The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education

Forms, Factors, and Preventions

Harvey Shapiro, Harvey Shapiro

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118966693
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Consejería educativa

In this comprehensive, multidisciplinary volume, experts from a wide range fields explore violence in education's different forms, contributing factors, and contextual nature.

With contributions from noted experts in a wide-range of scholarly and professional fields, The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education offers original research and essays that address the troubling issue of violence in education. The authors show the different forms that violence takes in educational contexts, explore the factors that contribute to violence, and provide innovative perspectives and approaches for prevention and response. This multidisciplinary volume presents a range of rigorous research that examines violence from both micro- and macro- approaches.

In its twenty-nine chapters, this comprehensive volume's fifty-nine contributors, representing thirty-three universities from the United States and six other countries, examines violence's distinctive forms and contributing factors. This much-needed volume:

• Addresses the complexities of violence in education with essays from experts in the fields of sociology, psychology, criminology, education, disabilities studies, forensic psychology, philosophy, and critical theory
• Explores the many forms of school violence including physical, verbal, linguistic, social, legal, religious, political, structural, and symbolic violence
• Reveals violence in education's stratified nature in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the problem
• Demonstrates how violence in education is deeply situated in schools, communities, and the broader society and culture
• Offers new perspectives and proposals for prevention and response

The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education is designed to help researchers, educators, policy makers, and community leaders understand violence in educational settings and offers innovative, effective approaches to this difficult challenge.

Section 1
School Shootings

Section Editor: Harvey Shapiro

Section 1
Introduction: Broadening the Context, Refocusing the Response

Harvey Shapiro

Sandy Hook, Columbine, Sparks, Red Lake, Oak Creek, Columbine, and, even more recently, Toqueville High School (in Grasse, France) and South Carolina’s Townville Elementary School, Benton, Kentucky’s Marshall County High School, and Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This partial list of school shootings continues to present us with questions of “how”: How could this happen – and in a school or college campus, of all places? How might education respond? How can we prevent what has become an increasing frequency of rampage and targeted school shootings? How can we help our children, school personnel, and communities heal in the wake of such trauma? How can we begin to understand? Asking these questions, we seek guidance for coping, comprehending, preventing, and responding.

Rather than considering these questions from the perspective of one discipline alone, we respond to these questions from a wide range of conceptual and disciplinary angles. The authors of this section are experts from the fields of criminology, sociology, philosophy, education, social theory, cultural studies, ethics, and forensic psychology. Without presuming to have conclusive answers explaining these tragedies, this section’s contributors provide compelling contextual understandings and new directions for policy and practice, revealing a complex matrix of often overlooked factors that contribute to school shootings and suggesting thoughtful, well‐grounded measures for prevention and response.

Equally important, the authors address prevalent misconceptions, misrepresentations, questionable, counterproductive responses, and their unintended, but harmful consequences. When we hear of a school shooting we become preoccupied, justifiably, with issues of school security, mental health, response time, and deterrence. These important concerns, however, can foreclose responses to pervasive underlying problems. By beginning to expose the latter, we offer new, ambitious, hopeful directions for understanding, preventing, and responding to the scourge of this form of devastating violence.

We all sense with empathy the deep pain, anger, and resolve of survivors and their loved ones. Their quests for safer school environments are exemplified in Sandy Hook Elementary School parents’ and Newtown, Connecticut’s community leaders’ continuing campaign to educate school personnel and students to “know the signs of planning a shooting,” asserting that “gun violence is preventable when you know the signs” (Sandy Hook Promise 2015). The ability to recognize signals of a potentially imminent repetition of anything akin to the seismic shock of the 2012 rampage school shooting and similar tragedies may be of great value.

As will become evident in this section’s chapters, there are other actions that could prove efficacious. For example, at this writing, the Connecticut Supreme Court has consented to hear an appeal of the Newtown victims’ families on their previously dismissed wrongful‐death lawsuit against the manufacturer of the AR‐15 assault rifle used by Adam Lanza in his December 14, 2012 shooting rampage at their children’s school. Also named in the lawsuit are the weapon’s distributor and the store where the weapon had been purchased by the shooter’s mother (Altimari 2017). One online retailer markets the AR‐15 assault rifle with the service mark, “Shoot now. Pay later^SM” (GrabAGun.com 2017). Also used in the San Bernardino, California and Aurora, Colorado shootings, the large‐magazine AR‐15 is called “America’s Rifle” by the National Rifle Association (Altimari 2017).

Despite the complexity of school shootings’ contexts and circumstances, there are significant, indisputable facts. As sociologist Ralph Larkin points out in Chapter 4, included among these are “that rampage school shooters are almost all male” and “that the vast majority of school shootings happen in the United States.” And these additional points are beyond contention:

• The number of rampage school shootings worldwide has increased in recent decades, from six in the 1970s, to 11 in the 1980s, to 36 in the 1990s, to 57 between 2000 and 2013 (Böckler et al. 2013).
• Since 1925, the United States has had 76 rampage school shootings. The country with the next largest number is Germany, with 8 during the same period (Böckler et al. 2013).
• These do not include the significant number of planned attacks that were averted (Madfis 2012). On February 1, 2017, for example, police in Florida arrested two teenagers for allegedly plotting what could have been a mass shooting the next day in their school. Other students reported overhearing them say that the attack would be “bigger than Columbine” (Hanna and Ansari 2017).

This section’s contributors provide new ways of interpreting and responding to these and many other alarming facts. Much recent research has minimized the shooters’ relationships to their educational, communal, and political environments and to the times in which we live, searching instead for a typology of common psychological profiles and proposing intensified security measures. The media, too, often overlooks relational, contextual understandings, tending to focus, instead, on spectacularized images and perpetrators’ mental illnesses and manifestos. Thus, a common response has been increased security measures, lockdown drills, the arming of staff, and defensive protocols. And there have been distorted, even false, characterizations in academia, as well, such as this recent one in a social science and policy journal: “These days, it is not uncommon for a teenager or a young man to walk into his present or former school on a shooting rampage” (Frank 2016, emphasis added). After reading these chapters, we hope our readers with recognize the inaccurate or misdirecting nature and effects of such depictions and hyperbolic claims.

In Chapter 1, criminologists James Fox and Emma Fridel argue that caricaturing school shootings as not being uncommon is the source of common misconceptions that schools today are unsafe places. They show how this disproportionally inflated understanding of the risk of school shootings has spawned widespread counterproductive responses, such as oversurveillance, zero tolerance measures, the increasing ubiquity of school security personnel, more simulated drills and lockdowns, firearms for staff, student profiling, and unwarranted, draconian punishments. The authors demonstrate how the unintended, but harmful, consequences of such increased measures are heightened fear, tension, a confrontational school climate, achievement declines, increased dropout rates, and psychological problems. They provide a broader perspective on school shootings, suggesting compelling alternative approaches and measures that consider school architectural design, the size of the student body, and school climate.

In Chapter 2, Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist, responds to the shortcomings of widespread profiling, metal detection, and surveillance measures, presenting his well‐developed, increasingly utilized, evidence‐based threat assessment approach to prevention. The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines is showcased as an appropriate way to recognize and respond to students’ threats of violence, while placing those threats in the context of the actual relative infrequency of violent crimes in educational settings. Arguing compellingly for the heterogeneity of student threats, Cornell shows how these threats are not generalizable and require thoughtful consideration of each individual context, avoiding a knee‐jerk alarm when a student makes a threat or fits a kind of profile. Beyond threat assessment, Cornell then argues for broader prevention measures: Support for families’ child‐rearing efforts, strengthening student services, addressing socioeconomic inequities, and considering the particular context of an...