Female Involvement in School Rampage Plots

Abstract

Utilizing data from news media accounts, this study investigates 11 incidents of averted school rampage threats that involved female perpetrators as conspirators or co-conspirators in plots to attack their schools. While the vast majority of both attempted and completed school rampage attacks have been committed by boys and men, there are in fact cases that have involved females. In this study, we provide descriptive information about the largely unstudied phenomenon of school rampage threats involving females and analyze how the multifaceted role of gender impacts these events in terms of their level of threat, group dynamics, and relative lack of news coverage.

Introduction

School rampage shootings are a phenomenon with a lengthier history than most realize, as documented cases in the United States date back to the deadly attack on the campus of the University of Texas-Austin in 1966.^* However, recent tragedies over the last few decades (such as those at Colorado's Columbine High School, Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, and Oregon's Umpqua Community College) have led both media and the public to be increasingly aware of this particularly deadly crime. As a result, a great deal of recent empirical research has been conducted on the phenomenon of school shootings (see Madfis 2017; Muschert 2007; Rocque 2012; Sommer et al. 2014 for reviews of this literature and Böckler et al. 2013 for the state of research internationally).

One of the most interesting findings to emerge out of these studies is the fact that nearly all of the perpetrators have been boys (Danner and Carmody 2001; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Klein 2012). In fact, if one uses Newman and her colleagues' (2004) specific definition of a “rampage school shooting,” which is limited only to those school shootings in which multiple people were killed or injured on school property by a current or former student of the targeted school, then only two instances have ever been perpetrated by females (the first was when a 16-year-old girl shot people at Cleveland Elementary School from her home across the street in 1979 and the second was the case of a woman who killed two of her fellow nursing students before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in 2008). Furthermore, if one utilizes the traditional and most common operationalization of mass murder in the homicide literature, where the phenomenon is limited only to those cases wherein at least four victims were killed during a single episode at one or more closely related locations (Duwe 2007; Fox and Levin 2014), there has not been a single case of a female committing a mass murder at a school (in this, the 2010 shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville comes the closest, but the perpetrator only managed to kill three of her academic colleagues). These specific operationalizations, however, result in blinding scholars to the multiple homicide cases, in which females killed or injured numerous people at schools—just not enough to strictly qualify as a mass murder, and in the neglect of extant incidents of school rampages that have been planned but not carried out by females. This exploratory study seeks to fill the latter gap in empirical knowledge by analyzing female involvement in averted school rampage plots.

Despite the breadth of research and theorizing on mass shootings and other rampage attacks where multiple victims are targeted, far fewer studies have addressed attacks that have been planned, yet, did not come to fruition. While incidents of violence that have resulted in multiple fatalities and injuries are often extensively investigated by numerous parties in academia, media, government, and the justice system, far less information exists about “near misses” (Verlinden et al. 2000, p. 28). In fact, it is only during the last decade that scholars have begun to investigate the phenomenon of averted rampage attacks (Bondü and Scheithauer 2014; Daniels et al. 2007, 2010; Larkin 2009; Madfis 2014a, 2014b, 2017, 2018; Mongan 2013).

Although unnecessarily strict criteria surely contribute to the lack of knowledge surrounding averted rampage plots and female mass killers more generally, there is no question that males commit the vast majority of mass murders, whether that is boys harming their classmates at school or men killing en masse in their homes, workplaces, or in public places (Fox and Levin 2014; Madfis 2014c). Thus, the significantly disproportionate involvement of males in mass murder warrants investigation, and while some scholarship has explored the gendered dynamics of school shootings with regard to tropes of masculinities by studying the lives and actions of male school rampage shooters (Danner and Carmody 2001; Kiilakoski and Oksanen 2011; Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Klein 2005; Neroni 2000), no similar investigation has considered female perpetrators and the role that gender has played in their motivations and behaviors. Seeking to begin to remedy such a deficit, this article investigates cases of school rampage that have been planned individually or collaboratively by females to glean an understanding of the role that gender has played in these events in terms of their level of threat, group dynamics, and relative lack of news coverage.

