Dylann Roof: How to make a rampage murderer

As the penalty-phase trial of young white supremacist Dylann Roof gets underway this week, reporters have asked me to explain the psychological dynamics that trigger deadly rampages like Roof’s at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. My answer: Although the specifics such as locale and target shift, the broad contours of such spree killings remain remarkably constant. Here is my recipe of key ingredients:

1. Alienation

We humans are tribal animals. For millennia, we lived in tightly knit, cooperative societies where individuals were rarely alone. As author Sebastian Junger explores in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, tribal identity motivates individuals to sacrifice for the collective good. In stark contrast, modern society deprives people of that essential sense of connection or belonging. Our current technological atomization is “deeply brutalizing to the human spirit,” writes Junger. Cast adrift, people feel meaningless and superfluous. Social alienation is producing epidemic rates of depression and suicide. But it is in spree killings that we see the ultimate expression of malignant alienation: Embracing nihilism, the killer finds meaning via symbolically destroying not just himself, but also the social order that rebuffed and humiliated him.

Mark Ames, author of the meticulously researched Going Postal, goes so far as to argue that mass shootings are a form of doomed rebellion against a toxic culture: Otherwise-normal people snap when pushed to the breaking point within decollectivized, militarized and ruthless settings. Workplace sprees occur in oppressive institutional settings rife with surveillance, mandatory unpaid overtime, and humiliating and degrading layoff rituals. Sites of school shootings, meanwhile, are often brutal places where students undergo chronic torment. The more endemic alienation becomes, the more people will snap.

2. Failure

This is perhaps obvious, but setting the stage for a spree killing is cataclysmic failure. Except in warfare, satisfied people don’t suddenly morph into killing machines. The killer has failed a life-stage transition, and his life has gone off track. Dylann Roof had a troubled childhood, marked by abuse, neglect, severe anxiety and academic failure, according to published accounts. He dropped out of high school. As a young adult, he couldn’t get a job or even a driver’s license. He coped by drinking heavily. The lives of other recent mass killers were similarly catastrophic, marked by failures on academic, vocational and/or relationship fronts. Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook) and Elliot Rodger (Isla Vista) had autism-spectrum conditions that left them incapable of forming intimate relationships. Omar Mateen (The Pulse nightclub) was a socially awkward loser: he flunked out of police training, got fired as a prison guard, and ended up doing lowly security work; his wife fled after he beat her.

3. Entitlement

Dylann Roof posing in his bedroom.

Failure alone is insufficient. The failure must be perceived as unfair. Like Roof, whose grandfather was a prominent attorney, the killer often has middle-class roots, inculcating the American mythology of success. Mass shooters often have higher aspirations than are realistic for their station in life. In Hunting Humans, pioneering anthropologist Elliott Leyton argues that the modern mass murderer tends to be especially socially conservative, class-conscious, and obsessed with power and status. Yet in our increasingly fragmented, alienating and high-stress world, a high-quality life is difficult for many a young American to achieve. Recognizing that he is on a dead-end trajectory and that his class aspirations will not be realized produces profound disappointment, personal shame and – ultimately - despair. To reduce cognitive dissonance, he needs someone to blame.

4. Projection

By the time he explodes, the spree killer has amassed an enormous reservoir of bitterness. He feels unfairly victimized. Through a scarcity lens, he perceives less deserving people as stealing away his opportunities and robbing him of his right to happiness. Those perceived as undeserving typically include lower-status or socially stigmatized groups such as people of color, women, sexual minorities or immigrants. This is the politics of resentment that Trump has milked so effectively.

Also feeding into the potent fury of many mass murderers are childhood histories of being bullied and socially rejected. In Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman and colleagues chronicle the tormented lives of infamous school shooters. Many were incessantly harassed, with antigay epithets a common refrain. In high school, Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech) was relentlessly bullied over his social awkwardness, speech impediment and immigrant background. Dylann Roof was described as a “bug-eyed boy” with a bowl haircut who struggled academically; we can only guess at his social travails.

