School Violence Beyond Columbine

School Violence Beyond Columbine

American Behavioral Scientist Volume 52 Number 9 May 2009 1246-1265 © 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0002764209332544 http://abs.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

A Complex Problem in Need of an Interdisciplinary Analysis Stuart Henry San Diego State University

Before Columbine, people tended to look at school violence in fragmented ways, which reflected a disciplinary analysis of social problems. Explanations about the causes of school violence tended toward psychological and developmental explanations about why school-age children become violent and social control theory about the lack of attachment and involvement by youth in conventional culture. Corresponding policies to deal with the problem focused on better detection, preemptive intervention, closer supervision, zero tolerance, and peer mediation. This narrow microanalytical framing of the issue failed to consider the multiple causal components of this complex problem, which includes the interrelated role of teachers, school administrators, educational practices and effective pedagogy, school district policy, cultural framing, gendered educational expectations, and the changing state of family and community relations in a postmodern “heartless” society. Taking an interdisciplinary approach suggests simultaneous considerations of the interrelated components constituting the problem from micro to macro and the multiple levels in which the problem is manifest. Keywords: Barak’s reciprocal-interactive theory; constitutive theory; cumulative violence; integrative theory; interdisciplinary analysis; victims as offenders

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ntil relatively recently, criminologists studying crime causation tended to align with one of 12 different theories rooted in a cluster of different social and behavioral disciplinary fields: economics, biology, psychology, geography, sociology, political science, Marxist philosophy, feminism, and most recently, postmodernism (Einstadter & Henry, 2006; Lanier & Henry, 2004). These theories rely on core elements of their parent discipline to explain why offenders engage in various crimes. For example, rational- and situational-choice theorists, influenced by economics, explain crime in terms of free-choice, cost-benefit rational calculus (Clarke & Felson, 1993); biosocial theorists explain crime in terms of genetic defects and deficiencies in intelligence, which, under certain environmental contexts, predispose some toward crime and violence (Mednick, Moffitt & Stack, 1987; Niehoff, 1999; Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985). Social leaning theory draws from developmental, social, and cognitive psychology to explain how people learn to commit and rationalize crime through cognitive 1246

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processes (Akers, 1998; Sutherland & Cressey, 1978). Social-control theory is rooted in sociology and psychological theories of development and explains that children and youth who do not bond to conventional norms and values (embodied in parents and schools) are less contained and have more freedom to deviate from norms (Hirschi, 1969; Nye, 1958); related, failures in family socialization and institutional control can lead to the inadequate exercise of self-control (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Hirschi & Gottfredson, 2001). Sociologically influenced strain and subcultural theory explains crime as the result of cultural and structural strains in society that have differential impact on some sections of the population, excluding lower classes from available opportunities and providing limited opportunities for conventional rather than deviant alternatives (Agnew, 1992; Merton, 1957). Each of these different theories, along with several others, shows how rational behavior choice is, in various ways, limited. The preferred criminological concept is “conditional free will” (Fishbein, 1998, p. 104) or “limited rationality,” which results when a range of individual, situational, environmental, structural, and cultural factors shape and channel available behavioral choices. At the most basic level, “decision-limiting factors include current circumstances and opportunities, learning experiences, physiological abilities, and genetic predispositions” (Fishbein, 1998, p. 104). When these factors are mediated by cultural conditions and structural factors, such as race, gender, and class, the limits to free rational choice are compounded. Thirty years ago, some theorists began to advocate a synthesis or integration of the different theoretical explanations of crime to form an integrated theoretical framework (Akers, 1993; Barak, 1998a, 1998b; Colvin & Pauly, 1983; Elliott, Agerton, & Canter, 1979, 1985; Fishbein, 1998; Hagan, 1989; Hawkins & Weiss, 1985; Johnson, 1979; Messner, Krohn, & Liska, 1989; Pearson & Weiner, 1985; Robinson, 2004; Tittle, 1995). Instead of seeing crime through multiple different lenses, these theorists advocated an interdisciplinary integrational approach that captures the maximum explanatory power. Farnworth (1989) defined theoretical integration as “the combination of two or more pre-existing theories, selected on the basis of their perceived commonalities, into a single reformulated theoretical model with greater comprehensiveness and explanatory value than any one of its component theories” (p. 95). Barak (1998a) has said there are several reasons why integration is attractive, which include the desires (a) to arrive at central anchoring notions in theory, (b) to provide coherence to a bewildering array of fragmented theories, (c) to achieve comprehensiveness and completeness, (d) to advance scientific progress, and (e) to synthesize causation and social control. Others, however, have argued that theoretical competition is preferable to theoretical synthesis (Akers, 1993; Gibbons, 1994; Hirschi, 1979, 1989). Indeed, Thornberry (1989, p. 51) has said that too much integration can lead to “theoretical mush.” A critical issue in considering integration is what is integrated. Messner et al. (1989) distinguish between integrating theoretical concepts and integrating theoretical propositions. Others (Barak, 1998a; Einstadter & Henry, 2006; Lanier & Henry, 2004) discuss integrating causes, and yet others debate whether it is valuable to integrate across different levels of analysis or

