{"id":5688,"date":"2026-04-18T12:29:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T12:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deniztuncalp.com\/?p=5688"},"modified":"2026-11-06T17:05:42","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T17:05:42","slug":"avoiding-easy-explanations-after-school-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deniztuncalp.com\/?p=5688","title":{"rendered":"Avoiding Easy Explanations After School Attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The things people say after school attacks in T\u00fcrkiye reveal as much about how we understand the world as they do about the events themselves. A handful of familiar explanations immediately begin to circulate: bullying, social media, family problems, games, technology. Everyone then reaches for the one that suits them best and offers the greatest reassurance. This is a familiar response to events of this kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his 2009 book Why Kids Kill<\/em> [1], Peter Langman observes that, after school attacks, public debate and media coverage gravitate toward readily repeatable explanations rather than a detailed examination of the perpetrator. The revenge narrative is the most comfortable. People can understand it, cling to it, and talk through their fears with it. They hope it will absolve and reassure them about themselves and their children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But research shows that there is no simple formula for explaining school attacks. We cannot construct an equation in which ‘A + B + C = school attacker.’ The problem is not just that we need more careful psychological analysis. We also lack a sufficiently broad understanding of a problem with many interacting dimensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Large segments of society no longer understand what the world inhabited by children and adolescents actually looks like. The internet is still imagined as one vague, homogeneous space. Yet young people’s everyday lives unfold within platforms governed by very different logics. Their internet and the internet you use are not the same. Reddit has one atmosphere, 4chan another, Discord another, and gaming communities yet another. Each has its own language, rhythms, humor, harshness, forms of humiliation, and rules of belonging. Banning a few of them will therefore not solve the problem. Today’s young people are growing up not only within a family, school, neighborhood, and country, but also within a transnational digital culture. Their humor comes from there, but so do shame, anger, performance, and alienation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The adult world does not know these spaces. Yet it speaks confidently about them despite that ignorance. A few symbols, words, or screenshots are enough for sweeping judgments. The impulse to prohibit and control arises from the same place. It seems easier to shut down what feels complicated than to try to understand it. That is why shocking events such as school attacks often trigger demands for emergency measures driven by panic\u2014measures likely to complicate the problem rather than resolve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We need to look in particular at the online worlds of adolescent boys. An aggressive manner of speaking, incel rhetoric, alt-right aesthetics, hatred expressed through irony, displays of toughness, misogynistic and racist motifs, and online performances that mock the self while belittling others have become familiar elements of many adolescents’ digital experience. These elements do not, however, form a single, disciplined ideological bloc. Instead, they produce a more diffuse, contradictory, and fragmented crisis of masculinity. We see young male subjectivities shaped by constant connectivity, an inability to express weakness openly, vulnerability concealed by sarcasm, and humiliation turned into aggression. To outsiders, some of this may look like a joke. At times, though, this language supplies a ready-made vocabulary for loneliness, anger, and fantasies of destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That online vocabulary does not emerge in a vacuum. It enters a wider condition of pressure extending from family and school to the economy and politics: a lack of prospects, feelings of worthlessness, poor education, declining social mobility, authoritarian family structures, loneliness, fear of humiliation, identity crises, and an authoritarian political climate. Together they form an already difficult backdrop. Digital culture gives it form, gestures, and enemies. Sometimes it also offers these children a false sense of belonging to a community. The online sphere thus becomes an ecosystem carrying a wider social crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The erosion of educational institutions is therefore a primary concern. Schools have long struggled to establish a credible connection between knowledge and the future. Children are told to study, work hard, and develop themselves, while the same society fails to show them that effort is rewarded, merit works, and a good education genuinely opens doors. Connections, family resources, and favoritism seem more real. In such an environment, school comes to be seen not as an institution that broadens horizons but as a compulsory procedure to endure. Teachers’ authority also erodes under parental pressure, economic hardship, and inadequate resources. I am not talking about the authority to silence a classroom, but the authority of knowledge and character that earns a student’s respect. For many young people, the teacher has ceased to be a figure with a meaningful connection to life. Teachers may instead be perceived as officials who are ‘just talking,’ their words constantly contradicted by life outside