5. Masculinity

Spree killings are exceedingly rare (making them impossible to predict). Not every alienated, bitter loner picks up an assault rifle. But those who do are invariably male. Women are more likely to blame themselves for their misery. As journalist Jamie Bartlett reveals in The Dark Net, hundreds of thousands of young women ages 13-25 flock to the myriad “pro-cutting” and “pro-ana” (anorexia) Internet sites that have sprung up in response to demand from alienated young women.

In contrast to this turning inward, many young men regard violence against others as a way to gain status and respect. Our cultural glorification of male violence is evidenced by the enormous popularity of first-person shooter and warfare games. It is evidenced by the lack of meaningful protest over our government’s modeling of killing as a solution to problems: U.S. military drone strikes in the Middle East have ended the lives of many hundreds of civilians, with little fanfare. After all, we are the good guys, protecting the world against evil. As boys grow up, writes masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel, “they learn that they are entitled to feel like a real man, and that they have the right to annihilate anyone who challenges that sense of entitlement.”

Mass shootings are a quintessentially American theatrical production, the ultimate display of alienated hypermasculinity inside the world's leading imperial power. The production is carefully planned and staged, often accompanied by websites, online manifestos and photos that will help it propagate and endure in the cultural imagination. Embittered young men seize upon the restorative potential of violence, which enables them to extract vengeance for a litany of wrongs both real and imagined. Even more powerfully, violence offers the lure of immortality: Rack up enough dead bodies, and you become infamous. You are no longer a nobody; you are a warrior.

6. Ideology

To become a warrior, one needs a cause. There is no shortage of alienated young men like Roof, reared on a diet of masculine entitlement and believing that they have been treated unfairly. In another time, they might be like dying trees in a parched forest, standing alone and unnoticed until their eventual collapse. But in the age of the enchanted Internet, such men can simultaneously retreat from humanity yet plug into like-minded online communities where their diffuse rage can find a focus.

Elliot Rodger (Isla Vista) in pre-production selfie: "I am gorgeous"

Take Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer. A flop with women despite his self-proclaimed “gorgeous” looks, he immersed himself in the misogynist realm of the “manosphere,” where “men’s rights” proponents and “pickup artists” rail against power-mad feminists who are denying men their natural-born right to supremacy (and sex). Such insular communities are like echo chambers, validating and amplifying warped ideologies. Within the manosphere, Rodger transformed himself from an invisible nobody -- a "beta male," in man-speak -- into a “true alpha male,” in his words, a heroic warrior standing up for oppressed “incels,” or involuntary celibates.

“Women are like a plague,” he repeats several times in an online manifesto. “The mere sight of them enjoying their happy lives was an insult to me, because I deserve it more than them…. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order to prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.”

Like Rodger, Dylann Roof retreated into the Web. But instead of the manosphere, his search for meaning led him to the white supremacist channel. Specifically, the Council of Conservative Citizens, aka the “uptown Klan,” which devotes a lot of energy to disseminating propaganda about the menace of black-on-white crime. The atomization of culture into discreet identities has left many white men feeling abandoned and scapegoated, and racist ideology is quick to fill this vacuum. Roof eagerly soaked up the ideology of a white race under siege; like Rodger, he also grew frustrated with the preponderance of rhetoric over action. “[S]omeone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me,” he wrote. “I have no choice.”

Reducing the world to a stark black and white furthers the killer's self-image as a heroic warrior battling the forces of evil. In Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning, fascism scholar Roger Griffin calls this “heroic doubling”: fanatics deploy violence as a call to arms to defend an idealized in-group against perceived threat by a demonized Other. Ideologically motivated killers like Roof, Rodger or the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik may act alone in the moment, but they see themselves as soldiers in a larger movement. The growing popularity of online manifestos – Roof had one, too, although at four pages it paled in comparison to Rodger’s 141-page tome – attests to the narcissistic fervor with which spree killers cling to their adopted ideologies as rationale for bloodshed.

