School Violence

Fears Versus Facts

Dewey G. Cornell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351549998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Illustrated with numerous case studies–many drawn from the author's work as a forensic psychologist–this book identifies 19 myths and misconceptions about youth violence, from ordinary bullying to rampage shootings. It covers controversial topics such as gun control and the effects of entertainment violence on children. The author demonstrates how fear of school violence has resulted in misguided, counterproductive educational policies and practices ranging from boot camps to zero tolerance. He reviews evidence from hundreds of controlled studies showing that school-based school violence prevention programs and mental health services, which are largely effective, are often overlooked in favor of politically popular yet ineffective programs such as school uniforms, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and Scared Straight. He concludes by reviewing some of his own research on student threat assessment as a more flexible and less punitive alternative to zero tolerance, and presents a wide ranging series of recommendations for improving and expanding the use of school-based violence prevention programs and mental health services for troubled students. Key features include the following:
Contrarian Approach– This book identifies and refutes 19 basic misconceptions about trends in youth violence and school safety, and shows how the fear of school violence has been exaggerated through inaccurate statistics, erroneous conclusions about youth violence, and over-emphasis on atypical, sensational cases.
Readability– The book translates scientific, evidence-based research into language that educators, parents, law enforcement officers, and policymakers can readily understand and shows what can be done to improve things.
Expertise –Dewey Cornell is a forensic psychologist and Professor of Education at the University of Virginia, where he holds an endowed chair inEducation. He is Director of the UVA Youth Violence Project and is a faculty associate of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy. The author of more than 100 publications in psychology and education, he frequently testifies in criminal proceedings and at legislative hearings involving violence prevention efforts.
This book is appropriate for courses or seminars dealing wholly or partly with school violence and school safety. It is also an indispensable volume for school administrators and safety officers; local, state, and national policymakers; involved parents; and academic libraries serving these groups.

1

The Fear of School Violence: An Overview

On the 21st of March 2005, sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise murdered his grandfather, a police officer, and used his squad car to drive to Minnesota’s Red Lake High School armed with his grandfather’s shotgun and a handgun. Wearing a black trench coat and protected by a bulletproof vest, he killed the school security officer and then proceeded from classroom to classroom, killing a teacher and five students and wounding at least seven others. Police officers arrived approximately eight minutes after the shooting began and opened fire on Wiese, striking him three times before he turned his own weapon on himself and committed suicide.

The Red Lake tragedy revived a complex and multifaceted debate over violence in our schools. This book examines the questions and controversies that fuel this debate, with an emphasis on distinguishing fear from fact. The unforgettable images from schools in Paducah, Jonesboro, Columbine, and Red Lake made a deep impression on the American public. The fear of school shootings has driven school authorities to adopt harsh zero tolerance policies that expel thousands of students every year, yet have no proven effect on school safety. In an attempt to prevent teen violence and drug use, schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on popular prevention programs that have been proven to be ineffective—and at the same time, ignore approaches and practices that have been shown to work.

This chapter provides an overview, showing how each subsequent chapter addresses important research and policy issues concerning school violence. Each of these issues is introduced by showing its relevance to the Red Lake shooting, which was a paradigmatic case because it demonstrated so many of the key factors that underlie the problem of school violence. Each chapter begins with a fundamental question and an illustrative case example, then presents research evidence that answers the question.

Highly publicized, extreme incidents like the Red Lake shooting understandably stimulate concern about the level of violence in our schools. The first question that these events raise is whether our schools are safe. Chapter 2 shows how the public has been misled into believing that juvenile violence has soared and that schools have become dangerous places. On the contrary, a careful review of the facts shows that juvenile violence has declined dramatically since the early 1990s and that schools are fundamentally safe.

A second, basic question raised by the Red Lake shooting is whether such tragedies can be prevented. Studies of school shooters by the FBI and the Secret Service, synthesized in Chapter 3, reveal a combination of factors in their psychological adjustment and peer relationships that makes it possible to prevent most school shootings without elaborate security or expensive programs. Chapter 3 also shows that the most extreme school shootings—which have received the greatest attention in the news media—are atypical cases and far less likely to occur than the public perceives. Furthermore, most deaths that do occur at school involve circumstances that require a different approach to school security. Efforts to prevent the highly publicized, but actually quite rare, rampage shootings divert attention and resources from more common forms of violence. This book explains how the lessons from psychological research on youth violence can be used to improve school safety.

In addition, Chapter 3 synthesizes findings from the law enforcement studies of school shootings and applies them to the shooting at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky. In this case, a fourteen-year-old boy opened fire on a prayer group, killed three girls and wounded five others, then abruptly laid down his handgun and exclaimed, “I can’t believe I did that—please kill me now.” A psychological analysis of this boy shows the “perfect storm” of factors that led to a one-in-a-million act of violence, including bullying, mental illness, violent video games, peer encouragement, and ultimately, access to guns.

