Predicting school violence

Abstract

It has been over five years since the fateful day in April of 1999 when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris began a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado that led to the deaths of 15 students and teachers, including themselves, and injuries to another 23 students. Recently, the release of a videotape showing both Dylan and Eric laughing and shooting trees with automatic weapons and shotguns six weeks before the incident has reinvigorated discussions of how such tragedies could be prevented (Associated Press, 2003). The echoes of this gruesome event have also continued to engage the attention of researchers, the public, and policy-makers and have led to whole scale changes in the security surrounding our schools. In the wake of this event and other high profile cases of school violence, school administrators have implemented myriad policies aimed at reducing the likelihood of these events re-occurring, including any number of safe school and zero tolerance initiatives (e.g., automatic suspensions or expulsions: 1) for weapons brought to school;' 2) for threats made against students or administrators; or 3) for violating school dmg policies) (Mulvey & Cauffman 2001). In some cities millions of dollars have been spent post-Columbine on the installation of metal detectors and the hiring of additional security guards for their schools (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Bomm, & Modzelski, 2002). Yet, these policy attempts to make schools more secure environments have some scholars suggesting that the measures will have the opposite effect by further alienating students from the school administrators, making it less likely that students will convey possible threats to the faculty (Mulvey & Cauffman, 2001).' In addition to securing the physical environs of the school, post- Columbine policy has also sought to be proactive in assessing the risk of violence within the student body. School administrators and policy-makers have become fixated on the idea of identifying students or "profiling" those who are more likely to engage in these violent acts in order to avoid future tragedies. Such policies have called on mental health professionals as well as students and faculty to name troubled students. In fact, the principal at Columbine High School circulated a memorandum after the tragic events requesting that students report other students who were acting in an unusual manner (Aronson, 2000). While such attempts to identify and predict school violence are clearly heartfelt, at present a vast number of problems inherent in the prediction of school violence suggest that these attempts will be less than adequate in achieving their stated purpose. This chapter will first examine rates of school violence with special emphasis placed on "targeted" school violence. Targeted violence is a term first used by the United States Secret Service in another context; it was utilized to define the prediction of whether certain individuals would engage in serious attempts and attacks on public or prominent officials (Fein & Vossekuil, 1998). Most recently, targeted school violence has been adopted by the Department of Education and the United States Secret Service joint task force of the Safe School Initiative to describe "school shootings and other school-based attacks where the school was deliberately selected as the location for the attack and was not simply a random site of opportunity" (Vossekuil et al., 2002, p. 4). As such, targeted school violence will be used in this chapter to describe incidents of school violence like the Columbine shootings, in which the school and its surrounding area were specifically chosen by the perpetrators as the setting for their violent acts.%econd, recent advances in risk prediction and assessment by mental health professionals will be examined, and the specific limitations of these techniques in predicting targeted school violence will be explored. Finally, several new directions for research and policy-making in this newly emerging subfield will be advanced. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.