What makes the ascendancy of extremist rhetoric so dangerous is this capacity to activate the alienated loner. A direct cause-and-effect relationship is readily observable: Donald Trump spews anti-Muslim vitriol, and in short order attacks on U.S. Muslims spike. Public figures can produce random lone-wolf violence via repeatedly demonizing an out-group, while maintaining plausible disavowal of responsibility. This practice -- most well-known for its contribution to abortion clinic bombings -- has a scholarly term, "stochastic terrorism.” In Roof's case, the Council of Conservative Citizens whose ideology Roof parroted in his manifesto was quick to issue a statement deploring the massacre, even while defending Roof's racist belief system as correct.

7. Contagion

In late-18th century Germany, groups of young men could be seen strolling about in identical outfits of blue tailcoats, yellow trousers and high boots. They were imitating Werther, the romantic hero of the sensational novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the idealistic protagonist kills himself over unrequited love. Blamed for a rash of copycat suicides among the impressionable and mentally ill, the novel was banned in Italy and Denmark.

This so-called Werther Fever is an early example of what we now refer to as a cultural meme – an idea, fashion or behavior transmitted like a virus from person to person, often via mass media, that takes on a life of its own as it propagates.

Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech) poses in pre-production selfie

Spree killings seem to have morphed into just such a cultural meme. Especially with the spread of social media, they often go viral, tempting the next angry and alienated man with the tantalizing promise of infamy and immortality – especially if the body count is high enough.

In truth, however, this immortality is illusory, as the very ubiquity of the mass shooter meme is numbing the public; one killer’s fame lasts only for the brief interval until another pushes him aside. Dylann Roof will have his moment in the spotlight this week, and then it will be on to the next case.

Instead of just dissecting each individual act in this never-ending drama (and emphasizing singular elements such as untreated mental illness, gun accessibility, social media, violent video games, bad parenting, law enforcement failures of prediction, and the like), we might do well to regard young men like Roof as canaries in the coal mine. It is only when the air in the mine is poisonous that the canary will die.

In the award-winning TV show Mr. Robot, there are these ninja assassins who, when cornered, put a bullet in their own brain. A computer-crimes detective refers to this as “erasing their histories.” In orchestrating a dramatic last stand, mass shooters like Roof are doing precisely this, erasing their heretofore empty and meaningless lives and replacing them with a meme.

Related blog posts:

• Newtown, CT: Latest massacre brings more hand-wringing (Dec. 18, 2012) 
• Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak? (July 22, 2012) 
• Arizona rampage: Analyzing the analyzers (Jan. 23, 2011) 
• Systems failure or black swan? New frame needed to stop memorial crime control frenzy (Oct. 19, 2010) 
• Virginia Tech: Can school shootings be prevented? (April 19, 2007) 

Dylann Roof's full manifesto is HERE; Elliot Rodger's is HERE.

Militarization: When the extraordinary becomes ordinary

In line with the human rights theme of this year's Blog Action Day (it's exciting to be coordinating with 2,000+ other bloggers from around the world!),* let me share four brief anecdotes. They may seem unrelated but, ultimately, they do connect. I promise.

#1: Cheye Calvo, mayor of the small town of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, was in his bedroom one night, changing clothes for a meeting. His mother-in-law was in the kitchen, cooking a tomato-artichoke sauce. Suddenly, Calvo heard an explosion and the sound of gunfire. Heavily armed men clad in black burst into the house. He saw his mother-in-law lying face-down on the kitchen floor at gunpoint. His two beloved black Labradors lay dead in pools of blood. Clad only his boxer shorts, the mayor was bound and forced to kneel on the floor. This was it, he thought. He was about to be executed, but he knew not why.