Gendered analyses of school rampage perpetrators and their sociocultural context have provided a refreshing and thoughtful approach to the subject, and many of the emergent theoretical pieces which address the myriad relationships between masculinities and crime, violence, and delinquency (Collier 1998; Messerschmidt 1993) have noted the particularly gendered nature of these crimes. As the literature on school rampage violence has almost entirely focused on successfully completed incidents of multiple-homicide at school rather than on episodes where violence on a massive scale was intended but averted (Madfis 2014a, 2014b), the foiled rampage plots of female students have never been studied and are barely even recognized by previous scholars. There have been numerous recent scholarly investigations of female perpetrated homicide (Bennett et al. 2012; Chan and Frei 2013; Farrell et al. 2013; Parker and Hefner 2015) and a great deal of research has been conducted about female serial killers (Davis 2007; Frei et al. 2006; Gurian 2011; Myers et al. 2005; Rautelin 2013; Schurman-Kauflin 2000; Scott 2005; Shipley and Arrigo 2004; Vronsky 2007). In contrast, little research has focused upon female mass murders or school shooters (although see Fast 2013; Messing and Heeren 2004; Sternadori 2012).

An Extreme Example of the “Gender Ratio Problem”

Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) famously introduced and explored the “gender ratio problem”—why it is that females commit so much less crime than males. Perhaps with no other form of crime is this ratio more significant than with mass murder. Regarding delinquency and crime more generally, females are both far less likely to commit almost all offenses (with the dual exceptions of prostitution and the status offense of running away—both notably victimless offenses) and to subsequently be arrested (Fuller 2015). Even when females are involved in criminal activity, their crimes are typically less serious and less violent (Alvarez and Bachman 2008). Although crime in general is a disproportionately male endeavor, and violence even more so (Alvarez and Bachman 2008), mass murder is typically a profoundly male act. According to Fox and Levin (2014, p. 140), 93.4% of mass killers are male. This may be contrasted to homicide offenders more generally, who are 88.3% male (ibid, 140).

While the vast majority of mass murderers are male, there have been numerous cases where the perpetrators of massacres have been female. Such notorious women have included disgruntled citizens (like the woman who committed the 1985 shooting at a suburban Philadelphia shopping mall), workplace killers (like the former US Postal Service employee who attacked workers at a Goleta, California postal facility in 2006), and family annihilators (such as the mother who drowned her five children in their bathtub in a Houston suburb in 2001). Likewise, only five school rampage attacks in all of American history have been completed by females (the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting, the 1988 Hubbard Woods Elementary School shooting, the 1996 shooting at Pennsylvania State University, the 2008 Louisiana Technical College shooting, and the 2010 massacre at University of Alabama in Huntsville). Through content analyses of the LexisNexis newspaper database as well as numerous online and print publications, 11 incidents of rampage attacks plotted by female students have been located. In the discussion to follow, this interesting finding and its resultant implications are analyzed.

Methods and Sample

Cases were first located through the LexisNexis newspaper database. Like Daniels et al. (2007), the search terms included “school” and “plot*,” “school” and “rampage*,” and “school” and “shooting*,” although the additional terms “school” and “attack*,” and “school” and “threat*” were added. In forming the sample of averted school rampage incidents, only cases that occurred at elementary, middle/junior high, and high schools in the United States were included. Cases involving adult strangers and former or current school staff as perpetrators were excluded from the sample, as were those that resulted in any injury or death or where only one victim was intended.

In addition, academic and government-sponsored publications (Larkin 2009; Newman et al. 2004; Virginia Tech Review Panel 2007), popular press sources (Bower 2001; Lieberman 2008; Robertson 2001), and Internet sites that compile lists of school violence incidents (Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence no date; List of School-Related Attacks no date) were consulted to gather as comprehensive a list as possible and to confirm the accuracy of data across multiple sources. By means of this method, 195 cases of averted school rampage attacks that occurred in the United States from 2000 to 2009 were located. Of these 195 cases, only 10 (5.1%) involved female perpetrators. A second search was conducted for the year 2010, which turned up one additional case of a female-involved averted school rampage attack. To explore and analyze these incidents, the LexisNexis database and Google search engine were then used to locate any and all available media content and reporting about these 11 cases.

