Deadly Lessons Understanding Lethal School Violence (2003) / Chapter Skim
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10. Literature Review
10. Literature Review
Pages 302-329
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From page 302... ...
In exploring the incidents of lethal violence in schools and the school rampage shootings, we discovered some more specialized bodies of research that had grown up around incidents similar to those under study. Thus we looked at the research on mass murder, on public rampages in workplaces and other public places, and on shootings followed by suicides.
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From page 303... ...
The researchers collected evidence from primary data sources for example, courtroom testimony, scientific articles, interviews with law enforcement personnel involved in the case, and video interviews with the perpetrators, survivors, family members, and witnesses as well as secondary data sources for example, newspaper articles. They produced a dataset that covers 27 incidents of mass murder involving 34 perpetrators.
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From page 304... ...
developed a typology of adolescent mass murderers that includes the following categories: family annihilator, classroom avenger, criminal opportunist (who commits mass murder during the commission of a crime, such as eliminating witnesses to a robbery) , bifurcated killers (who combine family annihilation and classroom revenge)
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From page 305... ...
In the immediate weeks prior to the shooting incident, the researchers found that the classroom avengers had been exposed to psychosocial stressors that seemed to act as triggering events for the shootings. Specific triggering events include reprimand or discipline by parents or school authorities; some form of public ridicule; treatment perceived as unfair or demeaning; loss of a real or imagined relationship, particularly with a female love object; and hostile rejection or taunting, teasing, or bullying by peers.
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From page 306... ...
Department of Education, the problem of protecting dignitaries from violent attacks seemed similar to the problem facing those interested in preventing school rampages. With the support of the secretary of education, the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center studied 37 school shooting incidents involving 41 attackers (Vossekuil et al., 2000~.
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From page 307... ...
In contrast to the McGee and DeBernardo (1999) study, the National Threat Assessment Center report concludes that there is no accurate or useful profile of the school rampage shooters.
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From page 308... ...
has also developed a model of threat assessment for school shooters by analyzing 18 school shooting cases (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2000~. The incidents involved both single and multiple offenders.
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From page 309... ...
A reading of the general research on violence suggests a broad range of variables that may be contributing to school rampages and provides some insight on the effectiveness of interventions focused less on the stable characteristics of individuals and more on either broad social factors or situational factors. Violence in General In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC)
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From page 311... ...
predisposing potential for violent behavior, a situation with elements that create some risk of violent events, and usually a triggering event. Development of an individual's potential for violence may have begun before birth: perhaps with conception involving an alcoholic father, or through abnormal prenatal neural development.
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From page 312... ...
But an important question is whether one kind of intervention should be preferred over another from the outset. The NRC panel on violence provides some guidance on this matter: "A major problem in understanding violence is to describe the probability distributions of predisposing factors, situational elements, and triggering events at the biological, psychosocial, microsocial, and macrosocial levels.
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From page 313... ...
Department of Justice found that the majority of such offenders are male, tend to have problems with substance abuse, mental illness, and school performance, typically display early minor behavior problems that lead to more serious acts, and have disproportionately been victims of violence themselves (Loeber and Farrington, 1998~. Serious and violent juvenile offenders differ substantially from juveniles involved in more typical, minor acts of delinquency: they tend to have earlier onset of delinquency and longer offending careers, tend to be chronic offenders, and are overrepresented in inner cities.
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From page 314... ...
identified other factors that could have contributed to the decline in youth homicide: economic expansion that created more opportunities for legitimate jobs, and police and community efforts to limit opportunities for the drug trade, remove guns from kids, and reduce conflicts among youth. If the cocaine epidemic explains the inner-city epidemic of lethal youth violence, then one would have to conclude that the rural and suburban epidemics were of a different kind, for there is no evidence that the
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From page 315... ...
The possession and use of a gun had become a symbol of power and control, a way to gain status and identity, and a means to enhance feelings of safety and personal efficacy among teenagers. The increased youth demand for guns, the available supply, and the culture that teaches kids lethal ways to use guns had a large and complex impact on the overall level and seriousness of youth violence.
