Preventing School Violence

On April 16, 2007, a young man named Cho Seung-Hui, who was described by the media as a "loner," shot and killed 32 individuals on the Virginia Tech campus, then took his own life (Associated Press, 2007). Seung-Hui's behavior prior to the attack could have served as a warning sign to the Virginia Tech faculty and staff. If someone had recognized that Seung-Hui needed help and guided him toward appropriate forms of aid, he might never have taken the drastic measures that resulted in dozens of deaths and devastated families. While no standard, accepted profile exists to categorize the "school shooter," hindsight reveals psychological, social, and familial similarities among youths who engage in school-related violence, and those who strike out through violence at school tend to struggle with internal pain, despair, and depression that go unnoticed by others (Pollock, 2004). With information about the common behavioral and psychological characteristics that tie together the perpetrators of student violence at their fingertips, how can school administrators and educators nationwide collaborate to prevent such incidents from continuing to occur? Current school programs and policies have failed to eradicate the issues of young adults who turn to guns and violence to ease their pain. If existing predictors can be recognized, they can lay the groundwork for the development of a universal training program for school administrators and educators that will allow public youth influencers to take proactive, preventative measures against violence among students. Current school programs are only the beginning to a widespread, unified approach to recognizing warning signals and preventing student violence around the world. This paper will outline the ongoing issue of school-related violence and homicide, the ineffectiveness of current school prevention programs, and some of the basic behavioral risk factors among students that educators must learn to identify in order to refer troubled youths to the help they need.

As illustrated by the widely viewed media coverage that centered on the Virginia Tech shooting, among other incidents, a great deal of attention and research has been dedicated to school violence in recent years. Few people are unfamiliar with many of the deadly school shooting incidents that have periodically overtaken American headlines throughout the last decade. Despite this attention, some existing school violence prevention and intervention strategies continue to fail. The failure of some programs is evidenced by the fact that school violence continues to occur in new locations almost every year. Granted, research exists to show that school violence is not the widespread, inherent danger some people might be led to believe it to be. Statistically, incidents of homicide on school property are relatively rare, according to Farrell and Camou (2006). A National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that the majority of youth homicides and suicides occur somewhere other than at school (Dinkes, Kemp, Baum, and Snyder, 2009).

Although such research shows a low percentage of student homicide on school property in relation to the greater school population, are a few student deaths acceptable over time? Families that have lost a child to a school shooter are not likely to be comforted by such statistics. Despite the last decade's high levels of public and media attention toward school-related homicides, hundreds of students continue to die on school grounds. The American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force stated in its 2008 report that "school violence is at a crisis level and increasing" (9). A BBC News Special Report showed that few years have passed in the last decade without at least one school shooting incident taking place somewhere in the world (2009). According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), within the last decade, more than 100 students have died in more than 100 school-associated violent incidents (2008). In the single year between July 1, 2006 and June 30, 2007, the National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice Statistics study found 35 incidents of violent youth deaths that occurred on school grounds (Dinkes, et al, 2009). The fact that homicide continues to occur among students at schools cannot be unproven by research that points to relatively low, overall numbers of incidents. That school-associated violent deaths continue to occur at all might serve as evidence of the need for a better system of prevention. Even though school-related violence has been thrust into the media spotlight and the public eye time and time again throughout the last 10 years, a complete solution for its elimination has not yet emerged.

The current lack of a total solution to school violence does not suggest that schools and communities are not making efforts to fix the problem, however. In response to past incidents of school violence, many schools have implemented widespread intervention and prevention programs and policies. For example, a five-step program called "Rachel's Challenge" was formed to discourage bullying behavior at the John W. Wynn Middle School in Tewksbury, MA (Radio Boston, 2008). According to Radio Boston, the program was formed as a result of the violent attack of 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO that took the lives of several students, including Rachel Scott (2008). Part of the program involves the placement of highly visible reminders for students to avoid bullying behavior. As discussed later in this paper, bullying is one of the recognized factors that can potentially lead to school violence (Orpinas and Horne, 2006). "Rachel's Challenge" is an example of one of the hundreds of different types of student violence prevention and intervention programs that exist in schools across the United States, many of which focus on different stages of youth development and education, according to Farrell and Camou (2006). As Farrell and Camou (2006) stated, schools represent "a particularly appropriate setting for violence prevention efforts" (2) due to the proximity of faculty and youth during youths' developmental years, allowing teachers ready access to students who struggle with their peers or self adjustment. If teachers were trained in a single set of standards for recognizing predictors of school violence, they might be able to further maximize their coincidental roles as watchdogs over student development and interaction. As Farrell and Camou (2006) suggest, students spend the majority of their waking hours in schools, which means teachers oversee the majority of students' interactions, placing teachers at an advantage to target troublesome behavior through violence prevention programs.

