1 - Violence in American Schools: An Overview

Summary

Introduction

Historically, our schools have been relatively safe havens from violence. However, over the past decade there has been an epidemic of youth crime. The violence on the streets and in some of our homes has spilled over into the schools. In recent years, the nation has been deeply shocked by several dramatic, incomprehensible multiple killings of students at school by their classmates. Fortunately such episodes are rare. However, on a daily basis many students, parents, and teachers are aware of threats or bullying and they experience pervasive anxiety about violence. Across the nation there is grave concern that our children are no longer as safe from intimidation, serious injury, or death as they once were while at school or on their way to or from school. This is the issue that we address in this book. Why has the level of youth violence escalated so steeply over the past decade? What are the impacts of this change on the priorities and functioning of the school; on teaching and on the learning and developmental outcomes for our children?

The societal response to this epidemic has been largely limited to increasingly harsh and lengthy sentencing with little evidence that this approach is deterring violence or rehabilitating young offenders. What is needed are new insights into the causes of this epidemic and new intervention strategies for making our schools safer places of learning. There are bodies of knowledge across diverse fields, not typically linked to criminology, that, taken together, have much to contribute to the understanding of these issues. They also point the way to implementing a range of integrated approaches for the prevention of the widespread youth crime and violence that have had such a disturbing ripple effect in our schools.

In this volume, new perspectives, methods, and data are presented from multiple scientific fields: social ecology, child and adolescent development, life course studies, criminology, and the field of public health. We believe these integrated approaches to the study of youth violence may be new to some readers. A brief description of each of these areas is given in the latter part of this chapter along with a guide to the location of chapters of the book in which each approach is more fully described and its contribution to the understanding of youth violence is explained.