GUNS

Jeff Weise would not have killed so many people at Red Lake if he had not had guns to do it. Chapter 4 examines the role of guns in school violence. Gun violence by young people soared in the 1980s, and juvenile homicide arrests tripled by the early 1990s; this generated a wave of fear and a widespread call for action. The political controversy over gun control clouded analysis of a fundamental problem: too many juveniles had illegal, unsupervised access to handguns, and when immature and impulsive youth carry guns, even ordinary disputes and arguments can escalate into killings. In fact, more than three-fourths of the murders committed by juveniles involved guns (Cornell, 1993). The fact that guns are not the cause of youth violence does not mean that guns do not play a critical role in escalating aggressive behavior into more violent outcomes. Psychological research discussed in this chapter shows how access to guns can influence a young person’s attitudes and decision-making process.

How many youths are bringing guns to school, and how much violence takes place that never makes it to the newspapers? Public perceptions of school violence have been skewed not just by media focus on a few extreme cases, but by researchers who used, and continue to rely on, faulty surveys and polls that exaggerate the danger of violence in schools. One of the most widely cited statistics, for example, is the claim that students bring an average of 135,000 guns to school every day. A Google search of “135,000 guns” retrieved more than 130 links in 2005, almost twenty years after the national study that generated this number was conducted. Organizations ranging from the American Sociological Association to the National Crime Prevention Council to the National School Boards Association promulgated this claim to support policy recommendations on various issues such as gun control, juvenile justice, and school safety. Despite all the attention given to this statistic, its source is not accurately reported; how it was extrapolated from a questionable school survey goes unexplained by all of these organizations. Chapter 4 unravels the mystery of where “135,000 guns” came from, and why it is unreliable.

BULLYING

Classmates admitted that Weise was often picked on and teased for his appearance and odd behavior (CNN, March 25, 2005; De, 2005). Other kids punched and kicked him in middle school, but this stopped when he grew to be over six feet tall (Rave, 2005). Even so, kids continued to make fun of him, and he was taunted so often that he frequently refused to go to school. He made no secret of his anger and contempt for those who rejected him. Like many of the other victims of bullying who lashed out by going on a lethal rampage, he was alienated from his peers and his community; he sometimes wore his hair dyed red and spiked into horns. As a member of the Red Lake band of the Chippewa tribe, he was openly critical of Native Americans and went so far as to place pro-Nazi postings on the website for the National Socialist Green Party. He called himself a “Native Nazi.” He even referred to himself by the German name Todesengel, which means “angel of death.” In many other school shootings, the attacker, like Wiese, appeared to be a victim of relentless bullying who responded by rejecting conventional values and becoming morbidly preoccupied with violent revenge (O’Toole, 2000).

Chapter 5 addresses bullying, which in recent years has become one of the hottest topics in academic and educational circles. A widely-cited national study reported that three out of ten students are frequently involved in bullying as a victim or bully (Nansel et al., 2001). How pervasive is bullying, and what can be done about it? There is a risk that schools will over-react to the problem of bullying, defining it so broadly that they overlook truly serious forms of bullying and implement programs that ultimately prove to be ineffective. Schools are rapidly implementing bully prevention programs, most of them modeled after the Olweus program developed in Norway. Although the federal government has endorsed and supported this program, studies of its effectiveness have yielded disappointing results (Smith et al., 2004) and there is a risk that the national movement to prevent bullying will fail. Instead, schools must do a better job of defining bullying, teaching students what bullying is, and encouraging students to seek help when they are being bullied.

ENTERTAINMENT VIOLENCE

Like other students who committed school shootings, Weise spent a lot of time playing violent video games and watching violent movies. A few months before the shooting, he created an animated video in which a gunman kills four people before taking his own life (Haga, 2005). Clearly, he had been preoccupied with thoughts of killing people long before his fantasies were translated into action.

Weise was also an avid fan of rap music with violent themes, such as the album “Self-inflicted” by a band called “Project: Deadman” (Von Sternberg, 2005). Weise especially liked the so-called “Horrorcore” school of hip-hop and posted statements on the fan Web site for Mad Insanity Records. A San Francisco-based rapper named Mars defended himself against accusations that his music affected Weise, stating, “I write a lot of crazy lyrics, but there’s something wrong about anyone who blurs the line between reality and entertainment. Maybe it inspired him, but no one knows what was going on in Jeff Weise’s mind” (Von Sternberg, 2005). Mars went on to say, “A lot of people who post on my Web site are a bunch of crazy kids,” he said. “They write about suicide, murder, guns. But to get to a place where you do something, you have to be kind of crazy, pretty warped as a person.”

Congressional debate over the influence of entertainment media violence on youth is a perennial topic that dates back to the 1950s when Congress investigated the impact of television violence. Although spokespersons for the television and movie industry have repeatedly promised to impose their own voluntary restrictions in lieu of government regulation, the level of violence children watch today is far beyond what Congress could have imagined fifty years ago; no one imagined video games in which the players can maim and kill their opponents in surrealistic scenes filled with bloody, mangled bodies. One of the most popular video games rewards players for having sex with prostitutes and then killing them (USA Today, July 14, 2005).

