A Globe and Mail commentator insists that Kimveer Gill is not a victim.
This happens whenever there's a big atrocious crime - someone cuts off any attempt to figure out why the perp did what he did by saying that the perp isn't a victim, the victim is.
The problem is that this attitude hinders investigation and discourse about what might lead someone to commit a crime like this. And we need to understand where this comes from - we can't just stop at "He's bad" or "He's crazy." We need to be able to look at the situation and say "Yeah, I can see why he did that" so we can take measures to prevent similar crimes in the future.
Being able to see why a perp did something doesn't mean you think it's good or justified. Can you see why someone might rob a bank? Sure - there's lots of money in there, and it belongs to a big faceless corporation. You can understand the reasoning even if you're not a bank robber yourself. Can you see why someone might strike someone else out of anger? No one who has ever been a child can honestly say they can't. But that doesn't mean you think it's acceptable to go around hitting people. And we need to understand these things. We couldn't have appropriate security in banks if we couldn't understand what would lead someone to rob a bank. We couldn't defuse tense situations if we couldn't understand what might lead someone to hit someone else.
And similarly, we need to understand what would lead someone to shoot up a school. Is it a certain kind of bullying experienced in school? Once we understand that, we can focus on training teachers to eliminate the conditions that make schools conducive to bullying. Is it a certain kind of mis-parenting? Once we understand that, we can disseminate the fact that that isn't appropriate parenting and provide parents with alternatives. But if we just write him off as a Bad Guy and use that as an excuse not to look into it in greater depth, we're doing ourselves all a disservice.
Meanwhile, one would-be head of the Toronto police union wants to give police the right to sue people who make false accusations against them.
Here's what that says to me: suppose something happens in my building and a police officer has to come to my apartment, then he decides to take advantage of the fact that we're alone in my apartment to rape me. Or suppose I'm falsely arrested for something, and the police don't much like my protestations of innocence so they decide to beat me. (There have been beatings and sexual assault cases involving the Toronto police in the past few years, and nothing has been done to give me reason to believe that it won't happen again.) What I'm hearing from this article is that if I so much as utter a word about it, if my dentist asks how all my teeth got knocked out, or my optician asks how my glasses broke, or my doctor asks why I'm suddenly requesting STD testing when I've been monogamous for my entire adult life, and I say that a police officer attacked me, the police will then sue me, take everything I have and leave me without a safety net, and garnishee my future wages so I'll have to live somewhere distant and infested in a high-crime area that will have cops coming to my building even more often and the whole thing starts over again. That's what this article says to me.
Now I can see how false accusations may be of concern to a police officer - there are certainly some good nefarious reasons why a perp might want to falsely accuse a cop - but the Toronto Police don't have enough public trust to do this. They've had a lot of scandals lately, so they're in no position to be demanding protection from us when we still feel like we need to be protected from them. I couldn't even reassure you with absolute certainty that they won't come and attack me just for blogging this.
3 comments:
But if we just write him off as a Bad Guy and use that as an excuse not to look into it in greater depth, we're doing ourselves all a disservice.
I don't know, I just thing some things are unexplainable.
Several years ago, when I was in college, we studied the Gary Gilmore case in one of my sociology classes. Gary was a serial killer. Mikal, his brother, who grew up in the same house, with the same parents, most likely same or similar social forces in almost every way, was not violent and became a successful music journalist.
Why did their paths go in such opposite directions? What could you have changed in Gary's life that would have made a difference?
First thought that pops into my head, unvetted for appropriateness: maybe having a brother like Mikal is the sole trigger.
But seriously though, there are lots of differences. Apart from basic birth order theory, they would have been parented differently - the parents were figuring things out with the older child, while their parenting of the younger child was informed by their experiences with the older one. The brothers had different friends and possibly different teachers. They held different roles in their respective social circles. They probably excelled at different things, which brought them different levels of respect or success depending on how well-respected or not their respective talents were. Then, of course, as they got older, their lives broke off into completely separate directions.
They may also have completely different personalities, and different personalities react differently under the same situations. I'm an introvert and my sister is an extrovert. Something that will make her rub her hands in glee at the new challenge to overcome makes me want to hide under the covers. A new challenge that excites me has her looking at me like I'm crazy. She pays to go on vacations that I wouldn't go on if you paid me. Something that's a Big Major Inconvenience to me is insignificant to her, and vice versa.
Clearly, the same things do not make both of us thrive. I can't speak for my sister, but the things that made me thrive were almost exclusively things that were found in my own life, but not in our shared life. The shared elements were either negative or neutral. We've both picked up some, but not all, of the values our parents attempted to instill in us, and we did not both pick up an identical set of values.
There are thousands of small ways in which siblings become different people, even if they grow up in the same environment. This is because human beings are more than just blank slates to be filled up with their parents' ideas. Sometimes you'll end up with a Ravenclaw and a Slytherin, sometimes you'll end up with a journalist and a serial killer. But if we just write it off as unexplainable, we'll never understand why.
...human beings are more than just blank slates to be filled up with their parents' ideas. Sometimes you'll end up with a Ravenclaw and a Slytherin, sometimes you'll end up with a journalist and a serial killer. But if we just write it off as unexplainable, we'll never understand why.
I agree, maybe my original comment wasn't clear.
Sociology was my college minor and one of the tenents we were taught is that there's really no such thing as 'human nature.' We really are (generalizing and oversimplyfing a complex topic here) pretty much blank slates--almost everything about us is the result of how we are socialized. At least that's what sociologists believe.
And so maybe unexplainable was a poor word choice. There probably is an explanation for the apparent differences between Gary and Mikal Gilmore, or your and your sister, or Kimveer Gill and others, etc. But can you find that explanation?
How do you know which personality trait(s) are the ones to look out for, or the ones that are likely to make a Bad Guy that way? Is it possible to do anything that would make a difference?
There likely are plenty of other people with similarities to Gary Gilmore or Kimveer Gill. Most of them don't become serial killers or shoot up a school.
So how do you know, what can you do, and will it matter, anyway? That's what I meant earlier.
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