Children as Victims and Villains: The School Shooter

Abstract

Childhood carries a heavy symbolic load. Children embody society’s fears about its present and are also emblems of its hopes and dreads regarding the future (Jenks, 2007). When they either commit — or are the victims of — crime, this symbolic freight becomes even heavier. Their transgression or victimisation appears to highlight not just the failure of adult control, but also an underlying sickness in the wider culture. The experiences and behaviour of children and young people are therefore frequently interpreted as ‘a window into society’s collective future’ (Brown, 2008, p. 204). This chapter explores the cultural construction of the ‘school shooter’ as a late twentieth-century representation of the young person as folk devil, and considers whether this remains a useful concept for cultural criminologists. In doing so, it focuses on an especially contentious and symbolically ambiguous stage of childhood, that of adolescence. As individuals no longer readily identifiable as children but not yet accepted as adults, adolescents occupy a liminal space ‘betwixt and between’ childhood and adulthood (Kroger, 2004).