Results

In terms of the makeup of the 11 schools under investigation, all 11 schools are public institutions. Seven are high schools, one is a middle school, one is a junior high school, one is a K-8 school, and one is a K-12 magnet school that serves Native American students as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs system. Three incidents occurred in the Northeast (Middlesex, NJ; New Bedford, MA; and Hopkinton, MA), five were at schools in the Midwest (Coshocton, OH; Bena, MN; Cleveland, OH; Schaumburg, IL; Puxico, MO), one was in the Southeast (Peachtree City, GA), and two took place in the West (Puyallup, WA and Sacramento, CA).^*

Table 1.

Female-Involved School Rampage Plots

Location and type of school	Date	Age of offender(s)	Number of plotters	Threat level
Von E. Mauger Middle School Middlesex, NJ	February 2001	Age 13 (8th grade)	1 (solo)	Direct low-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Von E. Mauger Middle School Middlesex, NJ	February 2001	Age 13 (8th grade)	1 (solo)	Transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
New Bedford High School New Bedford, MA	November 2001	Age 17 (f); others ages 15–17	Group of 5 (4 males, 1 female)	Direct high-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
New Bedford High School New Bedford, MA	November 2001	Age 17 (f); others ages 15–17	Group of 5 (4 males, 1 female)	Very serious substantive threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Hopkinton High School Hopkinton, MA	October 2003	9th grade	1 (solo)	Direct low-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Hopkinton High School Hopkinton, MA	October 2003	9th grade	1 (solo)	Transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Coshocton Junior High School Coshocton, OH	February 2006	Ages 12 and 13 (7th graders)	2 (duo, both girls)	Direct medium-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Coshocton Junior High School Coshocton, OH	February 2006	Ages 12 and 13 (7th graders)	2 (duo, both girls)	Unclear if substantive or transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School Bena, MN	February 2006	Age 13	1 (solo)	Direct medium-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School Bena, MN	February 2006	Age 13	1 (solo)	Transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Gov. John R. Roger High School Puyallup, WA	April 2006	Age 14 (f); others ages 12–14	Group of 4 (3 males, 1 female)	Direct high-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Gov. John R. Roger High School Puyallup, WA	April 2006	Age 14 (f); others ages 12–14	Group of 4 (3 males, 1 female)	Very serious substantive threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
C.K. McClatchy High School Sacramento, CA	April 2007	Age 14 (f), others ages 14–15	Group of 4 (3 boys, 1 girl)	Direct high-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
C.K. McClatchy High School Sacramento, CA	April 2007	Age 14 (f), others ages 14–15	Group of 4 (3 boys, 1 girl)	Very serious substantive threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Unknown School Cleveland, OH	October 2007	Age 13	1 (solo)	Direct medium-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Unknown School Cleveland, OH	October 2007	Age 13	1 (solo)	Unclear if substantive or transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
McIntosh High School Peachtree City, GA	October 2007	Ages 15 and 16	2 (duo, both girls)	Direct low-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
McIntosh High School Peachtree City, GA	October 2007	Ages 15 and 16	2 (duo, both girls)	Unclear if substantive or transient threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Schaumburg High School Schaumburg, IL	February 2008	Ages 14 and 17	2 (duo, both girls)	Direct high-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Schaumburg High School Schaumburg, IL	February 2008	Ages 14 and 17	2 (duo, both girls)	Very serious substantive threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)
Puxico High School Puxico, MO	February 2010	Age not released by authorities	1 (solo)	Direct high-level threat (O'Toole 2000)
Puxico High School Puxico, MO	February 2010	Age not released by authorities	1 (solo)	Very serious substantive threat (Cornell and Sheras 2006)

Regarding the perpetrators of these rampage plots, five incidents involved just one individual, three cases involved two-person duos, and the remaining three plots were planned by groups of three or four students as co-conspirators. The ages of female plotters varied from 12 to 17 with an average and median age of 14 (among the 10 cases where information about age was released).

