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57   3 Violence against Girls In October 1997, Luke Woodham beat and stabbed his mother to death before hiding a gun under his coat and making his way to his Pearl, Mississippi, high school, where he killed two students and wounded seven others. His main target, he said, was his first victim, his ex-girlfriend Christina Menefee. “I shot Christina,” he later said. “I never really knew why the others got shot. It just happened.”1 In a taped confession, Luke said that his mother had never loved him: “She always told me I wouldn’t amount to anything. She always told me that I was fat and stupid and lazy.” He cited the unrelenting bullying he endured at school, where “people always picked on me. They always called me gay and stupid, stuff like that.” But a primary trigger for the rampage, he made clear, was his ex-girlfriend’s rejection: “She’d always flirt with other guys. She always did that kind of crap, right to my face. She’d always tell me how cute other guys were, and all this kind of crap, and it just gets to you. I mean, I loved her, and she just didn’t care.”2 At his trial, Luke described the devastation he had felt when Christina Menefee broke up with him a year earlier. “I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t want to live,” he sobbed. “It destroyed me.” Luke acknowledged that he had been influenced by the leader of a group of boys who were into Satan—but even in that context he remained focused on the rejection. He told a psychologist that the older boy “said he knew I had been hurt by Christina, and that there was a way to get revenge. He said Satan was the way.”3 In interviews following his shooting and in his own written manifestos, Luke conveyed his belief that by using violence he could stop being a tormented victim and prove he was strong and “manly,” capable of making others quiver in his presence. “One second I was some kind of heartbroken idiot,” he declared, “and the next second I had the power over many things.”4 He explained that he had been told too often that he was weak and ineffectual—not masculine, but “gay.” He wrote, in an apparent effort 58  Violence against Girls to sound like Nietzsche: “I am not spoiled or lazy, for murder is not weak and slow-witted. Murder is gutsy and daring.”5 Luke was not the only shooter who tried to prove his masculinity by shooting his ex-girlfriend. Perpetrators targeted girls who rejected them in many of the school shooting cases. Violence against girls has not gotten the attention it deserves as a dominant feature of these crimes. Examining this violence closely also reveals high levels of sexual harassment and dating violence as antecedents to the shootings. These behaviors are too often perceived as normal aspects of teenage life, but in fact they constitute some of the most devastating expressions of our students’ surveillance of one another as members of the gender police. Violence against Girls and School Shootings Crime statistics have shown that boys under eighteen commit a significant proportion of sexual offenses, including 25 percent of all rapes and 50 percent of known child sexual abuse cases.6 Sexual harassment is a norm in many schools, and dating violence is much more common than people realize. A 2001 national study, by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), of students in the eighth to eleventh grades documents the wide range of harassing behaviors students experienced, from sexual comments, jokes and gestures, to sexual rumors and graffiti, to flashing and mooning, to touching, grabbing, and pinching. Some students reported having their clothing pulled off, being physically blocked or cornered , and being forced to kiss or perform other sexual acts.7 Adults in many schools often ignore or don’t notice these practices.8 The tendency to write off less extreme behaviors as “normal” may obscure many of the warning signs leading to serious crimes. In the case of many of the school shootings, this attitude may have allowed the shooters’ peers, and the adults around them, to explain away the many small incidents that preceded the shootings. Even after the fact, many were reluctant to view the shootings as intimately linked to dating violence and sexual harassment. A closer examination, however...

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