Maren Sanchez and Male Entitlement to Violence
Weâre hearing a whole lot  all about the Confidence Gap. But,  letâs talk about gender gaps  no one seems to keen on delving into: self-control and safety,Â
Maren Sanchez, who was 16, was stabbed to death by a classmate in a stairwell at her Connecticut High School on Friday. This a the photo being used by media taken from her Facebook page. She was, by all accounts, a happy, kind, ambitious and able girl who woke up, went to school and didnât go home because she made a boy angry. The homicidal classmate, unnamed, is also 16. His alleged motive was that she said no to attending a prom with him. Many accounts about this story are using the phrase, âunprovoked attackâ which implies that a girl, standing in a hallway at school and declining an invitation to the prom, could be responsible for a âprovokedâ attack. Iâm cynically waiting for explanations to start being made for why her killer did what he did and how tragic that his life is now over. Which is true, and happens regularly in cases involving teenagers, like the Steubenville rape, but not the point. The point isnât that the lives of raping and killing teenage boys are not lost, but that in expressing sympathy for them in the standard way does nothing to make sure we prevent the same from happening in the future.Â
She died as much from our apathy and basic contempt for the lives of girls and women, as from the knife he used to kill her with. This contempt is expressed not only in the routine beatings and deaths of girls and women at the hands of boys and men they know, but by our refusal to acknowledge this violence as the product of pervasive, violently maintained, gender hierarchy. These assaults happen every day and regulate the lives of all girls, women and non-gender conforming people who often face heightened violence. Girls are also aggressive and abuse, but thatâs not what this post is about. The overwhelming preponderance of violence is a gender one-way street. It happens every day.Â
For example, last month, 17-year old JeâMichael Malloy confessed to killing his 15-year-old girlfriend, Danielle Locklear during a âspat.â
Or, two months ago Matthew Bolton, 15,stalked and shot Anastasia Greer, 16, whoâd broken up with him.
That was a murder suicide, of which there are 12 each week in the United States, 69% involving a male murderer.Â
In the United States, 25 percent of teenage girls report being physically assaulted. Â
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 9.4 percent of high school students surveyed reported that theyâd been hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by their boyfriend or girlfriend. Â
The one-in-five women and almost one-in-seven men who experience intimate partner violence are between the ages of 11 and 17 years of age when they have their first abusive encounter.
Google âwalking while transâ to see how institutionalized the policing of gender is, and how it is expressed in hostility to femininity and expressions of femininity
An Avon Foundation study conducted by the No More coalition earlier this year found that one in 10 people between the ages of 14-21 have already committed an act of sexual violence, most but not nearly all of them, boys. However, 80 percent those on the receiving end of violence were girls. (18 percent were boys and five percent were transgender youth.)
In the next 24 hours violent men will kill at least three women in the U.S. and thousands and thousands more around the world. We arenât even keeping track properly.Â
Hereâs the interesting and most important part: the likelihood that a teenager would engage in this violence was not the same across all socioeconomic groups, but the teenagers with the highest propensity to sexually assault a peer were white kids, mainly but not solely boys, from higher-income families. The ones with the highest likelihood also consumed more pornography, a medium we do nothing to educate children about and one whose mainstream products normalize dehumanization and violent male domination. But, hey, free speech, status hierarchy and money â itâs the American way.
IWe absolve boys of responsibility at these ages, and we should, theyâre children still. I canât blame young boys, but I wonât absolve the adults around them, the promoters of xy entitlements and the boys-will-be-boys mentality that infuses family dynamics, school interactions and the legal system. That sentiment and all it implies is a fundamental building block of the aggrieved entitlement that routinely results in tragedies like Sanchezâs death.Â
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Oregon found that âGirls in the United States had significantly higher individual behavioral regulation than boys.â Not only did they appear to have more self-control but teachers and parents expect them to, so they attribute greater self-regulation to girls. They found that this is not true in Asian societies (the study included children in South Korea, Taiwan and China). In other words, we have a national problem with not expecting or teaching boys to control themselves when they are quite clearly biologically capable of doing so.  Thatâs a gap no one is talking about on Sunday morning news programs.
When a boy, maybe out of embarrassment and anger, allegedly pushes a girl like Sanchez down the stairs and stabs her to death in their school, status, power and domination arenât the first thing that comes to mind. Just sadness for everyone. In the case of teenagers in particular there is such evident tragedy in the loss of the lives of two young people and the profound scarring of those around them. But, soon after, status, power â and the institutionalized tolerance for violent male domination â have to be part of any constructive conversation. Otherwise we ensure the institutional tolerance that enables these crimes and reproduces a violent and misogynistic status quo.
Speaking of which, multi-billionaire tech CEO Gurbaksh Chahal, once called Americaâs most eligible bachelor, was sentenced to three years probation for  battering his girlfriend and telling her at least four times as he did that he would kill her.  A video allegedly showing him hitting and kicking her, 117 times if youâre counting, was deemed inadmissible by a judge because police seized it with no warrant. Chahal says that protests against his being professionally engaged are a âpolitical witch hunt.â  Chahal will retain his board seat â heâll keep working, go to meetings, make lots of money and keep posting feel-good memes because, well, he couldnât be expected to control himself. It does seem to me, however, that believing âSuccess is how high you bounce when you hit bottom,â really depends on whether or not youâre the one doing the hitting.
The Self-Control and the Safety Gaps- both gendered - are serious and important ones.  I will never stop being outraged by these facts and disgusted by the people who chose, and itâs a choice, to deny them. If we decided to close it, fewer of our girls would âfind themselvesâ dead.  Arenât you sick of hearing about girls and women being raped by predators and bludgeoned and slaughtered by angry boys and men never taught â by families, neighbors, religions, schools â to value them as human beings in their own right?
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