TW: violence, death, abuse
Last week in my town a fifteen year old boy was killed. A family is broken. An unimaginable loss has filled those hearts, grief their now constant companion.
That alone is devastating, more than any family should have to bear.
But what has left the town reeling in the aftermath of this death is that a 16 year old has been arrested and charged with second degree murder.
It seems that a child killed a child.
The devastation is immense.
More than twenty years ago, my career started in youth mental health. I have worked in group homes, gang communities and alternative classrooms with the kids struggling the most. I have (safely and professionally) restrained kids to keep them from hurting themselves or others. I have worked with children as young as five years old who reek of cigarette smoke every single day. I’ve run after school programs for kids so they have at least an hour or two a day with access to food and a stable adult.
What I know to be true, following this work and my nine years of post-secondary studies in the field, is that kids aren’t born bad. They are taught to be.
That means the kid accused of murder in this case learned their violence somewhere – at home or in the community.
Somewhere they learned that bullying is ok.
Somewhere they learned that to feel good you need to put someone else down.
Somewhere they learned that violence is the answer.
And now we have adults, apparent supporters of the victim, threatening more violence, as if wanting to reaffirm to everyone that yes violence is an acceptable choice. Adults are writing vindictive comments online and calling the high school, abusing staff on the phone so much that the principal had to write an email urging the parents to be better behaved.
And we wonder where bullying comes from… we wonder why the schools can’t stop it…
If you are a parent yelling at school staff, or referees or your neighbour or your partner, you are teaching your child that aggression and bullying are normal.
If adults are verbally abusing school staff, it’s not hard to understand where the children are learning violence. It’s not hard to understand how this kind of thing can happen.
But adults don’t want to look in the mirror. They don’t want to look at themselves. It’s so much easier to blame someone else, to decide the problem lives elsewhere, not something they may be fostering in their own home and community.
As if this situation needs any more complexity the accused youth has been reported to be a trans girl. I wish this didn’t make things worse. I wish gender just didn’t matter, but we’re not there yet in our society, especially not in this small town.
Rather, trans hate is on the rise now. Fueled by fear and ignorance, and fed by the ability to indulge it all online, threats are being thrown around. The trans kids in our community are now at even greater risk than before.
About ten years into my mental health career, I shifted my work from youth to adults. It was too heartbreaking trying to help the kids but having to send them home to abuse. It was too hard knowing the source of the problem but be stuck working on the symptom. Nothing was going to change for these kids if their parents didn’t change.
I don’t know the accused. Her identity has been protected as she is under-age, but of course many people in our small community know who she is. I do not. What I write here isn’t based on intimate knowledge of her and her family. What I write here is theoretical, based on my extensive experience in the field.
I know kids. And kids don’t hurt kids unless they’re hurting too. That hurt may come from inside their home, or the world they face when they leave it, but it comes from somewhere.
Hurt people hurt people.
Hurt kids hurt kids.
When violence occurs, we should strive to ask why, to wonder what kind of pain this person may be navigating that has led them to such an extreme act.
When bullying happens, we should be thinking about what happens to that child at home, offer services, offer support.
We need to remember that bullying is learned.
Sadly, the parents threatening violence and abusing school staff have also, most likely, been bullied or abused at some point in their lives. They too wouldn’t behave this way if they hadn’t been taught that it’s ok. The cycle of abuse is a real thing, leading to generations of violence, trauma and devastation.
But there is always an option to choose to do things differently. It’s not easy. It means, sometimes, acting totally differently than you feel you want to. It means feeling the fear rather than transforming it into anger and throwing it at another. It means sitting in grief rather than writing retaliatory comments online. It’s not easy to choose differently, but if we want our children to be safe with each other, adults must model safe behaviour.
If the bullying is ever going to stop in the schools, it needs to stop among the adults first.
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Updated to add: This post has received a lot of attention and because of that, more clarity is required. I must emphasize, I do not know the accused or what they have faced in their life. What I have shared below is primarily in response to the poor behaviour of adults in our community (retaliatory comments online, abusive phone calls to the high school) and how this kind of response shows us how and why such tragedies can occur. If the adults cannot be well behaved, how do we expect our children to be?
My point is not that the accused must have been abused at home but that the accused has been hurt somewhere. And seeing that they identify as a trans girl, she has likely been on the receiving end of verbal abuse and discrimination, particularly in this small town. Personally, I don’t believe anyone is inherently bad and I know that some people may disagree with that. But when I see someone hurt someone, it’s in my nature to ask why, to wonder what may have driven their unkindness. I believe the world would be a better place if we addressed the underlying pain, rather than focus on the external behaviour. In this case, it seems there is a culture of violence and discrimination that has contributed to this tragic outcome. I feel deeply for everyone involved, all of the youth and families who are aching with grief.