* * * * *

#2: In the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, an alert neighbor observed a man forcing a woman into her apartment. Police were called. They burst in and found the woman in handcuffs, a man hiding in her closet with rope and two pairs of women's panties in his backpack. Daryl Thomas was a resident of the neighborhood, a husband and a father, and a computer system manager for a Manhattan law firm. When questioned by Senior Detective Harold Hernandez, he was forthcoming. No, this was not his first sexual assault; he had committed seven or eight similar attacks in the neighborhood in recent months. Yes, he was willing to show police the precise locations. The detective had one major problem: He was unaware of any serial rape spree in the 33rd precinct. If the victims had reported the crimes, the Manhattan Special Victims Unit would have notified the precinct of the pattern, so police could be on the lookout for a suspect matching Thomas’s description.

* * * * * 

Police prepare to enter Carey apartment

#3: After dental hygienist Miriam Carey attempted to ram a barricade near the White House and was shot to death on Oct. 3, her one-year-old baby in the car, police descended upon her home town of Stamford, Connecticut, armed with helicopters, bomb trucks, Hazardous Materials trucks and machine guns. The 100-odd personnel from the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and state and local police sealed off the area and evacuated nearby residents before donning Haz-Mat suits with self-contained breathing apparatuses and entering Carey’s apartment. Rather than bombs, guns or Al Qaeda literature, they reportedly found prescriptions for the antipsychotic risperidone and the antidepressant escitalopram, medications consistent with Carey's diagnosis of postpartum depression with psychosis.

* * * * * 

Ohio State University's MRAP

#4: Ohio State University has just obtained a military surplus Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) armored personnel carrier. Explaining the acquisition, the campus police chief points out that stadiums are at risk for terrorist attacks, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The MRAP may also be used for crowd control at football games. The vehicle cost about half a million dollars to produce and is designed to withstand "ballistic arms fire, mine fields, IED's, and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical environments." To make its appearance less ominous, its desert tan is being repainted black and its roof-mounted machine gun being removed. The university joins the ranks of cities across America -- from Preston, Idaho to Cullman, Alabama to Boulder, Colorado and Murrieta, California -- that are cashing in on Department of Homeland Security grant money to buy such intimidating vehicles. In Dallas County, Texas, for example, the sheriff’s department plans to use its new MRAP to serve drug warrants. 

So what's the connection?

All four anecdotes relate to an insiduous shift in U.S. policing over the past few decades, toward greater and greater militarization.

The emergence of SWAT

Young people born in the 1980s may find it hard to believe that back in 1970, there was only one SWAT team in the entire United States -- in Los Angeles, California. Today, SWAT teams are a cultural icon. Almost all cities and most small towns have these paramilitary forces. By and large, the role of SWAT teams is far removed from the Hollywood image of hostage rescue or mass shooting intervention. Rather, they are being deployed – tens of thousands of times per year – in drug raids and to serve routine warrants, according to a new book by award-winning in investigative journalist Radley Balko. 

Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland (Anecdote 1), was a victim of one such raid. Mistaken drug raids are far from rare. The judiciary's progressive weakening of checks and balances in regard to warrants and searches has fostered a police culture in which "extraordinary violence" is meted out with impunity. The shooting of dogs "at the slightest provocation," Balko writes, is part of a larger problem of an us-against-them "battlefield mentality" in which many police see the citizenry as the enemy.

Allure of the techno-warrior

"Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38?" asked one U.S. military officer who trained police SWAT teams in the 1990s. "With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun."

As this quote implies, SWAT raids -- conducted hundreds of times per year in cities large and small -- foster a masculine culture of violence and a worship of a "techno-warrior" image of policing. SWAT raids are the ultimate in power, an adrenaline rush that is quickly habit-forming. Recruitment videos that emphasize this culture may, in turn, be changing the type of individual who seeks to become a police officer.

Texas SWAT team terrorizes organic farmers in August

Balko traces the militarization of police to the "drug war" ideology that began under President Nixon and escalated under Ronald Reagan. One specific clause in an omnibus crime bill of 1984, not considered particularly controversial at the time, ultimately produced a seismic shift in American policing. The asset forfeiture law allowed police to seize property, auction it off, and divide up the bounty, just so long as federal agents were even remotely involved in the investigation.