Although educators might currently be positioned to carry out the application of a solution, not every school violence prevention program is created equally. When many different rules are imposed through the implementation of many different programs, a singular program becomes a monumental goal. Research shows that the disparities in programs from one school to the next, such as in the popular implementation of zero tolerance policies, create difficulty in the development of a unified, standard practice that can be equally applied and moderated. The American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force (2008) describes zero tolerance policies as a system based on consequences that are "most often severe and punitive in nature... applied regardless of the gravity of behavior, mitigating circumstances, or situational context" (2). The American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force suggests that controversial and inconsistent implementation of such policies is widespread among American school systems and has had contradictory effects on prevention efforts, even possibly serving to exacerbate issues of some youths' mental health (2008). While the effectiveness of individual zero tolerance policies in preventing violence and other problem behavior remains to be seen until the next incident occurs, their ability to cause anger, frustration, and confusion among students and parents can be seen in the American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force's findings (2008). In fact, the American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force (2008) found that the application of zero tolerance policies within schools outweighs existing information regarding the effectiveness of the policies, and "data tended to contradict the presumptions made in applying a zero tolerance approach" (8).

While many schools across the nation have implemented their own policies and programs in response to school violence, no evidence suggests a universal standard might currently exist or be under development to unify the collective knowledge regarding the predictors of school violence. "School shooters," overall, carry many factors and characteristics in common that can serve as the foundation for the development of a single, over-arching training program that can teach school administrators and educators how to identify potential perpetrators of school-related violence and direct them toward needed resources. As Pollack (2004) stated, few incidents of school violence have occurred in which the perpetrators did not exhibit signs prior to the attack that could have initiated "pre-emptive action" (8). In fact, Pollack (2004) found that many perpetrators of school violence displayed behavior or warning signs that indicated apparent dysfunction or a need for help, but no one intervened in time to prevent the resulting attacks.

With the understanding that "school shooters" often carry many prior, noticeable factors in common, what are some of the basic warning signs? For example, Mrug, Loosier, and Windle (2008) found that exposure to violence can have detrimental effects on youths' psychological health, potentially aiding in the development of depression and other psychopathological disorders that can lead to violent behavior. Orpinas and Horne (2006) draw a direct correlation between bullying and potential violence on the parts of victims, from self-inflicted violence in the form of suicide to retaliatory violence that can result in homicide. Loeber, Pardini, Homish, Wei, Crawford, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, Creemers, Koehler, and Rosenfeld (2005) conducted a study in which they identified dozens of categorical risk factors that contribute to potential homicidal behavior among young males. All of these common psychological and behavioral factors form the basis upon which school administrators and educators can inform themselves and take action to prevent school-related violence, instead of waiting to form a reaction after it has occurred. For instance, as Orpinas and Horne stated (2006), "Bullying can be preventable if the adults in the lives of children opt to make it so" (1). Similarly, if educators and other adults choose to act upon this and other behavioral warning signs, they can aid in preventing a number of serious issues among students that can lead to school-related violence. The American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force recommended, as an alternative to zero tolerance policies, that schools should "seek to reconnect alienated youth" (57) as one method of preventing student violence. However, before educators can act to reconnect youth, they must first be trained to identify the behaviors and warning signals of disconnected youth. In many cases, as research such as Pollack's (2004) shows, public youth influencers are able to recognize the predictors of violence among students, but, as a whole, they need further research and training in order to step in and solve the problem before it happens.

In the end, psychological research has shown, time and time again, that young people who commit acts of school-related violence or homicide exhibit signs and symptoms of distress or depression prior to attacking their peers (Pollack, 2004). With such predictors present and identifiable in student bodies across the nation and beyond, school administrators and educators have, within their grasps, the key factors upon which to develop a worldwide school violence recognition and prevention program. If teachers learn to recognize behavioral symptoms of depression, anger, isolation and bullying among students, they would then possess the proper training to guide troubled students toward intervention programs or psychological treatments that can head off potential violent behavior. Teachers and other public youth influencers are in need of universal training to see and to act upon the warning signs among students-if not for students' individual psychological health, then for the physical safety of their peers. In order to stop ongoing occurrences of violence among students, school administrators, educators, psychologists, policymakers, parents, and community members must band together to create a single, effective solution. Because research regarding behavioral violence predictors is widely available, and because many schools have violence prevention programs in place already, a unified standard regarding violence prevention training for educators is a real possibility for replacing current, disparate programs that have not succeeded in the elimination of school-related violence.

References

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