Violent Victim
How do we deal with the violent victim? Who is to blame? What do we do with him? Prison? Isolation? Execution? We want to deal with him swiftly and put him out of mind. Something inside horrifies.
When you read about a “monster” committing a mass shooting, he – it is virtually always “he” – you usually don’t read about him beginning life innocent, loving, and trusting. In those first years of total dependency, if the most basic needs are neglected, he heads for a rough ride through life.
Trauma-Centered Teaching
Teachers need to understand the connection between Adverse Childhood Experiences(ACEs) and emotional, social, and academic problems. It is important to empathetically manage the behavior of students with symptoms of developmental trauma.
I can’t remember a student I considered a discipline problem. I saw students acting out as a cry for acceptance. I tried to offer a feeling of worth and acceptance. I cannot recall a student who did not respond positively, each in their own way.
But it was the proverbial blind leading the blind. Of course, I wish I knew then all that I have learned so I could go back in time and correct egregious blunders.
I was a mild looking, monstrously violent man who came close to killing on more than one occasion. Before I was eight years old I thought of making a long fuse from our second story apartment out into the alley two stories down. I would turn on the gas as my parents and sister slept, leave the house, and light the fuse. But I did not want to kill my sister.
Remembering Kip Kinkel
On May 20, 1998, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel was suspended pending an expulsion hearing from Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. He loved his parents and did not want them to know. So he killed them. In a note Kinkel left on a coffee table in the living room, he described his motive for killing his parents: “I just got two felonies on my record. My parents can’t take that! It would destroy them. The embarrassment would be too much for them. They couldn’t live with themselves.” “I had to do it. There was no other way,” he tells the police interviewer.
On May 21, 1998 he drove his mother’s car near his school and killed two students and injured twenty-five others school on a shooting rampage in the school cafeteria.
Listen to the recorded police interview. Put it up loud, because the recording is poor.
On September 24, 1999, three days before jury selection was set to begin, Kinkel pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder, forgoing the possibility of being acquitted by reason of insanity. In November 1999, Kinkel was sentenced to 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
He is into his third decade in prison. Is he the same person who did the shooting? Isn’t a 15-year-old yet a work in progress?
After two years in Reading Goal (Redding Prison) for his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal.
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother’s life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed and cries to Time.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