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“multi-level integration” (Paternoster & Bachman, 2001, p. 305) as in macro–micro integration (Colvin & Pauly 1983). In integrating across levels of analysis, levels to be considered include (a) individuals and their interactive social processes (micro), (b) kinds of organization and their organizational processes (meso), and (c) kinds of structure, culture, and context (macro) (Akers, 1994; Barak, 1998a). In this article, I examine the value of applying such an integrative framework of crime causation across several levels of analysis to explain school violence.

School Violence as a Multicausal Phenomenon Several researchers studying school violence in general, and school shootings in particular, have noted that a complex set of influences or multiple causes operate at the individual, community, and national levels (Garbarino, 1999, p.13; Henry, 2000, p. 17; Newman, Fox, Harding, Mehta, & Roth, 2004, p. 229). Most recently, Muschert (2007) states, “School shooting incidents need to be understood as resulting from a constellation of contributing causes, none of which is sufficient in itself to explain a shooting” (p. 68). According to this view, if we are going to comprehensively examine school violence, or any specific form of it, we need to see school violence as the outcome of several causal processes. Although for some purposes it is valuable to distinguish between types of school violence, such as the rampage school shootings perpetrated by White male teenagers in suburban and rural communities (Newman et al., 2004) and the inner-city urban violence that escalates through interpersonal and gang-related disputes over time (Garbarino, 1999), it is also important to recognize that these may be different manifestations of a similar confluence of violent and subviolent themes that permeate our society. In his examination Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding, Gregg Barak (2003) argues that in spite of clear evidence that violence is cumulatively interrelated across a range of societal levels, most analyses are “un-reflexive,” tending to “focus on one particular form of violence, without much, if any reflection on the other forms.” He argues that “these fragmented and isolated analyses seek to explain the workings of a given form of violence without trying to understand the common threads or roots that may link various forms of violence together” (Barak, 2003, p. 39). Thus, to examine complex social reality, such as school violence, or subsets of it, such as rampage school shootings, we need to take a wide-angle interdisciplinary lens to the nature of what constitutes violence in schools and retain the connection between school violence and violence in society. We need to consider the range of different disciplinarily based explanations to assess what each brings to a comprehensive analysis of school violence.

Explaining School Violence: An Integrated Approach As Barak (2003) points out, several developmental or life-course theories in criminology present examples of integrated theorizing, particularly, Terrie Moffitt’s


(2001) adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent explanation of antisocial beha vior and Robert Sampson and John Laub’s (2001) social development theory of antisocial behavior. Similarly, in illustrating the way biological correlates of behavioral disorders can be integrated with a range of other criminological theory, Diana Fishbein (1998, pp. 104-109) shows how different causal theories can be integrated to explain aggression. She argues that some children are born with certain brain-functioning differences that can lead to adjustment problems in school. These could be differences in neuropsychological functions and intelligence that develop in a child’s brain because of a variety of prenatal or postnatal factors or family and environmental factors, findings that led Moffitt, for example, to argue that “children who ultimately become persistently anti-social do suffer from deficits in neuropsychological abilities” (Moffitt, 2001, p. 102). In illustrating integrative theory, Fishbein (1998) uses the example of IQ or learning difficulties resulting from genetic neurological disorders (biological theory). She says that these can result in difficulties in coping and adjusting, particularly to the school environment (psychological theory). Moffitt (2001), for example, says that children with neuropsychological impairments create challenges for their parents and other adults, such as teachers, whose reactions can further entrench the problem through inappropriate discipline. Students with low IQ or learning disabilities find school less rewarding than other students and, as a result, are less bonded to the school and convention (social control theory). These problems can be exacerbated by poverty, inequality, and racism, such that the “cumulative continuity of disadvantage” is accentuated (Sampson & Laub, 2001, p. 155) through key institutions of social control. These include the family and family relational problems, school and school failure, peer groups and peer rejection, and depression and state sanctions (Barak, 2003, p. 152). Indeed, a child who does poorly in academic work and feels rejected by the school may become alienated from school and act out aggressively; as a result, he or she may be rejected by peers. Moffitt (2001) says, “Children with poor self-control and aggressive behavior are often rejected by peers and adults” (p. 109). The form of peer rejection will depend on the peer hierarchy but could include ridicule, taunting, and bullying. In addition, Moffitt says those previously rejected may avoid subsequent positive relationships for fear of future rejection by withdrawing or striking out, which results in their being excluded from conventional development opportunities (developmental theory). Furthermore, Fishbein (1998, pp. 105-106) says that if the school is ill equipped to deal a child who is neuropsychologically different or has learning disabilities and places the child in a special-needs category or removes him or her from the classroom, this can further alienate the child and inculcate the view that he or she is “different” and inadequate, resulting in a dramatic decline in self-esteem (labeling theory). The child may interact with other, similarly placed children and find that experience more rewarding (subcultural theory), further separating himself or herself from the mainstream of children who, because of their own need to maintain their own place in the school peer hierarchy, distance themselves from the “differently” classified child.


