A 14-year-old boy’s killing of eight people in Thailand is the latest in a series of attacks in the country that, according to Dr Stephen Whitehead, exposes a wider pattern of male violence linked to toxic masculinity. But like climate change, society repeatedly acknowledges each case while refusing to confront the underlying pattern, he argues

The first two people to die on Friday morning died at home. Police found the boy’s grandfather shot dead in the kitchen and his grandmother shot dead in a bedroom of the house where all three of them lived. He was 14. They had raised him. The handgun was his grandfather’s.

He then walked to school. At around 9.30am, in a purple physical-education kit, he began firing on the grounds of Debsirin Nonthaburi School, home to 3,000 pupils on the north-western edge of Bangkok. Five members of staff died at the school and a 12-year-old girl died from her injuries the following day. More than 20 were injured. The boy also died after shooting himself. Nine people were dead in all, including him.

Many readers will already have performed the manoeuvre this article is about. Thailand. Guns. A long way away. Appalling, obviously – but not here, not mine, nothing that asks anything of me.

That manoeuvre is precisely why I have come to think of toxic masculinity as a climate problem.

Nobody who denies climate change disputes the physics of the greenhouse effect. The denial has never been total but, rather, granular. Yes, the atmosphere retains heat but this particular flood was just weather. Yes, the record is warming but this particular fire was arson or bad luck. You concede the general and contest every particular, and by that method you never once have to act. It’s an extraordinarily efficient way of being wrong.

The denial of toxic masculinity runs on the same machinery. Nobody denies what happened in Nonthaburi on Friday. What gets denied is the pattern into which it falls. The perpetrator had access to a gun. Police have since said he had watched violent online content and had an interest in firearms. Thailand’s prime minister pointed to school-related stress. Each may help explain what happened; none removes the harder question of what pattern the event belongs to.

So let me lay out the pattern, entirely within one mid-sized, largely Buddhist, comparatively peaceful country in South-East Asia.

February 2020, Korat. Sergeant Major Jakrapanth Thomma shot his commanding officer dead over a property dispute, stole military weapons, drove to the Terminal 21 mall and killed 29 people. October 2022, Nong Bua Lamphu. A former policeman killed 36 people; 24 of them were children at a rural childcare centre. He then drove home, killed his wife and his son, and shot himself. October 2023, Bangkok. A 14-year-old boy opened fire in Siam Paragon with a blank-firing pistol illegally converted to fire live rounds, killing two women.

July 2025, Bangkok. A man with a grievance against security guards at the Or Tor Kor fresh market shot five people dead then killed himself. February 2026, Hat Yai. A 17-year-old walked into a school with a handgun stolen from a police officer and opened fire. The school director died the following day. I live in Hat Yai. That was my local news – a teenager deciding that a school was the correct venue for whatever he was carrying.

And Friday. Six incidents; more than 80 dead, not counting the men who killed them. Six male perpetrators.

Guns are part of the story. Thailand has roughly 15 civilian firearms per 100 people, compared with 120.5 in the United States. After Friday’s attack, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul promised tighter controls on carrying firearms in public. He is not wrong; fewer guns will mean fewer dead children. But notice the shape of the response. We will discuss the weapon at any length you like. We will discuss the boy’s mental health, his family circumstances, his screen time. What we rarely discuss is the variable that has held constant across all six of these events: the perpetrator is male. We have collectively agreed to treat the single most reliable predictor in the entire dataset as though it were a coincidence.

Look again at those six. A soldier who felt cheated by his commander; a policeman sacked and facing court; a man who believed the market guards had wronged him. In case after case, a man sustains an injury to his standing, experiences that injury as unendurable, and converts it into other people’s deaths. It is masculinity operating exactly as it was taught — a grievance that must be answered, publicly, with force, because the alternative is to be seen to absorb it.

Here I should say what the term ‘toxic masculinity’ actually means, because it is a hostage to fortune and its critics know it. It sounds like an accusation against men as such, and is routinely misread that way. In fact, it names something far narrower: a script of manhood that ties a man’s worth to his dominance, codes vulnerability as humiliation and licenses aggression as the legitimate answer to being disrespected. Most men who absorb some of that script will never raise a hand to anyone. The point is risk, not inevitability.

Climate science does not claim that warming caused any particular hurricane, but that warming loads the dice, shifts the distribution and turns the once-in-a-century event into the once-in-a-decade one. Toxic masculinity loads the dice in precisely this manner. It doesn’t manufacture killers. Instead, it raises the ambient probability that a boy in pain will reach for a weapon rather than for a person.

And the dice are loaded most heavily where we look least. Remember where Friday began: not at the school gates but in a kitchen and a bedroom, with a grandmother. UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimate that about 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024 – around 137 every day, or one every 10 minutes. Around 60 per cent of all women and girls intentionally killed that year died at the hands of a partner or relative.

Set beside it the figure nobody quotes: just 11 per cent of male homicide victims were killed by a partner or relative. Men are overwhelmingly killed by strangers. Women are overwhelmingly killed by the people who claim to love them.

And it’s not an abstraction. Count the days. On Sunday morning in Nakhon Si Thammarat, police found a 33-year-old man, Kittipat Mudman, dead beside his motorcycle, shot through the temple with the pistol he had used two days earlier on his girlfriend as she lay in bed looking at her phone. Sudaporn Jitra was 34; investigators believe he had seen her talking to another man. On Monday morning, in Nonthaburi again, a former MP shot the chairman of the provincial administration four times through his car window – a friend of many years who owed him money and would not talk, then rang a live YouTube politics show to announce what he had done. Three days, three men, three injuries to status that could not be absorbed.

The emissions are only rising. What was once the fringe of the internet is now the ordinary media diet of adolescent boys. In March, Monash University and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety published a guide to help schools counter the manosphere. A survey of 200 British teachers found 76 per cent of secondary staff ‘extremely concerned’ about online misogyny in their classrooms. The 2026 edition of Keeping Children Safe in Education names misogyny as a statutory safeguarding priority for the first time — the moment an institution stops arguing about whether the sea is rising and starts costing the seawall.

Which brings me back to the boy in the purple PE kit. He is evidence. Somewhere between his grandfather’s gun and the third floor of his school’s pink building, he acquired the belief that this was a thing a man does with his humiliation. He did not invent it. It was taught to him — by other boys, by screens, by the adults who watched it forming and decided it was a phase.

The lag is the cruellest part of the analogy. Carbon released today warms the world for decades. A boy shaped at 12 does not become a statistic until he is 25. Which means the emissions of 2026 – the algorithms, the influencers, the profitable business of telling lonely boys that their loneliness has a female cause – may not present their invoice until the 2040s. We are, right now, choosing the weather our grandchildren will live in.

It does not matter where you live. Geography will not exempt you, and neither will your own innocence. You did not burn the coal but your house burns anyway. For most readers it will not arrive as a school shooting but as the boyfriend who checks your daughter’s phone. As the colleague who cannot take an instruction from a woman without needing to punish someone for it. As your son at 14, alone in his room, being told by a stranger with an eight-figure following that his pain has a name and that name is female.

Deny it for as long as you find it comfortable. The flames are entirely indifferent to your position on the matter.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

READ MORE: ‘What ‘passport bros’ misunderstand about Thai women‘. More Western men are travelling to Thailand in search of supposedly submissive partners. But these so-called ‘passport bros’ are mistaking emotional restraint for weakness, and overlooking the hidden labour and social cost borne by the women they claim to admire, writes Dr Stephen Whitehead.

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