegally, is risk factor in school shootings. But in the aftermath of Columbine, the media focused on the more fundamental question of the tragedy: why?
20 years ago, we had a far more healthy response to what was the first mass school shooting. This Newsweek editorial is evidence of that. We had begun to study how such violence was the result of mental illness and culture. pic.twitter.com/6p1Qi7zxJi
— ART TAVANA (@arttavana) April 20, 2019
Today we can expect calls for gun control in the same breath that announces the horror of a new school shooting. Calling for vast policy proposals that probably wouldn’t have prevented a shooting while the bodies are still warm is bad enough, but in the last two years, things have taken a turn for the exploitative.
In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., the media tried a new playbook. Rather than just simply calling for gun control themselves, they gathered 16-year-olds who had just seen their friends get murdered in cold blood to discuss policy on national television. You see, cable news hosts insist they don’t have policy preferences so it’s far better to put children on stage to voice your policy preferences for you?
The schtick is irresponsible from a journalistic perspective, but it’s evil from a mental health one. The kids of Parkland never had the opportunity to process their trauma in private. Instead they traded shock and horror for the vicissitudes of the public spotlight. We already know that Hollywood destroys the lives of perfectly normal kids who become child actors. The consequences of fame for traumatized teenagers may be even more destructive.
Within just one week this year, two Stoneman Douglas students killed themselves. One, a recent graduate, suffered from PTSD and survivor’s guilt. The family of the other, a 16-year-old who still attended Stoneman Douglas, declined to disclose the reason behind his suicide.
Stoneman Douglas teacher Kim Krawczyk reportedly warned that the school wasn’t handling the mental health ramifications of the shooting. BuzzFeed News, which spoke with Krawczyk in both June 2018 and earlier this year, reported:
‘The kids would have to repeat their story, what they saw over and over,’ she said at the time.
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Two had started cutting themselves, she said. One sophomore was so emotionally incapacitated she ‘was homebound and studying there,’ she added. Two others had exhibited such concerning behavior authorities had to get involved.
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She’s losing more students each day, too. After the shooting’s anniversary, four dropped out, bringing her total up to eight since the school year started.
Trauma always inflicts damage, regardless of the circumstances. But between CNN Town Halls dragging kids into public instead of letting them process their trauma and a school district so obviously inept, Parkland almost engineered the perfect storm to brew a mental-health crisis. With the presence of social media and all eyes of the actual media firmly focused on Stoneman Douglas, the Werther effect, the suicide contagion phenomenon named after the Goethe novel, runs the risk of metastasizing in real time.
The media have exploited vulnerable children for other political causes. The global climate change movement have lionized 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden as a hero of the movement for her Friday school strikes “for climate.” While I have to grant Thunberg credit for devising the most innovative way to cut class once a week and earn applause for it, I worry for her in earnest. Thunberg has both Aspergers and OCD so debilitating that when she first became obsessed with climate change at age 12, she stopped eating and talking. While she’s not dealing with the same trauma as the Parkland kids, the media’s playbook is the same with her, nonetheless.
Twenty years after Columbine, we’ve still failed to scrape the surface of the many facets that led to the massacre. Gun laws and regulations may be a part of that, and students affected by the violence ought to feel free to participate in the discussion. But rage, heartbreak, and even righteous indignation do not confer actual authority, and the media’s attempts to use traumatized children as their mouthpieces ought to be called out for compounding exploitation upon fame upon trauma.
