Campus Violence

In the United States and elsewhere, acts of violence have occurred on educational campuses, including public and private schools and colleges, causing extraordinary trauma. For example, a mass shooting on February 14, 2008, on the campus of Northern Illinois University 50 miles east of Chicago caused deaths and injuries. In April 2007, a mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute claimed more than 30 lives. During the preceding years, a number of deadly shootings occurred on high school campuses in Colorado, Kentucky, and Arkansas. All these incidents involved young men who wanted to kill others, fellow students of their own age.

What could cause a youth of any age to suddenly take the life of another? Rampage shootings force civilized society to face this question and a host of others. How can school shootings be prevented? What motivates violence? Fundamentally, all these questions are focused on finding explanations.

Kathleen Nader's recent book, School Rampage Shootings and Other Youth Disturbances: Early Preventive Interventions, provides some answers. Dr. Nader is a pioneer in the field of child trauma, violence-related psychological mitigation, grief and loss, and child-related assessments. She points out that aggression in schools has long been a problem, but rampage shootings are a rarity on or off campus.

The 2011 rampage shooting in Norway is illustrative; a lone, local terrorist, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, first bombed a target in Oslo and then shot and killed dozens of children attending a youth camp on a nearby island. This rampage shooting was completely unexpected.

Dr. Nader notes in her book that, during the 2008–2009 school year, an estimated 55.6 million students were enrolled in schools (prekindergarten through high school), and in 2008, there were approximately 1.2 million victims of nonfatal crimes at school among students ages 12–18 (e.g., 619,000 thefts, 629,800 violent crimes). Clearly, violence in the schools is a significant problem.

Preparing schools for rampage shootings also prevents them. A number of programs have emerged over the years to both stop the root causes of youth-targeted school shootings and shooters and identify the factors—related to family, school, culture, and community—which put them at risk for violence.

Various options have been identified for the reduction of aggression, other delinquency, and psychopathology in youth that collectively provide important lessons and methods for helping to offset the risk of school violence. These include methods for improving social skills, coping skills, self-control, and empathy, as well as methods for customizing these skills to work within specific cultural and environmental conditions. The prevention of bullying is especially important.

Recent reports indicate that students exposed to violence in schools utilized their own support systems and a variety of coping methods and styles, typically gender based (e.g., competitive versus cooperative), to fully recover from the effects. Recovery periods varied considerably.

Recent research emerging from the research at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois universities show similar patterns of reactions among the shooting victims and bystanders. They found that social networking and ritual were important. In another study of the campus violence, the researchers found differences by gender in how students coped over time. Males were more externally focused compared with females, who often internalized grief and fear.

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