Cav's Place

The media from here is flooded with news about how this or that influenced a teen to do a certain thing. Not that talk about such influences isn’t relatively common anyway, but lately there have been several events that they could use as examples, like the 13 year old guy who killed one of his friends and then tried to erase the traces “like in the movies” or the 12 year old emo girl who committed suicide by throwing herself out the window.

The murder is only one out of a series of such events that took place lately. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it started with two children killing an old woman. The media fed on that issue for a while, but then they got flooded with similar events. There was an 11 year old guy who killed a three year old girl in a horrible manner, then the 13 year old and also two other cases that shouldn’t be filed along with the rest, but they do it anyway. I’m talking about two 18 year old guys who raped and killed two little girls just days apart. One of the girls was five, the other was seven.
The only mention of such potential influences over the course of the investigations was related to the 13 year old, but the media focused on that even though it wasn’t mentioned as inspiration for the murder, but only for what happened afterwards, plus that he was known to be mentally unstable. The boy said that after the murder he cleaned the knife and put it in the victim’s hand and then he wiped his fingerprints off the door handle “like in the movies”. But, if his statement is to be believed, all he’s guilty of is perhaps using disproportionate force in self defense. He said he brought his 16 year old friend cigarettes since he’d always send him to get him some, but then his “friend” started beating him because he hadn’t brought a part for his bike as well, so he picked up a knife and stabbed. Then he said his friend pulled the knife out and tried to choke him, but collapsed after a few seconds. He also said he told his dead friend he was sorry for what he did before trying to erase the traces.
The other cases had other potential “influences” and motives, or even none at all. But a more detailed post about possible violent influences (and how they’re not to blame for any such things) has been in my drafts for a very long time now. Who knows, maybe this will finally make me write it. So I’ll end this topic by just saying that if the media wants to point fingers towards the violence in movies, games or music lyrics, they should also point towards themselves, considering how much they feed off such stories.

The other story, however, can be considered to be linked to my previous post, seeing as it also deals with suicide. You have a 12 year old girl who broke up with her boyfriend. Her mother was hardly ever home, working a lot and spending most of her free time with her boyfriend (and, apparently, future husband) at his place. The girl didn’t like him and things apparently got rather ugly when she was announced that he’ll become her stepfather. Her real father was a drunkard and hardly ever visited. Her grandparents, uncle and aunt lived in the same apartment with her and (sometimes) her mother, which must have made things quite stressful. Oh, and she was also very obviously emo and had recently developed an obsession for Tokio Hotel‘s Don’t Jump.
Out of all those reasons, which one do you think the media focused on? Who cares that she had several good reasons to be very unhappy when you can say she was influenced by other emo kids and did what she saw in her favorite video, right? (At the moment I started writing this, the last comment posted for that video was written by somebody from Romania and it said “this is a stupid video, a 12 year old girl commited suicide because of it”.) There was even a psychologist saying that no 12 year old actually wants to die. Did she test all of them with a lie detector to know that?
Still, there were a few balanced opinions. At the end of the comment another psychologist mentioned that she wasn’t depressed because she was emo, but she was emo because she was depressed. The rest of the comment was along the same annoying lines as most others, but I guess that was the requirement in order to get it printed and manage to throw in those last few words. Then there was an editorial in another newspaper in which the author said he has a daughter and is quite frankly frightened by this, because he knows that neither that video nor identifying herself as emo made her kill herself and eliminating the convenient causes leaves him at a complete loss when it comes to solutions for the actual problems that cause so much sadness in today’s world. And another psychologist said in a TV show that she sees the suicide and being emo as two completely separate things and would like it if people would stop saying that’s the cause. But those balanced opinions are very few compared to the rest…
I’m also seeing that she was obviously more and more depressed lately, she had started smoking and she was seen drunk at least once… And she told everybody that she was going to kill herself because of her boyfriend breaking up with her and the situation in her family, but everybody thought she was just doing it to get attention and ignored her! So now the people who ignored her then dare blame it on a lifestyle and a video?
Let’s look at the video and lyrics for a moment. The media is describing the video as showing a guy getting ready to jump off a building as the bad moments of his life pass before his eyes before he “throws himself backwards in a final gesture of defiance” at the end. Take a look for yourselves, is that what you see? I looked it up and what I’m seeing is a guy who’s persuaded not to jump, which is exactly what the song title and lyrics say as well. (Yes, I know he does jump in the German version, but she was watching Don’t Jump, not Spring Nicht.) After all, the chorus is:

“I scream into the night for you
Don’t make it true
Don’t jump
The lights will not guide you through
They’re deceiving you
Don’t jump
Don’t let memories go
Of me and you
The world is down there out of view
Please don’t jump
Don’t jump”

With the message as obvious as that, how can they say she did what she was being told in her favorite video? Seems to be quite the opposite to me!
Besides, I see things as being quite simple when it comes to this. You are the only one responsible for your actions. If you do something like that because someone told you to, whether directly or indirectly, then you’re too stupid to live in the first place and the world is better off. Otherwise, people should stop fishing for convenient causes and start looking for real solutions to the actual problems. And, just as I said in my last post, that means real solutions that fix the problems, not ways to make people cope. There are so many things nobody should have to cope with…

I guess that’s a general problem in today’s world. People run away from responsibility so much that they even stop being aware of the fact that others can be held accountable for their own actions. They find such convenient explanations for others because they’d want the same to be done for them if and when they’d do something wrong. (Not that killing yourself is wrong, I think my opinion on that is very clear.) Besides, people who aren’t responsible for their own actions need somebody to guide them, even control them. And many want to be that somebody, having power over another!
And please don’t bring age into this. At 12 or 13 you should be aware of what taking a life means, whether your own or another’s. If you aren’t, then a lot of people have failed terribly when you were little, and those are likely to be the ones most inclined to look for such convenient explanations.