Building on Fishbein’s (1998) integrative approach, we can see that if those in the school peer hierarchy are allowed by school authorities to bully those who are intellectually different and/or physically different, this will further decrease their selfesteem. Students who feel threatened by others may see that one solution to their fear of being beaten is to equalize their difference in power by carrying weapons, particularly, knives. This, in turn, can get them into trouble with school or juvenile justice agencies (labeling theory). Others may internalize their fear, which adds to their low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness, and this produces depression and suicidal ideation (psychological theory) as a means to escape. Intervention by school counselors or therapists underscores the mental health issues and reinforce the sense that the problem is individual. Other students may react to their treatment as different and blame those who bullied them and/or the school that allowed that to occur or those who reinforced the differences. In doing so, these students may see retaliation against their abusers as justified; violence will not be perceived as harm but as deserved payback for the accumulated violence that they have suffered (neutralization theory). Moreover, the extent to which there is external support for this depends on the existence of available “cultural scripts” that provide examples of the use of violence to produce justice. As Fagan and Wilkinson (1998, p. 80) argue, “Norms supporting and justifying violence also are communicated through popular culture. Conceptions of manhood are presented that place a high value on ‘heart’— withstanding or engaging in acts of extreme violence—or even the willingness to “take a bullet.” They argue that the milieu of fear and danger “is reinforced and perhaps amplified by the popular media, as well as the poses and styles than express ways to manage threat and convey toughness and control” (Fagan & Wilkinson, 1998, p. 81) (cultural theory). Barak (2003) argues that the combined effect of fictional images in movies and the dramas in the news and advertising media “have communi cated a distorted and undeveloped picture of the various forms of interpersonal, institutional and structural violence” in which violence is “reduced to a function of ‘evil’ people, and the danger stems from the street rather than the executive suite” (p. 201). He says that these social constructions of violence shape our response in ways that invoke more violence, such as retributive policies, rather than in ways that are peacemaking and restorative in nature (social constructionist theory). Overall, from this illustration, we can see that different theories explain different dimensions of the process that might result in school violence.

School Violence as a Cumulative Reciprocal Process Rather Than a Single Event The central argument of this article is that school violence is a broad phenomenon with multiple manifest forms that together compose a continuum of violence. The explosive violence that grabs media attention, such as rampage shootings, is at one


end of this continuum but is itself the outcome of many subprocesses of violence, which are contributing causes that occur over time in relation to students and the school in its social, political, and cultural setting. The culmination of these processes can produce a crescendo outcome or remain in less violent forms. The problem with analyzing school violence is that we often separate it into types and subtypes of school violence in attempts to explain each, without recognizing the cumulative interrelations and interaction between them. However, research on violence toward children and youth has demonstrated that those who are subject to violence themselves become violent. For example, Straus has shown that corporal punishment, in the absence of parental support, increases the likelihood of children acting violently toward siblings and toward partners in subsequent relationships (Strassberg, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994; Straus, 1994). Others have shown that child abuse can produce a pattern of harm on others, perpetrated by the victim of abuse, that can escalate through a series of “violentization” stages resulting in serious violent crime (Athens, 1992). One large national study found that “children who are both the victims of parental assault and who witness spouse assault have a rate of assault against nonfamily children that is six times higher than children from nonassaultive families” (Hotaling, Straus, & Lincoln, 1989, p. 345, as cited in Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1998, p. 112). Similarly, youth who live in violent neighborhoods and who witness firearm violence have double the likelihood of committing violent crime themselves (Bingenheimer, Brennan, & Earls, 2005, p. 1323). For these reasons, one would expect that violent victimization in school would also result in an increased propensity to commit violence. Indeed, a growing body of research indicates that victims of violence are more likely than their peers to also be perpetrators of violence, and that individuals most likely to be victims of personal crime are those who report the greatest involvement in delinquent activities. (Siegfried, Ko, & Kelley, 2004)