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It may be that the school rampage shooters took their inspiration from the youth violence of the inner city. Or it could be that one school rampage shooter took his inspiration from an earlier school rampage shooting with little connection to inner-city violence.
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From page 317... ...
Victims of bullying tend to be unpopular and rejected by peers and tend to have low school attainment, low self-esteem, and poor social skills (Farrington, 1993~. There is evidence that social isolation and victimization tend to persist from childhood to adulthood, and that victimized people tend to have children who are victimized (Farrington, 1993; Nansel et al., 2001~.
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From page 318... ...
Schools that tolerate bullying increase the level of bullying as well as the risk that an unusual act of retaliation will occur. RESEARCH ON VIOLENCE CLOSELY RELATED TO SCHOOL RAMPAGES In looking in detail at some of the characteristics of the school rampages, one can think about them as more or less similar to specific categories of violence.
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From page 319... ...
These observations on the nature of mass murderers fit well with the revenge motives and premeditated attacks described by the available research on youth school rampage shooters. Levin and Fox (1996)
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From page 320... ...
The availability of firearms is important as a facilitator to mass murder (Fox and Levin, 1998~. Public Rampages and Workplace Violence Since schools are work settings for the faculty, staff, and administrators, youth school rampage shootings could be viewed as an extreme form of workplace violence.
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From page 321... ...
Five exhibited behavior prior to employment that should have excluded them from being hired. Six homicide incidents committed by postal workers involved multiple victims; five of them involved retribution for personal matters, such as a spurned intimate relationship, or work-related troubles, such as termination from job or perceived unfair treatment.
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From page 322... ...
Homicide-suicide offenders, particularly incidents involving multiple victims, share some common elements with the youth school rampage shooters. A review of the available research on homicide-suicides found that more than 90 percent of the perpetrators were male (Felthous and Hempel, 1995~.
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From page 323... ...
As suggested by the pseudo-commando offender, some suicidal individuals force police officers to kill them. This form of suicide is known as "suicide by cop," a term used by law enforcement officers to describe an incident in which a suicidal individual intentionally engages in life-threatening and criminal behavior with a lethal weapon or what appears to be a lethal weapon toward law enforcement officers or civilians specifically to provoke officers to shoot the suicidal individual in self-defense or to protect citizens (Hutson et al., 1998~.
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From page 324... ...
In the rare events that involve victims, the suicide-by-cop perpetrators share some characteristics with the youth school rampage shooters. According to one researcher, some suicidal individuals may prefer suicide by cop because they may see themselves as victims and set up the situation to prove it (Foote, 1995~.
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From page 325... ...
An extensive review of the relationship between terrorism and the media concludes that while other factors are probably at least equally important, media coverage is sufficient to lead to acts of imitative behavior (Schmid and DeGraaf, 1982~. According to one researcher, media coverage has two effects (Surette, 1990~.
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From page 326... ...
One conceptual model shows copycat crime as resulting from the interaction of factors in four areas: the initial crime, media coverage, social contextual factors, and copycat criminal characteristics (Surette, 1990~. The model denotes a process in which particular, usually highly newsworthy and successful initial crimes and criminals (after interacting with media coverage)
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From page 327... ...
In some suicide clusters, the tendency to glorify suicide victims and to sensationalize their deaths has frequently fostered a community-wide preoccupation, even a fascination, with suicide. The resulting highly charged emotional atmosphere is believed by many to have contributed to causing suicide.
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From page 328... ...
CONCLUSIONS This review of research undergirds our investigation in Part I of six specific incidents of lethal school violence, including four that are considered school rampages. The research reviewed here has directed attention to the following broad classes of potential causes of the violence: 1.
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From page 329... ...
The more we looked at the cases of school rampages, the more they looked like other kinds of rampages rather than other kinds of youth violence or other kinds of school violence. Given the trends in this form of violence, it also seemed important to keep our eyes open to the possibility that there were contagion mechanisms operating during that period to generate the cluster of these events observed in the United States and in the world.
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