school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Add to this an anti-intellectual public discourse. Thinking, reading, seeking to understand carefully, going into depth, and admitting what one does not know no longer generate much social esteem. Snap judgments, slogans, ready-made interpretations, and performative confidence circulate more readily. AI enters this environment, too. The assumption that ‘we can always ask it, and it will tell us’ is not merely a matter of technological convenience. A passive use of AI that abandons learning reflects a society increasingly unwilling to make the effort to learn. Knowledge comes to be treated less as something internalized by a person and more as a service retrieved on demand. For people who choose not to learn, the capacity for conceptual thinking can gradually disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So far, I have been describing our broader social and digital blind spots. But this perspective alone is insufficient, because it does not explain the mental world of the perpetrator. Langman’s work, although now somewhat dated, remains valuable in this respect. It does not place school attackers into a single social category. Many of the young people he examined were not invisible outsiders with no connection to school or to other people. A considerable number had not entirely disengaged from school. Some performed above average academically; some participated in sports, music, or school activities. For some, school was not simply a hated environment\u2014it could even be a place where their intelligence was recognized. Yet they became attackers nonetheless. This is why Langman considers the stereotype of the alienated student with no connection to school inadequate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He offers a similar correction concerning loneliness. Nine of the ten attackers Langman examined showed depression and suicidal thoughts, but only one experienced what could be described as pathological isolation. The others had friends, acquaintances, and people with whom they spent time. Social visibility, then, does not necessarily correspond to a person’s internal condition. A child may belong to a group, be known at school, and participate in activities, yet feel emotionally shattered, unloved, worthless, and helpless. Langman’s findings seriously weaken the clich\u00e9 of the ‘lonely child.’ The issue may be not social absence, but an emotional collapse that goes unnoticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bullying also requires a similarly cautious approach. In T\u00fcrkiye, the revenge narrative often becomes the easiest account: someone was excluded or humiliated and then exploded. It sounds familiar. Langman explains clearly why this is inadequate. Millions of children experience bullying without killing anyone. Moreover, attackers often do not target the individuals who harmed them one by one; instead, they attack crowds or people chosen at random. The question is under which combinations of vulnerability, fantasy, and psychological disturbance experiences of mistreatment can become lethal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The debate about media and violent content demands the same balance. Saying ‘video games caused it’ may be reassuring, but it does not explain the problem. Langman does not make that simplification either. He notes that millions consume violent media without committing murder. Still, for some young people, violent content can provide models, scripts, and a form of rehearsal\u2014a vocabulary for action. That observation matters even more today. There are no longer only films and games; there are imageboards, Discord communities, meme chains, aggressive language built on irony, and online performances of masculinity. Cultural material gives shape to anger that already exists. Langman did not write about today’s platforms, but the reasoning he offers remains useful for understanding them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another important contribution of Langman’s work is that he does not collapse attackers into a single type. He distinguishes psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized patterns. He also emphasizes that depression appears in many cases but cannot by itself explain them. This places an important limit on today’s debate. Single labels such as ‘sad child,’ ‘bullying victim,’ or ‘gaming addict’ are not enough. Personality structure, trauma, psychotic disintegration, narcissistic injury, humiliation, anger, and fantasy combine in different ways. We cannot build a sufficient explanation simply by listing environmental factors without examining the perpetrator’s mental world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today we lack two kinds of attention. The first is genuine curiosity about the digital and social worlds in which young people live. The second is psychological patience in trying to understand perpetrators. If we rely only on the first, we explain everything as social decay and lose sight of the perpetrator’s psychological makeup. If we rely only on the second, we minimize the crises of education, family, future prospects, and digital culture. What we face emerges at the intersection of these two lines: institutional erosion, a lack of future prospects, an anti-intellectual climate, an online economy of aggression, and fragile perpetrator psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world young people inhabit has changed. In many cases, the concepts available to adults have barely developed at all. So we speak a great deal and understand very little. The noise is immense, but our understanding is weak. The issue is complex, and simple interventions are likely to make it even harder to untangle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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