It is clear from much of the research on school violence that social interaction between student offenders and victims can turn some victims into offenders. A study by Furlong, Sharma, and Rhee (2000) on types of victims and victimization revealed the connection between victims and future offending. Although some victims absorb and positively cope with violent victimization, others “withdraw and experience diminished self-esteem and social self-efficacy. Yet, others may react to these affronts by seeking to ‘level the score’ and by taking revenge or retribution” (Furlong et al., 2000, p. 83). Indeed, research reveals that a critical component in this process is the element that Katz (1988) called “righteous slaughter,” the idea that violence, including deadly violence, is justified. Cintron (2000), for example, argues that the effects of violence can be cumulative such that “prior pain maps onto current experiences and gets filtered through a broader ideology of respect and righteousness.” This can produce violent acts of vengeance. This is the perception by some victimized youth


that retaliatory violence is justified. A study by Lockwood (1997) on school fighting found that 84% of youths justified their violent interactions arguing that they were retaliating against harm to themselves, reacting to others’ offensive or insulting behavior, acting in self-defense, or helping a friend who had been attacked. Furlong et al. (2000) point out that this kind of response “can lead to a chronic perpetrationretribution cycle that has no easy or clear exit” (p. 83). In the case of rampage school shootings, evidence supports the claim that forms of violent victimization, such as bullying and exclusion, for considerable time produced an inner sense of hopelessness and vulnerability (Newman et al., 2004). This was the case, for example, in Columbine and at Thurston High. Importantly, key elements in Newman et al.’s (2004) analysis of rampage school shootings illustrate the combined impact of physical, psychological, and social-symbolic harms of reduction on those who became offenders through the social hierarchy of exclusion, bullying, belittling, ridicule, and other harms of repression that prevented these victims from finding a social escape from a situation that they define as hopeless. In his study of rampage shootings, Larkin (2007) says that such “harassment, physical intimidation” is perpetuated by peer elite groups, such as athletes, “in the defense of their own social privilege.” He argues, “The vast majority of rampage shootings, including those at Columbine, are retaliatory violence by the victims of such physical and psychological violence” (p. 227). On the basis of this accumulation of evidence, I argue that in conceiving of school violence, we should consider the range of physical, psychological, and symbolic violence as contributing causal elements that can culminate in instances of extreme violence. From this perspective, rampage school violence is not a different crime but an extreme level of the culmination of its constitutive forms of subviolence. Thus to seriously examine the conditions contributing to extreme school violence, we need an approach that considers a wide range of different forms of violence, each seen as both caused by, and causes of, violence, that add together to produce other violent events. So how can we define school violence in a way that captures the broad range of subviolent processes, the violence by stealth that is part of the production of school violence incidents? To do so, we need a definition that goes beyond physical violence and beyond dramatic outcome incidents. A critical factor in the process of school violence in general is the use of power to harm others, where harm is conceived of as a loss to a person’s human social standing, or what we have called “harms of reduction” (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996, p. 103). This loss can be (a) physical, resulting in bodily pain, suffering, or death; (b) material, such loss of property or money; (c) psychological, from threats, fear, manipulation, producing depression, or loss of self-esteem; (d) social and symbolic, reducing one’s sense of social identity, status, or dignity; or (e) moral or ethical, undermining one’s concern for others or for accepted standards. Related are “harms of oppression,” in which the exercise of power along these same dimensions oppresses others’ ability to accomplish socially acceptable goals and objectives that