The evidence that entertainment violence can cause actual violence is reviewed in Chapter 6. Literally hundreds of scientific studies conducted around the world have led to the conclusion—officially accepted by numerous medical and scientific organizations—that exposure to entertainment violence increases a child’s aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and, over time, increases the risk that a child will engage in violent criminal behavior as an adult (Anderson, Berkowitz, et al., 2003). Nevertheless, news reports of these studies have consistently minimized and discounted the findings, so that the public has not been well informed (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). Chapter 6 concludes with the arguments commonly raised by the entertainment industry’s defenders, and explains why they should be dismissed.

VIOLENCE PREVENTION

Weise was a troubled young man with a history of psychiatric treatment for depression (Haga, 2005; Rave, 2005). He had attempted suicide at least once by cutting his wrists and he was being seen for mental health counseling; his dose of Prozac had been increased just a week prior to the shooting. One statement he posted on the internet reflected his suicidal feelings, “Most people have never dealt with people who have faced the kind of pain that makes you physically sick at times, makes you so depressed you can’t function, makes you so sad and overwhelmed with grief that eating a bullet or sticking your head in a noose seems welcoming” (Zenere, 2005). His emotional troubles are yet another factor he shared with other students who had gone on shooting rampages; depression and suicidal behavior were identified in most of the cases studied by the Secret Service (Vossekuil et al., 2002).

Schools have implemented hundreds of programs designed to address mental health problems in students, to promote positive social behavior, and to prevent aggressive and antisocial behavior. Chapter 7 will review the evidence for effective programs and describe those that can substantially reduce fighting and other misbehavior at school. Although effective programs are available, they are often overlooked in favor of less successful approaches that seem more appealing. Chapter 8 will identify four popular but highly controversial approaches—Juvenile boot camps, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.), Scared Straight, and school uniforms—that are widely used despite clear evidence that they are ineffective.

Student Threats

Could the school shooting at Red Lake have been prevented? The attack seemed to have been carefully planned and methodically carried out. Both the FBI (O’Toole, 2000) and Secret Service (Vossekuil et al., 2002) studies of school shootings reported that nearly all of the attackers made some of their classmates aware of their intentions and engaged in weeks or months of planning that could have been recognized as a harbinger of impending violence. Several potential school shootings have been prevented because students who knew about their classmate’s intentions sought help (O’Toole, 2000).

Many Red Lake students knew that Weise had threatened to commit a violent act of revenge. Dozens of students were questioned before a grand jury about their possible knowledge of Weise’s intentions, and one student was arrested as a potential co-conspirator (Louwagie, Burcum, & Collins, 2005). Weise made numerous direct and indirect references to what he might do in statements to his peers and in numerous web postings. During the 2003-04 school year Weise was questioned by police after he allegedly told classmates that he was going to “shoot up the school” (Zenere, 2005). Another sign of Weise’s violent intentions was his animated video of a gunman going on a suicidal rampage, which was posted on the web for all to see.

Should the school have done more to investigate Weise and determine whether he posed a threat to others? Is school suspension—the most widely used disciplinary response to violent behavior—an effective response to a dangerous student? A new approach to investigating student threats—termed “threat assessment”—is described in Chapter 9. In 1999, the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime convened a national conference on school shootings and subsequently issued a report (O’Toole, 2000) concluding that schools should use a threat assessment approach to identify potentially dangerous students. In 2002, a joint report of the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education similarly recommended that schools train threat assessment teams (Fein et al., 2002).

Although two government reports recommended that schools conduct threat assessments, there was no assurance it would work. Could the threat assessment approach used in law enforcement be adapted for schools? To answer these questions, a team of researchers at the University of Virginia, headed by the author, took on the task of field-testing threat assessment in 35 public schools (Cornell, Sheras, Kaplan, Levy-Elkon, et al., 2004; Cornell, Sheras, Kaplan, McConville, et al., 2004). The results of this field-test are reported in Chapter 8.

Why Fear Matters

The fear of violence is important because fear has driven schools to make radical changes in how schools function and how students are disciplined. Anxious school administrators have responded with strict zero tolerance policies that dictate severe punishment for even accidental violations of school rules.

Stunned by testimony on the growing juvenile crime wave, in 1994 Congress passed the Gun-Free Schools Act, which required that schools expel for one calendar year any student found to be in possession of a firearm at school. Although the law permitted local school districts to modify the expulsion on a case-by-case basis, this provision was frequently overlooked in favor of less flexible p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1 The fear of school violence: An overview
• 2 Are our schools safe? From juvenile crime to school violence
• 3 What Caused the School Shootings?
• 4 How many guns in our schools?
• 5 What can we do about bullying?
• 6 Are we teaching our kids to kill?
• 7 Does prevention work?
• 8 What doesn’t work?
• 9 How can we deal with student threats?
• 10 What do our schools need?
• References
• Index