Asset forfeiture created a huge incentive for police to go after people in order to seize their property. Drug enforcement brought in boatloads of cash, much of which was reinvested into more battle gear. Police departments competed with each other for drug revenue, to the neglect of investigating violent crimes such as rape, robbery and murder. So, we end up with situations like the one a few years back in Oakland, California, in which a lack of investigative prioritization allowed a serial rapist on parole to remain free to prey on young African American girls until he finally made the mistake of gunning down four police officers.

Detective work is no fun

Many police officers are appalled by the insidious militarization of police. Betty Taylor, police chief of a small Missouri town, recalled how she became troubled by the economic disparity between the "drug guys," flush with property seizures and endless federal grants, and the struggling sex crimes unit that she had established.

"When you think about the collateral effects of a sex crime, of how it can affect an entire family, an entire community, it just didn’t make sense," she told Balko. "The drug users weren't really harming anyone but themselves. Even the dealers, I found much of the time they were just people with little money, just trying to get by." Her opinion solidified when she was recruited onto a SWAT team, and witnessed first-hand the lasting terror that the raids produced in vulnerable children.

"I thought, how can we be the good guys when we come into the house looking like this, screaming and pointing guns at the people they love? ... Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night…. When you get into that [us-versus-them] mentality, there are no innocent people. There's us and there's the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties."

Downgrading crime

The case of Daryl Thomas (Anecdote 2) involved more than neglect of violent crimes. As Detective Hernandez discovered, police brass in his precinct -- and throughout New York City -- were systematically downgrading crimes from serious felonies to minor misdemeanors, in order to improve their CompStat crime statistics. A model that has been adopted throughout the United States as well as in England and Australia, CompStat had the unintended consequence of fostering competition among precincts for lower statistics. Only seven categories of major crime are counted in crime statistics and made publicly available, so police can reduce crime rates by, for example, reclassifying attempted rape as criminal trespass.

The Thomas case was handled quietly, with no media attention. Thomas was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. But Hernandez, frustrated by the constant battles with his own superiors, took an early retirement. "Unfortunately, this is the culture for the young cop coming into the department. He doesn't see the bigger picture," he said. "If it's going to allow him to have a day off, and they won't ride him or harass him, he'll go along with it. And New Yorkers are being victimized, and no one responds to their complaints."

While major crimes were being downgraded to misdemeanors, Manhattan police were also being encouraged to trump up minor cases -- drinking in public or driving without a seatbelt -- in order to bolster their statistics. Police officer Adrian Schoolcraft surreptitiously recorded his superiors giving these directives; with the collusion of a department psychologist, he eventually found himself drummed out of the force on trumped-up psychiatric grounds. (You can hear excerpts from his secret tapes on This American Life.)

Culture of fear

Putting the case of dental hygienist Miriam Carey (Anecdote 3) in historical context illustrates just how much has changed in the past few decades. 

Back in 1976, Chester M. Plummer became the first person shot to death by White House guards. Plummer and Carey were similar in some respects. Both were African American. Both were described as apolitical. And both manifested signs of psychiatric decompensation. With her postpartum psychosis, Carey had apparently incorporated President Obama into a delusional belief system. Plummer, a decorated Army veteran, former high school football star and part-time cabbie, had been examined by a psychiatrist after being arrested for indecent exposure; the doctor thought Plummer's recent divorce had triggered a psychiatric crisis. On July 25, 1976, Plummer scaled a fence while holding a three-foot pipe. He was shot to death after ignoring the guards’ orders to stop.

What happened -- or didn't happen -- next is where the difference in culture emerges. Blogging at The Nation, Rick Perlstein compares the two cases to highlight the extreme overreaction of police today to any threat, however contained.

