Jennifer Lawrence und das Kleid in der Kälte

The battle between feminists and pretty women in revealing outfits continues… #IntrasexualCompetition pic.twitter.com/JJIr9Vj7eg

— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) February 21, 2018

Söhne, die ohne Väter aufwachsen, und Gewalt

Ein Artikel bringt angesichts der neuerlichen Schulschießereien einen interessanten Aspekt:

in the aftermath of tragedies like Charleston or Sandy Hook, Americans hear the shared characteristics of the shooters: typically they are young males who obtained a gun (duh), used drugs (legally or illegally), dropped out of school, and committed or planned suicide as the grand finale to their murders. But to focus on these characteristics is to focus arbitrarily on the 12 to 24 months before the shooting. It ignores the roots of the problem: the household.

As University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox pointed out back in 2013: “From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s ‘list of U.S. school attacks’ involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.” His observation is largely ignored.

In contrast, conversations about black-on-black violence often raise the link between broken households (or fatherless homes) and juvenile delinquency. But when the conversation turns to mass shootings, we seem to forget that link altogether.

Now, this isn’t to say that every single mom is doomed to raise a mass shooter. Not every kid who grows up without his father will turn into Roof, and not every mass shooter grew up without his dad. Mental instability can be a product of any number of factors. But to ignore the link between a mass shooter and his fatherless childhood would be to simply ignore the facts. On CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History,” seven of those shootings were committed by young (under 30) males since 2005. Of the seven, only one—Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho (who had been mentally unstable since childhood)—was raised by his biological father throughout childhood

Dann bringt der Artikel noch andere Zahlen:

But what does any of this have to do with mass shootings? Let’s revisit some those characteristics of mass shooters. Violence? There’s a direct correlation between fatherless children and teen violence. Suicide? Fatherless children are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.Dropping out of school? Seventy-one percent of high school dropouts came from a fatherless background. Drug use? According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.” How about guns? Two of the strongest correlations with gun homicides are growing up in a fatherless household and dropping out of school, which itself is directly related to lack of an active or present father.

It’s no coincidence that, much like the number of fatherless children, the number of mass shootings has exploded since the 1960s. Throughout the entire 1960s, six mass shootings took place. That number doubled in 1970. Heck, 2012 alone saw more mass shootings than the sixties did.

Ich habe keine Ahnung, ob die Zahlen stimmen. Es wäre auch interessant, näher auf die Gründe einzugehen: Geschiedene oder getrennt lebende Kinder dürften gleichzeitig auch ärmer sein, haben einen großen Verlust mit einem gewissen Trauma erlitten (neulich hörte ich, dass die Trennung der Eltern für viele Kinder so traumatisch sein soll, wie der Verlust  eines Bruders oder einer Schwester).

Es muss also nicht per se die Abwesenheit des Vaters sein, sondern schlicht die Abwesenheit eines Elternteils bzw die Änderungen die damit einhergehen.

Und – als alter Biologist muss ich darauf hinweisen – natürlich werden sich auch Väter mit entsprechenden Veranlagungen, die einen Massenmord begünstigen – vielleicht eine gewisse Psychopathie oder soziale Nichtangepasstheit, die sie zum Aussenseiter macht – eher trennen oder eher verlassen werden. Und die Veranlagungen könnten auch bei der Mutter vorhanden sein, weswegen auch diese evtl eher verlassen wird oder verläßt.

Aber jedenfalls ein interessantes Thema. Wer mehr Studien dazu hat, die das etwas näher beleuchten, der kann ja darauf in den Kommentaren hinweisen.