Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m struck by how many layers a story from another country has proven to have.
Same.
One thing I’ve progressively become less comfortable with over the last few days is the focus on the mental health or otherwise of the perpetrator. What worries me is that it becomes easy to say
“oh well he was xxxx, and therefore we don’t have to worry about anyone else unless they are xxxx”
It frames the discussion that excludes the possibility that the trait in question has nothing to do with the crime. -
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
Excellent question. What say we take that really seriously and find out what the hell’s going on with those men?
It's one of the deeply frustrating things about mass murderers (for criminologists) they almost always commit suicide. That leaves the investigators mostly guessing at what went on in the killer's heads. It's made even more difficult because they are outliers, they don't fit inside normal behaviour models they don't have the normal motivations. It makes empathy very difficult, it makes analysis very difficult.
Most of the discussions here and elsewhere make the assumption that if you can shift the average behaviour towards a less violent and volatile point then you will have fewer of these outliers. But it's really difficult to know if that would be true.
On a bad day I tend to think that there will always be people willing to commit crimes like this most recent tragedy, on a good day I think we'll understand behaviour so well we will be able to predict and cure such aberrant thinking.
But for now we can't predict and treat so it seems to me that the only thing to do is limit the harm they can do when they appear. Evidence suggests arming the population en mass does not help reduce the harm so I'd suggest we don't do that.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
“This just feels like an insult to both games and the people we lost.”
The young man is right. These kinds of arguments always come out just after another gun related tragedy. You also see lots of mental health discussion at this time too. Yet neither video games nor mental health have any statistically significant association with gun deaths. It's almost as if there were a group of people trying to distract the discussion away from the issue of gun control.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Incidence of being male = 50%; incidence of firearm related death = <0.1%.
The relevence of gender to gun violence seems statistically very poor.
Incidence of being male 50%; incidence of running 100m in less than 10 seconds <.1%, correlation between male and ability to run 100m in under 10 seconds 100%
Stats.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
But let’s use that to do a better job of raising them, and explaining hyper-masculine culture
That's what I'm saying!
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
But what does this actually MEAN? In practical terms?
It means recognising that some approaches just won't work. In the same way that you as a parent know full well that demanding your child sit still and just learn for 8 hours and don't move would be a stupid approach.
All I'm saying is understand that testosterone has an influence on behaviour and adapt your teaching methods to account for that. It doesn't have to be dumb.
The simple fact is men commit most of the violent crime and the most violent crimes. You argue that it is a failure to raise our boys properly and I agree. Where we differ is that I argue that some of the failure is because we don't properly understand and account for the effects of testosterone and the male biology on behaviour. I'm not suggesting doing dumb things.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
is that testosterone is why you’re very unlikely to ever see a society where violent crime is skewed female (or even 50/50)
Yup. And the corrolary is that if you want to address violent crime you have to understand and work with the effects of testosterone, not ignore it.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
weren’t generally aggressive, testosterone types
Most folks assume the effect of testosterone is to produce big bulky males eg TV wrestlers. That is the effect of externally applied drugs. Endogenous (self produced) testosterone is much more complex in its effects. There is no question that the increase of testosterone during male puberty alters brain development. Decision making shows distinct male/female differences.
Again the question was why is it always boys? If you seriously believe testosterone has no role in this then we will simply disagree.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Ana Simkiss,
It is up to the courts, ultimately the Supreme Court.
Yes. But the court can only rule after a law is made and then challenged. Thus far none of the laws made by states to limit access to semi automatic weapons have been overturned by the supreme court.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
I don’t buy “the hormones made him do it”
That isn't what I said. I said that testosterone make males different from females and is almost certainly the difference that make males more violent than females and almost certainly the difference that means men commit these crimes more than women.
I entirely agree it isn't an excuse for violence. But I do think any attempt to address violence in society, particularly by males, must take into account the effect on behaviour of this hormone. The numbers are too stark to simply dismiss it as failure to raise boys properley, which is not what you said but if you ignore the biology then you are putting it all on the parents and society.
I am in no way suggesting it is an appropriate excuse, nor am I describing it as a particularly good trait.