All 11 of the incidents were direct threats, meaning that they were communicated in an unambiguous manner and specified that a certain action would be taken against a specific target (O'Toole 2000). This is in contrast to indirect threats with tentative phrasing that are less clear and definitive, veiled threats which imply violence but leave room for interpretation, and conditional threats which warn that violence will occur unless certain demands are met (O'Toole 2000). This may be an artifact of the operational criteria and research method, both of which made direct threats more likely to appear in the sample. However, based on O'Toole's (2000) classification of low, medium, and high-risk levels of threats, the severity of the threats varied a great deal.

Five cases involved high-level threats, which are defined as posing an imminent danger to the safety of others, are direct, detailed, conceivable, and show evidence that concrete steps have been taken toward carrying them out. Three incidents were medium-level threats that may be carried out, but which are not wholly realistic, show evidence that the people threatening others have thought through the plan, indicated potential locations and times, but lack any indication that they have taken preparatory steps to act on the threat. The final three cases were low-level threats, which pose minimal risk, are vague, implausible, and lack realism (O'Toole 2000).

Based on Cornell and Sheras' (2006) work distinguishing between transient and substantive threats, five cases would be classified as very serious substantive threats, three cases would be deemed transient threats, and the available information on the remaining three cases is insufficient to determine how they should be classified. Transient threats are “statements that do not express a lasting intent to harm someone. Transient threats either are intended as figures of speech or reflect feelings that dissipate in a short period when the student thinks about the meaning of what he or she has said” (Cornell and Sheras 2006, p. 21). In contrast, substantive threats are “statements that express a continuing intent to harm someone…they also indicate a desire to harm someone that extends beyond the immediate incident or argument when the threat was made” (Cornell and Sheras 2006, p. 22). These scholars further separate substantive threats into serious and very serious threats based on the intended harm to be committed, where a serious threat is a threat to physically assault someone and a very serious threat is to kill, sexually assault, or severely injure someone (Cornell and Sheras 2006). As only threats of multiple-victim homicide attacks were considered in this study, all five substantive threats were necessarily very serious ones.

Discussion

In our analysis of news media coverage of these 11 female-involved school rampage plots, several key points regarding the gendered nature of school rampage shootings emerged. First, consistent with research on the gendered nature of violence in general, school rampage plots involving female perpetrators tend to involve less serious forms of violence. Second, in part, due to the reduced degree of violence, female-involved school rampage plots tend to be viewed as less serious with regard to established threat assessment tools. Third, in many instances, the female plotters themselves have engaged in bystander intervention in ways that undermine their male co-conspirators' plans for successfully carrying out the plot.

All three of these gender dynamics diminish the relative newsworthiness of female-involved school rampage plots in ways that contradict the common construction of newsworthiness in the study of media and social problems. In other words, the uniqueness of female involvement in school rampage plots does not necessarily translate into widespread media coverage of such events. The fact that our search of these 11 female-involved school rampage plots did not turn up significant media coverage in-and-of-itself is telling, given the widespread media coverage of school-related violence more broadly (Cohen and Brooks 2015). This lack of coverage also challenges the notion of newsworthiness articulated in critical media and social problems research. According to Surette (2015), the concept of newsworthiness represents “the criteria by which news producers choose which of all known events are selected to be news” (p. 17). These criteria include the seriousness and uniqueness of the event, the characteristics of the victim and perpetrator, and the degree to which the event fits with existing frames and narratives.

In relationship to school rampage shootings more broadly, all these criteria tend to be present. For instance, school rampage shootings (whether carried out or averted) are viewed as serious, yet, rare occurrences. Victims of school rampage shootings almost always fit the image of the “ideal” victim. That is, they are young, innocent bystanders whose only “wrongdoing” was showing up to school. Finally, these events fit with existing and growing narratives related to institutional failure within schools, increasing youth violence, and the gun control debate. It would follow, therefore, that female-involved school rampage plots would garner widespread media coverage, given that these are even more unique events within the context of an existing media construction focused on the relatively rare occurrence of school rampage shootings more broadly. However, as this study shows, this is not the case.

