School Violence Prevention

Abstract

Objective: This study was designed to describe the level of violence in three high schools and to test the effects of universal and targeted strategies to reduce this violence.

Design:A repeated measures design with two baseline scores and two intervention scores was used during a two year period. Two rural high schools served as control schools with a single intervention high school.

Participants: All freshmen at the three high schools completed a self-report measure of school violence; 420 completed the study at the end of their sophomore year.

Method: Multiple universal and targeted interventions to prevent school violence were used for slightly more than one year. Scores on student Victimization and Perpetration, gathered one year apart, were compared using a pre-test post-test model.

Findings: Student reports of perpetration at the intervention school were significantly lower than the combined scores at the control school. Students, teachers, and administrators reported improved awareness, knowledge, and skills to implement violence prevention programs.

Conclusions: A comprehensive program that includes university and high school partnerships has the capability to reduce school violence during a short period. Despite limitations to the study, continued use of research partnerships to decrease school violence is war-ranted.     

School Violence Prevention

Abstract

School violence has many faces and many casualties. In varying degrees it touches students, parents, educators and communities of every school world wide. At the local level, communities are seen as playing a significant role in violence prevention. Generally, community-based violence prevention approaches involve the assessment of local problems, identification of target issues, selection of a range of interventions, and the encouragement of collaboration among civic groups, the juvenile justice system, local leaders, and young people themselves. These programs are generally judged as successful if they are able to address risk factors effectively for individual youths, strengthen those factors that provide protection and enhance resiliency, provide sufficient support and effective supervision, and increase pro-social attitudes by providing youth with a sense of having an increased stake in their local communities. Although too few educators are aware of its impact, the women's community has been involved in this work for decades. In this paper I discuss the results of interviews with members of the women's community in Atlantic Canada who have developed proactive violence prevention initiatives. I will concentrate on their efforts to bring those programs into the schools and their experiences of the successes and challenges they encounter.     

Involving Students in School Violence Prevention

Abstract

Why are some students not willing to tell adults about a possibly violent situation in their school? In this study, 1,100 students in the Mid-South were surveyed on their knowledge of, and willingness to tell about, a possibly violent situation, their involvement in behaviors that are related to school violence, and their school's climate. About 1/3 of students knew of a potentially violent situation, and about 3/4 were willing to tell an adult. However, students who were involved in antecedents to violence and/or who had an unfavorable view of their school were much less likely to tell an adult about such situations. Efforts to prevent school violence should be designed with these factors in mind.     

学校暴力的防与治

暴力作为一个全球性社会问题,近年来频繁地在我国校园及其周边发生,给青少年学生带来身体及心理上的极大伤害。由于其后果的严重性,防暴治暴已成为当前净化学校环境的一项重要任务。文章在分析学校暴力产生原因的基础上,提出防暴治暴的学校管理策略。     

Student Willingness to Seek Help for Threats of Violence in Middle School

Abstract

This study examined factors that influence a student's willingness to seek help for a threat of violence. The sample consisted of 542 middle school students who completed an anonymous survey that asked students how likely they would be to seek help in response to being bullied or threatened. The survey also included measures of type of bullying, attitudes toward aggressive behavior, and perceptions of teacher tolerance for bullying. Stepwise multiple regression analyses indicated that willingness to seek help is lower in higher grade levels and among males. Students who hold aggressive attitudes and perceive the school climate to be tolerant of bullying were less likely to report a willingness to seek help. Implications for improving student willingness to seek help are discussed.     

A Principle-Based Psychology of School Violence Prevention

Abstract

This paper proposes that school violence is primarily a function of the typically poor mental health of at-risk students. It asserts therefore, that the most leveraged solution to this vexing problem is for school personnel to teach these students how to re-kindle and experience their birthright of optimal psychological functioning. It suggests that this goal can best be achieved by helping both teachers and students understand a unique principle-based psychology that purports to account for all youthful perception, feelings and behavior. The three principles of this psychology (i.e., Mind, Consciousness, and Thought) are defined, classroom conditions conducive to teaching youth these principles delineated, contemporary research supporting the major assumptions of this paradigm summarized, and the results of school violence prevention programs based on this psychology presented.     

