This story doesn't note the gender of the victims but just calls them "people".
And that is one of the things that drives me crazy - I mean the fact that when an overwhelming majority of females are killed in massacres like this one, the media will sometimes only report that a certain number of 'people' were killed. Last year - at least I think it was last year - a school massacre not unlike the one in Germany happened in Kauhajoki, Finland. For what felt like days and days, the media stubbornly refused to report the gender of the nine students and the one teacher that had been killed. The reason for the silence may have been that the police did not release any information about this, but of course there must have been people in Kauhajoki who knew the victims, but again no one said anything. It was quickly reported, however, that one of the victims was a young man who was regarded as the shooter's best friend. But what about the other eight students? I scoured the internet for facts about them, but this seemed to be one of those cases where the police were determined not to report the victims' gender. Then a few serious and probably reliable newspapers reported, in the briefest possible manner, that the victims had been one male teacher, one male student and eight female students. And then
nothing more was said about it! Nothing! Newspapers kept speculating about what it meant that the shooter had killed his best friend, but no one -
no one! - commented on the fact that all the other killed students were female.
Do you realize that the ratio of male and female student victims was the same in Kauhajoki and in Winnenden? In both cases, nine students were killed, and out of them eight were females. The big, huge difference is that in Germany the skewed gender ratio was acknowledged, and it was seen as really troubling. In Finland no one said a thing. Indeed, when a Swedish newspaper wrote about the shooting in Winnenden and compared it with Kauhajoki, it commented on the fact that so many of the victims in Winnenden were female. But it said nothing about the fact that the gender ratio of the student victims in Winnenden and Kauhajoki was the same! Because, no doubt, this Swedish newspaper didn't realize what the gender ratio of the victims in Kauhajoki had been! By refusing to discuss or comment on it, Finnish police and Finnish media succeeded in making the massacre of girls in Kauhajoki 'disappear'. Of course the girls themselves remain dead as doornails. But practically no one knows that all but one of the killed students in Kauhajoki were girls, so no one needs to give it a thought. Not only the girls themselves were killed, but the acknowledgement and realization of how these girls were victimized was killed, too.
In Germany the media have been upfront about the killer's targeting of girls. That means that Germany has been given a chance to mourn the victims as dead
girls. I commend German media for acknowledging the loss of
girls like this. Perhaps, if these things will be discussed more openly, societies will feel obliged to try to increase their efforts to curb men's violence against women.
Ann