"There’s terrorism now, they say. But there was terrorism then, nearly every month -- 89 bombings attributed by the FBI to terrorism in 1975, culminating in that awful LaGuardia bomb; and a veritable wave in the winter and spring 1976, much of it around the trial of Patty Hearst: of an FBI office in Berkeley, Standard Oil of California headquarters in San Francisco. Americans didn’t freak out, or shut down, or exhibit symptoms of PTSD. They had a massive outdoor national 200th birthday party."

Writing in The Baffler, Chris Bray makes a similar point in regard to the shutdown of Boston after the explosion at the marathon that killed three people.

Police outside Carey residence in Stamford, CT

In the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities weren’t locked down, armored personnel carriers with police logos didn’t rumble in, and SWAT teams in combat uniforms and body armor didn’t storm through the suburbs for a loosely ordered set of (ultimately hapless) house-to-house searches. Somehow, though, 2013 was the year it became appropriate to close cities, turning off taxis, buses, and trains and telling residents that the governor was suggesting -- okay, strongly suggesting -- that they not leave their homes until the police said so. One of those familiar moments in which officials ask the public to be on the lookout turned into a remarkable new moment in which officials ask the public to cease to exist in its public form so that the police can have the streets.

That leaves Anecdote 4, about armored personnel carriers, which pretty much speaks for itself.

"We are in the midst of a historic transformation," wrote Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter B. Kraska in 2007 in regard to police militarization. "Attempting to control the crime problem by routinely conducting police special-operations raids on people’s private residences is strong evidence that the U.S. police, and crime-control efforts in general, have moved significantly down the militarization continuum." 

The irony is that this militarization is occurring simultaneously with a great diminution in violent crime in the United States. In particular, despite the public's perception of police work as dangerous, the job of law enforcement is getting safer all the time.

The American Civil Liberties Union is looking into the broader implications of the spread of military culture into domestic policing in the United States. The agency believes that militarization has come at the cost of trampled human rights and a greater risk of violence, according to a report in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. The study is due out next year.

That strikes me as a bit too late. Pandora's box has long been opened, and there's no going back.

So, don’t be too surprised if you happen to spy a mine-resistant, ambush-protected, armored personnel carrier rolling down your street in the near future. It's only a matter of time.

Sources and recommended resources:

Radley Balko (2013), Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces 

Peter Kraska (2007), Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police

Graham Rayman (June 8, 2010), Village Voice, NYPD Tapes 3: A Detective Comes Forward about Downgraded Sexual Assaults: When even attempted rapes are being downgraded to misdemeanors, is the public safe?

Rick Perlstein (Oct. 3, 2013), Nation, Culture of Fear: Miriam Carey’s Tragedy, and Our Own

Ira Glass, This American Life, “Right to Remain Silent” (well worth a look or, better yet, a listen)

Sarah Stillman (August 12, 2013), New Yorker, Taken: Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing? 

* * * * *

*Blog Action Day is an international event in which thousands of bloggers around the world pledge to participate. This year's theme, in coordination with Amnesty International, is human rights. If you want to see a true smorgasbord of human rights topics streaming in live, check out the web page.

Special offer on groundbreaking group rape text

The Handbook on the Study of Multiple Perpetrator Rape: A multidisciplinary response to an international problem

Photo credit: Sajjad Hussain

Two current events, on opposite sides of the globe, signal encouraging changes -- dare I say even a tipping point -- in public attitudes toward sexual violence:

1. The giant waves of protest sweeping India in response to the vicious gang rape of a young woman (who died from her injuries) on a public bus in New Delhi. Protesters, spurred on by social media, are demanding that authorities address gender violence in a country in which police and prosecutors have often turned a blind eye to rampant violence against women, including rape, sexual harassment, dowry murders and honor attacks. As Shalini Nataraj of the Global Fund for Women notes in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle,  what is remarkable is that "people of all backgrounds are coming out into the streets, they are bringing their young children, they are demanding accountability from their government for this culture of violence that goes unpunished. People in India today are talking about rape."

