<p>JeepMOM,
Privacy laws are not absolute. In fact, no laws are really “absolute,” in that life and the safety of the community cannot be subordinated to privacy claims, when those threaten the security of others. Again, someone should have done the more loving thing with the Cho family, which would have been to inform them of the truth. Ditto for his teachers & school administrators, who have every right to such private information & needed Cho’s private information in order to direct the family to adequate services, to provide an intelligent educational plan for him, and to protect him & eventual classmates from a massacre.</p>
<p>UUMmm interesting idea - but if my privacy rights were trounced upon - then believe me - they would be made absolute - this after the facts issue we are discussing bears little relief to what was in the past - 20/20 vision now is great - but in the long run - he and his family had every ‘right’ to privacy - as he had not threatened the security of anyone else until last monday.</p>
<p>Maybe the family was informed - and maybe they weren’t - the cultural differences play a huge role in this situation. There was no reason to believe that CHO would eventually do this horrid deed.</p>
<p>I will repeat: Privacy rights, like other individual rights, are not absolute.</p>
<p>And the point is not that a behavior could be directly predicted, but that neglect of any psychopathology can logically have diastrous & fatal effects. That’s why educators & other people in positions of authority have a level of responsibility to predict a citizen from himself and from others.</p>
<p>whoops, I meant “protect” in that last sentence, not “predict.”</p>
<p>From an AP story today:</p>
<p>“I think we failed him as a society at large,” says Josephine Kim, a mental health expert who also emigrated from South Korea at age 8. "I think our community failed him, the school system failed him, and definitely the immigrant life really failed him…</p>
<p>Kim, who specializes in depression among Korean Americans, characterized Cho as an “internalizer.”</p>
<p>“They’re not disruptive,” she said. “Those students are withdrawn and isolated, and even though we see that as a problem, because it’s not disruptive, often they slip through the cracks.”</p>
<p>And she said Korean society - Confucian, patriarchal, and steeped in pride, dignity and the importance of family - has long viewed mental illness as a taboo topic best kept in the closet.</p>
<p>Many Koreans consider it "a sign of bad blood or a sin to be depressed, Kim said. “It’s against our culture to talk about these things.”</p>
<p>In immigrant families, the generation gap often is exacerbated by the cultural divide of parents struggling to make ends meet while their children try to become American, she said.</p>
<p>“Every Korean immigrant kid goes through it. And I think some come out stronger and better, and for some, it’s really tough and they can’t get over it,” Hong said.</p>
<p>Kim, whose younger brother, Paul, was a classmate of Cho’s at Virginia Tech, said she did not know the Cho family personally. But she speculated that “the parents really wanted to provide the American Dream for their kids, which required that they made superhuman sacrifices working really hard.”</p>
<p>“That might have meant they didn’t have enough time at home with their kids. It’s often kids raising themselves,” said Kim, speaking by telephone from Cambridge, Mass."</p>
<p>NSM - thank you for the above - it is pretty much what I have suspected - that the cultural issues have been a primary source of how this family handled things.</p>
<p>Epiphany, I haven’t read all the posts here but was wondering whether the case of Janet Frame had been brought up among discussions on alerting strange behaviors or writings of students. Jane Campion made a film on Frame a few years back. Frame was a college student when the school convinced her family to commit her to a mental institute due to her strange writings. she went through numerous electric shock therapy and was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy when she was saved by winning a prestigeous literary prize. She was let out and subsequently published eleven novels. </p>
<p>Cormac McCathy won the Pultizer Prize this year. I wonder how you would have reacted to his writings if he is a youngster in your class?</p>
<p>Earlier today I read Jeannine Lee’s Associated Press article wherein she quoted the Korean-American psychiatrist’s [opinions] observations on Cho and his family. Scrutinizing the possible cultural/ethnic components of Cho’s past is not attacking or condemning the Korean immigrant community. It’s a relevant evaluation as to what events or habits hurt or hindered the young man.</p>
<p>From Newsweek:</p>
<p>"A genetically identical clone of Cho growing up with different experiences in a different environment would likely not have set an American record for mass murder: although the biology would have been sufficiently twisted, the psychology—the product of experiences interacting with that biology—would not have been. Similarly, a Cho who grew up in, say, Japan would almost certainly not have acted on his hatred and fury: biology and psychology set the stage for homicidal violence, but the larger culture would likely have prevented its execution. (Japan is not immune from heinous murders, of course: one day after the Virginia Tech shootings, the mayor of Nagasaki was fatally gunned down on a sidewalk, apparently by a mobster.) What is becoming clear is that criminal violence reflects and requires the dark hand of individual biology, life experiences and the larger cultural surround—and the will to take lives in cold blood…</p>
