By Julianne McShane
Days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, staff from Men as Peacemakers, a Minnesota group that works with students to break down gender stereotypes and reduce violence, checked out how participants felt.
The mostly white students, reflecting the state's demographics, talked about the lockdown drills they had practiced at school, but their responses weren't very emotional, recalled Serrano Robinson, coordinator of the group's youth restoration program.
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The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, "sadly seemed normal to them," he said.
As civic leaders and politicians search for ways to stop mass shootings, activists from organizations across the country like Men as Peacemakers say their work is vital to overcoming the toxic masculinity that research shows is at the root of many. mass shootings and other acts of violence perpetrated by men.
Research suggests that these types of programs may be key to fostering healthier emotional expression in youth, breaking down gender stereotypes, and ultimately reducing violence.
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“We're not saying that something like [our program] can always prevent violence, because there are many multifaceted reasons why violence occurs,” said Sarah Curtiss, co-executive director of Men as Peacemakers.
“But what if all children could be seen, heard, have a large emotional vocabulary?” she added.
According to a database maintained by the Violence Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank funded by the National Institute of Justice, 98% of mass shooters over the past 50 years have been men, and at least 53% of them have been white men.
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Although research indicates that there are many factors that contribute to a man's decision to carry out a mass shooting, such as access to weapons, his psychology, his personal grievances, and his extremist views, studies also reveal that conceptions of masculinities that foster violence and social domination are great motivators.
The authors of a 2014 study published in the journal Men and Masculinities wrote that "straight white men's entitlement conflates with downward mobility, subservient masculinity, and other disappointing life-course events" to lead shooters into mass to carry out their attacks in an attempt to regain a sense of dominance after feeling socially outcasts.
Another study published in 2010 in the journal Health Sociology Review examined three mass shootings that ended with the assailants committing suicide and concluded that the shooters felt that their rights were being threatened and that they should take revenge on all those who had hurt them.
A boy looks through the sights of a rifle during the third day of the National Rifle Association convention in Indinapolis, Ind., on April 27, 2019. Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Undoing this belief system, or preventing it in the first place, requires developing positive role models of masculinity and a broader range of emotional expression, according to activists.
Men as Peacemakers tries to promote emotional awareness in children and young people bombarded with messages from the media and society to repress their feelings.
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Weekly sessions typically begin with quizzes in which students are asked to use an illustrated emoticon chart with faces expressing two dozen emotions to help them describe how they feel.
"I don't think they are given that time to just be emotional," he opined.
At Maine Boys to Men, their Sexism and Violence Reduction Program focuses on breaking gender stereotypes and building healthy relationships, as well as empathy and consent in sexual situations.
"How does someone get to the point of bringing a gun to school and committing such a horrible act of violence?" Executive Director Heidi Randall wondered.
“That doesn't come out of nowhere,” she pointed out.
Maine Boys to Men has served at least 13,000 mostly white students, reflecting the demographics of the state, since its founding in 1998, according to Randall.
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Leaders often discuss with students how "performative masculinity" manifests itself in pop culture and politics, such as Will Smith's slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars and Russian President Vladimir Putin waging war on Ukraine, the report said. program director Jordan Hebert.
"A lot of our work is about meeting people where they are," Hebert said, "and where they are is saturated in this culture of violence."
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A 2019 study of the show, published in the journal Children and Youth Services Review, found that it improved high school boys' views of gender equality in relationships and their perception of male power.
Cure Violence, which works with more than 1,600 people—mostly children and youth of color—on reducing violence in communities across the country, also takes an evidence-based approach that includes disrupting potentially violent conflict, identifying and treating high-risk individuals and changing community norms by employing people from the neighborhood to work with high-risk individuals and local leaders to build trust and stop violence.
Independent studies have found that Cure Violence programs reduced murders by 31% in Chicago, 56% in Baltimore, and 63% in New York.
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"We know that the process of socialization in the United States instills in men a code that links traditional male gender roles with violence," says Dr. Fredrick Echols, Executive Director.
“Having a safe space where men can go to say, 'Hey, I'm in trouble, I really need help,' that's very empowering,” added Echols.
Both habitual gun violence and mass shootings emanate from the same source of dominant social norms that foster violent masculinity, advocates say, noting that men are both the perpetrators and victims of most gun violence. firearms, according to the American Psychological Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
And black men are 15 times more likely to die by firearm homicide than white men, according to a report released in April by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
“There is an overlap [among mass shooters and other perpetrators of gun violence] with how masculinity is expected to be expressed,” explained Derek McCoy, co-executive director of programs and partnerships at Project PAVE, an organization of violence reduction in Denver.
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McCoy created Project PAVE's True Man program, which focuses on ending violence in relationships through behaviors that reflect healthy masculinity.
Leaders will ask the students, who are primarily Black and Latino, to write the feelings they show to others on one side of a piece of paper and the feelings they keep to themselves on the other.
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This allows students to "get to know each other [in] an authentic sense," McCoy noted.
"We can't assume that we're going to fix these individuals [who perpetrate mass shootings] coming out as lone wolves when we're turning them into lone wolves," she opined.
For the mostly black and Latino students of Becoming a Man (BAM) in Chicago, the recent mass shootings reminded them of the gun violence that plays out in their neighborhoods every day, according to Hannaan Joplin, the organization's senior regional manager for the city.
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“On the one hand, they don't feel so alone, but it's also like, where can you be safe now?” Joplin wondered.
"Even suburban kids face the same thing we do," he added.
BAM emphasizes six core values - integrity, responsibility, self-determination, respect for femininity, goal setting, and positive expression of anger - which students cultivate through activities such as meditation and the use of boxing gloves to release anger. contained frustration without hurting others, according to Joplin.
Joplin said that when she thinks about the recent mass shootings, she remembers that the shooters "were once little kids."
"If they had had something like a BAM [program] ... I wonder if they would have made those same decisions," he said.