2. The uproar over a sexual assault by members of the high school football team in Steubenville, Ohio against an unconscious girl, and alleged attempts by local authorities to cover it up. After a tenacious crime blogger posted deleted tweets and was (unsuccessfully) sued by a young athlete, the New York Times published an excellent, in-depth piece. Now, in an unprecedented development, the underground hacker group Anonymous has entered the fray, digging up and publishing incriminating tweets and videos (including the disturbing one below, featuring an athlete who has not been arrested) and demanding more aggressive prosecution.

These are precisely the types of cases that I analyzed for an upcoming chapter in the first-ever book on multiple-perpetrator rape, due out next month. My analysis focuses on the subtexts pertaining to masculinity, social status and race that are embedded in media coverage of high-profile cases. But although some of the two dozen cases that I analyzed generated widespread public outrage, it typically focused narrowly on the perpetrators and, at times, their immediate communities. The current international uproar is qualitatively different, in that people are connecting the dots between patriarchal power and sexual victimization.

Given this current level of public interest, next month's publication date for The Handbook on the Study of Multiple Perpetrator Rape is timely. I just finished reviewing the galley proofs and found the book to be a highly informative compilation, written from an international and multi-disciplinary perspective.

From the publisher's promotional blurb:

"The contributions to this collection are written by leading academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines who bring together research and practice on multiple perpetrator rape by presenting new data from a strong theoretical and contextual base. This book will be a key text for students and academics studying multiple perpetrator rape and an essential reference tool for professionals working in the field, including police officers, educationalists, forensic psychologists, youth workers, probation staff, lawyers, judges and policy makers."

Ad glorifying group rape; my web page with more examples is HERE.

Co-editors Miranda A. H. Horvath and Jessica Woodhams are phenomenal researchers who head an international consortium (of which I am proud to be a part) that focuses on the understudied problem of group rape. Horvath, who has published extensively on sexual violence and violence against women, is the David Jenkins Chair in Forensic and Legal Medicine at Middlesex University, where she is also deputy director of Forensic Psychological Services. Woodhams is a forensic psychologist who teaches forensic psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK and has also published extensively on sex offending.

Chapters include:

• Multiple perpetrator rape as an international phenomenon by Teresa Da Silva, Leigh Harkins and Jessica Woodhams
• Masculinity, status, and power: implicit messages in Western media discourse on high-profile multiple perpetrator rape cases by Karen Franklin
• Variations in multiple perpetrator rape characteristics relative to group size: Comparing duo and larger group MPR offences by Mackenzie Lambine
• Group sexual offending: comparing adolescent female with adolescent male offenders by Jan Hendriks, Miriam Wijkman and Catrien Bijleveld
• Busting the ‘gang-rape’ myth: girls’ victimisation and agency in gang-associated rape and peer-on-peer exploitation by Carlene Firmin
• Streamlining: understanding gang rape in South Africa by Rachel Jewkes and Yandisa Sikweyiya
• Multiple perpetrator rape during war by Elisabeth J. Wood
• Leadership and role-taking in multiple perpetrator rape by Louise Porter
• Offender aggression and violence in multiple perpetrator rape by Jessica Woodhams
• Multiple perpetrator rape victimization: how it differs and why it matters by Sarah Ullman
• Multiple perpetrator rape in the courtroom by Miranda A. H. Horvath and Jacqueline M. Gray
• Issues concerning treatment of adolescent multiple perpetrator rape offenders by Talia Etgar
• Girls and gangs: preventing multiple perpetrator rape by James Densley, Allen Davis and Nick Mason

This is the fourth volume in the book series Issues in Forensic Psychology, edited by Richard Shuker of the therapeutic prison community HMP Grendon in the UK. The series aims to provide analysis and debate on current issues of relevance to forensic psychology and associated fields. Routledge anticipates issuing the paperback in 2014.

To take advantage of a 20 percent pre-publication discount (until February 28), visit the book's web page and use the discount code CRIMHPR12 when placing your order. The same url can also be used to recommend the book to your institution's librarian.