An Elementary School Violence Prevention Program

Abstract

This article details the implementation and empirical evaluation of an elementary school violence program. The problem of school violence and the significance and focus of the study are discussed. The general research question in this study was to examine the potential for a computer-mediated anger management program to enhance or improve the conflict resolution skills of youth with aggressive behavior problems in an elementary school setting. This study employed an 8-week computer-mediated anger management program, called SMART Talk (Students Managing Anger Resolution Together), for teaching conflict resolutions skills. This program was derived from a meta-analysis (Scheckner et al., 2002) due to its large effect size, statistical significance, and computer-mediated execution in order to verify past results with a more specifically defined population of at-risk (i.e., aggressive) students. Overall, the results suggest that participants in the intervention group significantly reported more intentions to use nonviolent strategies in a future conflict than students in the control group. Further research is recommended in order to assess the replicability of this study to other populations. Recommendations include longer intervention duration, larger sample size, multiple school settings, and multi-systemic implementation (i.e., teacher and parent workshops) as well as longitudinal studies.     

Monitoring School Violence

Abstract

National monitoring of school violence is essential for needs assessments, policymaking, and evaluation at the national level. As informative and important as national monitoring is, the data generated at the national level is often not useful at the district or school site levels. There is therefore a need for a feasible method of monitoring school violence on the district and school level; furthermore, we need to find ways to effectively apply national-level information to schools and school districts. over time should be the foundation for the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions in this area. In this article, we propose an expanded concept of monitoring that links comparable data on school violence at the grade, school site, district, and national levels. The paper presents our conceptual framework and methodology and illustrates its implementation in a district in Israel. We present examples of reports generated to monitor school violence for the district as a whole and for each of the school sites. Finally, we conclude that this is a feasible and useful model that social services could adopt to monitor practice in many other areas.     

Evaluation of a Theater-Based Youth Violence Prevention Program for Elementary School Children

Abstract

The present study evaluated the impact of Urban Improv (UI), a theater-based youth violence prevention (YVP) program developed for inner-city youth, on three behavioral and psychological outcome domains: aggressive behaviors, prosocial behaviors, and scholastic attention and engagement. This study compared outcomes for 77 elementary school students in classrooms designated to receive UI with those of 63 students from matched control classrooms. Findings revealed that students who received UI were superior to matched controls on all outcome domains. Findings support UI as a promising practice for YVP with urban elementary school students and suggest that greater attention should be focused on application of theater-based programs in YVP.     

School Violence: The Role of Parental and Community Involvement

This study utilizes the School Survey on Crime and Safety to identify variables that predict lower levels of violence from four domains: school security, school climate, parental involvement, and community involvement. Negative binomial regression was performed and the findings indicate that statistically significant results come from all four domains. When modifying the sample to include only schools that offer some form of parental involvement opportunities, schools with greater parental volunteering and participation in subject area events experience reduced levels of violence. Implications from this analysis include developing creative methods for greater parental input in school activities.     

The Effect of Peer Victimization on Learning

Abstract

Incidents of school violence have prompted calls for school communities to create environments that encourage student by-standers to act responsibly and proactively when they confront a range of violent incidents, from bullying and fights to weapon carrying and other serious threats to school safety. It is not always clear, however, what bystanders would—or should—do when faced with violent or potentially violent situations. This article describes findings from focus groups conducted with 54 middle school students and 97 staff in an urban, predominantly African American school district with relatively high levels of community violence. Discussions addressed bystander norms, attitudes, and behaviors, and identified barriers that prevent youth as well as adult bystanders from taking positive action. Findings inform violence prevention strategies for building consensus and supporting positive bystander responses.     

An Examination of School Violence and Safety in South Florida Elementary Schools

Abstract

This study examined conditions of safety and violence in South Florida elementary schools. Although conditions were generally considered safe in these schools, approximately one-half of the elementary school students in the study did express some concerns about their safety, especially in school bathrooms and the area outside of their school building. Students who do not have positive relationships with other students at school and do not feel safe in their community generally feel less safe at school. In addition, students who are experiencing academic difficulty in school and do not expect to attain an education beyond high school feel less safe at school. In this study, those students who felt less safe also tended to be male and from lower SES back grounds.     

Characteristics of School Violence and the Value of Family-School Therapeutic Alliances

Abstract

This article discusses the problem of school violence and the fear about school safety that have been reinforced by extensive news media coverage of the recent series of school shooting incidents. Various factors associated with school violence are addressed, including sociocultural influences on adolescents that pose a challenge to counselors and therapists working with this clientele. In order to reduce violence and aggression in schools and to ease concerns about safety, steps must be taken not only by schools but also by parents and communities. Families can play an important protective role in minimizing at-risk behavior by young people. In fact, many of the most effective youth violence interventions include family components. Several of these programs are described as well as a number of collaborative approaches that demonstrate the potential synergy of school counselors and family therapists working together. With the addition of more courses in family dynamics in counselor education programs, school counselors will be in a better position to collaborate with family therapists in helping reduce violence in the nation's schools.     