We hypothesize several explanations for the paradoxical treatment of female-involved school rampage plots by media. First, although female-involved school rampage plots meet the criteria of seriousness and uniqueness, they do not align well with the dominant construction of school rampage perpetrators. Female plotters violate assumptions regarding the gendered-nature of violence broadly, and mass violence in particular (Madfis 2014c). Moreover, media and other claimsmakers are reluctant to address the very real threat of toxic masculinity as a precursor to (mass) violence. Ignoring threatened or achieved violence among females contributes to the continued degendering of violence in public discourse (Klein 2005; see also Cohen 2016). Finally, the perception that females are less violent and actual gender differences in the commission of violence lead some to dismiss the seriousness of female-involved school rampage plots, issues we take up in more detail in this study.

In the data, we found multiple instances in which school and criminal justice officials as well as other individuals made statements suggesting a lack of intent on the part of female plotters. For instance, in response to an eighth grade girl's posting of an online hit list of fellow students, it was reported that school officials at Von E. Mauger Middle School in Middlesex, New Jersey “did not believe the girl was going to carry out the threats” and that “the posting may have been a prank” (March 12, 2001). Similarly, after not filing charges against a 13-year-old girl who had been arrested for allegedly making a threat to carry out a shooting at the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig school in Minnesota, a Cass County attorney suggested that “she was venting on paper, and not intending for anyone to see it. Through the whole investigation it became obvious that [the note] wasn't intended to frighten or harm others” (February 24, 2006). Finally, when a 13-year-old girl was arrested after her five-page list of the teachers and students that she wanted to shoot was found at an unknown school in Cleveland, Ohio, one of her teachers noted that “the girl seemed more bent on getting attention than taking lives” (October 15, 2007).

These statements by school and criminal justice officials are not surprising given the very real gender differences in the perpetration of violence. As described earlier, women and girls are significantly less likely to engage in violent behavior. As such, it is not surprising that girls' plots to commit a school rampage killing are not taken as seriously as those that involve male plotters. Moreover, this dynamic comports with existing research on the gendered dynamics of crime in general. For instance, an important research by Broidy and Agnew (1997) on gender and strain suggests that girls are more likely to internalize experiences of strain, leading them to engage in forms of self-harm (e.g., drug abuse and cutting) as opposed to externalized harm such as violence against others.

Moreover, the tendency for female plotters to not carry out their rampage shootings or to engage in bystander intervention aligns with existing research on gender differences related to suicide, wherein females are significantly more likely to plan and attempt suicide, while males are more likely to actually commit suicide (Kilmartin 2010). Thus, it is notable that it was often the female co-conspirators who were the ones who came forward to inform on their peers and ultimately prevent the attack. For example, the 2001 rampage plot in New Bedford, Massachusetts was averted when the only female co-conspirator came forward because she feared for the safety of her favorite teacher (Larkin 2009). Much like this incident in New Bedford, several other cases of averted school rampage have entailed female students coming forward as positive bystanders to reveal crucial information about threats, while many male students told no one (Madfis 2014a). In addition, even in these cases involving female plotters, three cases involved just one female plotter who conspired with a group of male students. Furthermore, in the cases in Puyallup, WA and Sacramento, CA, authorities would later stress the minor actual involvement of the female students in these conspiracies.

In conclusion, this exploratory analysis of female-involved averted school rampage attacks reveals an interesting contradiction. In some ways, it makes sense that female plotters were generally perceived to be less culpable, since they are in fact less involved in plotting rampage attacks, incidents involving female plotters are often less serious in terms of their genuine threat, and female plotters are more likely to intervene to stop the violence from actually being carried out. However, like female violence more broadly, female involvement in plotting rampage attacks is a clear violation of gender stereotypes, which, as discussed earlier, often leads to increased media coverage and public outrage, even when the severity of the violence is relatively minimal, as documented in news coverage of “girl fights” and bullying by females (Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008; Chesney-Lind et al. 2007). While we hypothesize several explanations for this contradiction, further investigation of these dynamics is warranted.

This exploratory study was intended as a first step toward filling a gap in the current literature on school rampage plots. As indicated in this article, there is a dearth of research on female-involved school rampage plots. Our descriptive data provide a starting point for further research in this area. In addition, we hope that our initial analysis of and thinking around the gendered dynamics of female involved school rampage plots and (the lack of) media coverage of these incidents opens space for more critical analyses of the role of gender (and toxic masculinities, in particular) as a factor in male involved school rampage plots.

Footnotes

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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