<p>"Rather than being smooth, manipulative psychopaths, says Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, mass killers tend to be aggrieved, hurt, clinically depressed, socially isolated and, above all, paranoid.</p>
<p>It is a specific kind of paranoia: a tendency to blame everyone but themselves for their troubles, to believe the world is against them and life is unfair. “They see others as being responsible for their problems; it’s never their fault,” says James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. “That’s why when they come to the decision that life isn’t worth living, they decide to take others with them.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18248728/site/newsweek/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18248728/site/newsweek/</a></p>
<p>NSM - ^^that is one of the best explanations that I have seen regarding the patho-physiology of what could have happened to this guy and the how/why he ended up doing what he did - thank you</p>
<p>
Kids raising themselves. Very interesting point.</p>
<p>I have heard over and over about the Cho’s poverty. Yet today I read that they bought a $145,000 townhouse in June of 1997 and paid off the mortgage in 2003. </p>
<p>I also read that Cho’s mom stopped attending church on Sundays shortly after he began school at VT & instead drove to Blacksburg to visit him. Was he communicating his isolation to his mom? Or was she just sensing it & attempting to reach out to him? The roomates never saw the parents, so were the meetings with mom & son taking place off campus?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1177304315163870.xml&coll=1[/url]”>http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1177304315163870.xml&coll=1</a></p>
<p>An interesting article and theory. All of this just goes to show - no one knows. </p>
<p>A Social Theory of Violence Looks Beyond the Shooter</p>
<p>By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, April 23, 2007; Page A03</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201190.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042201190.html</a></p>
<p>Black says that studying the relationships between victims, perpetrators and bystanders can explain psychologically inexplicable behavior: Why do people such as Cho kill strangers who have nothing to do with their problems? The vectors of social geometry, Black says, propel individuals to do what they do. “There are particular social configurations that produce various kinds of behavior,” Black said. “It is the configuration that generates the violence. It is not peculiar to the individual. There is not something in the individual’s mind that brings the event into existence.”</p>
<p>D Take a lok at the post by cheers in the duke lax thread - Cho hired a stripper a month before the massacre at VT. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=288805&goto=newpost[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=288805&goto=newpost</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In the part of the country in which the Cho family lives, this is an inexpensive home.</p>
<p>It sure seems like a steal to me. But how’d they manage to pay off the mortgage so quickly? Wish we could!</p>
<p>Regardless of whether the house was “inexpensive” compared to others in the area, I am not sure I consider a family who can pay off a $145k mortgage in 6 yrs poor. Also, fromthe photos they showed, the townhouse and neighborhood looked quite comfortable.</p>
<p>My understanding is that some Asian immigrants don’t believe in borrowing even to buy a house, so to buy a house and pay it off as quickly as possible may pinch pennies and work overtime to an extent that most people wouldn’t consider feasible in this country.</p>
<p>Link to the story about Cho hiring a stripper:</p>
<p>"Seung-Hui Cho hired her to dance for him in a motel room one month before the massacre at Virginia Tech’s campus, dancer Chastity Frye said in an on camera interview with at TV station in Roanoke, Va… "
<a href=“Report: Cho Hired an Escort Before Rampage - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/US/VATech/story?id=3071730&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312</a></p>
<p>From e-Bay: "some news outlets have erroneously reported that Mr. Seung-Hui Cho may have purchased on eBay ammunition used in his crimes. To be perfectly clear, guns and ammunition are not permitted on eBay. Mr. Cho did not purchase guns or ammunition on our site. We can confirm that Mr. Cho did buy and sell numerous items on eBay in recent months, including books and tickets to sporting events. "</p>
<p>That’s right NSM. Many Asian families will buy a home and try to pay it off a.s.a.p., every penny goes towards the house payment. There may be very little furniture in the house, no window treatments etc. If a family does not eat out, nor go to movies, only buy at the thrift store, cook at home, and work 12 hours a day, I can see how it is possible for them to pay off the house. Plus at minimum wage, there is no incentive to carry a loan as the interest payments don’t effectly lower your taxes, maybe.</p>