Methodological and Measurement Issues in School Violence Research

SUMMARY

School violence became a topic of broad national concern in the United States in reaction to a series of tragic school shootings during the 1990s. Efforts to understand and prevent school shootings have stimulated the rapid development of a broader interest in school safety with an emerging multidisciplinary research agenda. The maturation and fulfillment of this research agenda require that researchers critically examine their research methods and measurement strategies. This article introduces a volume that examines fundamental methodological and measurement issues in the rapidly expanding body of research on school safety and violence. The authors hope to stimulate greater attention to methodological pitfalls and critical measurement issues that hinder research progress in several related areas, including the uncertain reliability and validity of self-report surveys used to measure high-risk behavior and bullying, the limitations of discipline referral databases as a source of information on school climate, and the overly narrow focus on relatively infrequent critical incidents of violence, often at the expense of a more comprehensive and multifactorial examination of the school environment.     

School Violence in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

This article reviews school violence prevention programs that were published between the years of 1990 and 1999. All the interventions fitting inclusion criteria involved being implemented in a school setting, using a control group, and including a quantitative methodology. Effect sizes were calculated for the final sixteen articles that were reviewed in the meta-analysis. A process of inspection was used in order to come up with treatment characteristics most common to each prevention program. Each study was thus described according to six categories: theoretical base, setting, age group, leader training, duration, and random assignment. Four studies resulted with strong effect sizes; however, a regression analysis was not conducted due to inadequate sample size. A review of the literature suggested that program impact could be significantly affected by the use of cognitive-behavioral strategies, multi-setting atmosphere, and primary (elementary school) prevention. In addition, intuitive support (common knowledge in the social science field) indicated that a qualified program leader and longer length of program could also contribute to the influence of a program. Future researchers are encouraged to use a more comprehensive literature review (e.g., past 20 years) in terms of conducting meta-anal-yses in order to provide a larger sample size adequate enough to see the true effects of different intervention components on outcomes (regression analysis; i.e., additive component effects).     

自杀性暴力犯罪的特点及预防

自杀性暴力犯罪是一个新的概念。它是随着我国20世纪80年代改革开放以来,频频发生的危害社会的自杀性暴力犯罪现象而产生的。自杀性暴力犯罪不是一个法律概念,也不是我国刑法规定的犯罪种类,它属于暴力犯罪的一种。自杀性暴力犯罪的表现形式有两种:第一种是自杀者一般采取爆炸、投毒等暴力手段与危害对象同归于尽,这种自杀犯罪形式占绝大多数;第二种是等到实现犯罪目的后再自杀。     

Using Office Referral Records in School Violence Research

SUMMARY

Perhaps the most “naturally occurring” data on school misbehavior and aggression are school discipline data, including office referrals, suspensions, and expulsion data. These data constitute the most common markers of school discipline status available on school campuses. There is, however, very little information available in professional or research literature about the reliability and validity of office referrals. This article examines the sources of error that enter into the collection and use of office referrals. Despite these sources of errors, this article documents the importance of considering how office referral data provide information about how discipline systems are functioning on a school campus. Guidelines are provided for utilizing disciplinary data for school safety and school policy planning.     

Daring,Substance Use and Involvement in Violence Among School Children

Abstract

This study explores whether the association between substance use and involvement in youth violence is a unique association resulting from the properties of the drugs, or whether it is part of a larger behavioral cluster. The sample was composed of 1,571 10th grade students from the Israeli secular and religious state school systems, including both Jewish and Arab schools. The results indicate that the strongest predictor for unplanned violent activities such as physical fights is alcohol use, suggesting that this chemical substance may lower the threshold of unplanned violence. However, daring was found to be the strongest predictor for planned violent activities such as bullying and weapon carrying, suggesting that the behavioral pattern is the most influential. Thus future research and intervention programs would perhaps benefit from differentiating between planned and unplanned violence.     

现阶段暴力犯罪预防对策探析

随着我国经济文化的发展,暴力犯罪明显增加,手段不断变化,社会危害性极其严重.针对这些犯罪,应该采取如下对策:加强法制教育;强化社会治安综合治理;加速案件侦破,加大打击力度.