are open and available to others to achieve; it does not just take away from who and what they are but it prevents them from becoming something else. In considering who exercises harm-producing power over others, we need to go beyond the notion of offenders as individuals and consider varieties of collective offenders, from groups to societal structures and cultures. Although individual students can be considered in the category of offender (as can individual teachers, school administrators, and other staff), offenders also operate at the level of groups, institutions, practices, and processes. For example, at the group level are peers, cliques, and gangs that constitute a pecking order in the school peer hierarchy, from jocks and cheerleaders to geeks, nerds, and outcasts. Those at the lower end of this order are subjected to physical violence, ridicule, put-downs, bullying, ostracism, and other forms of marginalization that can feed into the accumulation of psychological trauma and contribute toward more violent incidents. Group-level violence also includes teachers who beat on students and who use their institutional power to belittle. At the institutional practices level are pedagogies that discriminate on the basis, for example, of sexism, racism, and ageism, which add to the day-to-day violence born of the frustration of disengaging educational practices and uninspiring pedagogy. This level would also include school policies, school climate, and school governing structures. Beyond the group and institutional level is the contribution of community-level agencies, such as school boards and the effects of their policies on school districts, school size, school staffing, and the socially toxic neighborhoods that promote fear and insecurity imported from dysfunctional families. Ultimately, “offenders” can also be at the national societal level and include educational policies on schooling, gun availability, and mental health programs; popular culture and the mass media delivering a sea of violent technologies; and cultural celebrations of violent heroes manifest through video, film, and the Internet that provide the medium and script through which violent dramas may be acted out. It includes a gun culture that defends the right to own and bear arms. The societal level includes the ideology of competitive individualism through winning and losing that celebrates a few at the expense of the rest who are put down, disrespected, and wasted. Taking account of these constitutive elements, school violence then is defined here (modified from Henry, 2000, p. 21) as any acts, relationships, or processes that use power over others, exercised by whatever means, such as structural, social, physical, emotional, or psychological, in a school or school-related setting or through the organization of schooling and that harm another person or group of people by reducing them from what they are or by limiting them from becoming what they might become for any period of time.

Levels of School Violence: Toward an Integrative Analysis In his “reciprocal theory of violence and non-violence,” Barak (2003) argues that pathways to violence (and nonviolence) span “across the spheres of interpersonal,


institutional and structural relations as well as across the domains of family, subculture and culture are cumulative, mutually reinforcing, and inversely related” (p. 169). He points out that “most explanations of the etiology of violence and nonviolence . . . emphasize the interpersonal spheres to the virtual exclusion of the institutional and structural spheres” (Barak, 2003, p. 155). In contrast, he argues that we need to take account of the dynamic interrelations of these different levels to understand the pathways to violence: “The interpersonal, institutional and structural levels of society are, indeed, part and parcel of the same cultural relations” (Barak, 2003, p. 170). This same multilevel analysis of culminating factors can be applied to school violence, and a few scholars have suggested this approach. In analyzing causes of school shootings, Muschert (2007, pp. 68-69) identifies 13 categories of “cause.” Like Barak, he laments the lack of integration across disciplines in analyzing school shootings, saying that many researchers have focused on a single cause but that “no single dynamic is sufficient to explain all, or even a subset of such events.” He argues that “causes may emerge from a variety of levels, ranging from the individual causes, community contexts and social/cultural contexts in which the events occur” (Muschert, 2007, pp. 67-68). He gives examples of “individual” causes drawn from existing research, which include mental illness, access to guns, peer relationships, and family neglect or abuse. Community context includes youth and peer dynamics; school contexts, such as poor student–faculty relationships or ineffective school administration; inability of communities to respond to delinquency or excessively oppressive community responses to delinquency; and intolerant community climate. At the social and cultural levels, he includes the crisis in public school education, gender role violence, conservative religious political climate, gun culture, and media violence (Muschert, 2007, p. 69). Interestingly, each of these “causes” can also be seen as forms of violence if taken from the expanded definition offered above. Another way of analyzing school violence is to examine its various “forms” as constitutive elements in a continuum of violence and to consider these in two dimensions. In one dimension, violence would be classified in terms of (a) the source of violence, (b) the nature and extent of harm caused, and (c) profile of the victim. A second dimension for classifying school violence is the structural levels at which each offense operates. This spans a nested set of contexts from micro to macro (see Benbenishty & Astor, 2005; Henry, 2000; Muschert, 2007; Welsh, Greene, & Jenkins, 1999). These include (a) individual, (b) group, (c) organization, (d) community, and (e) society and culture. As Benbenishty and Astor (2005) state, school violence “is the product of many factors that are associated with multiple levels organized hierarchically (nested like a matryoshka doll): individual students within classes, classes within schools, schools within neighborhoods, and neighborhoods within societies and cultures” (p. 113). Moreover, as others have noted (Welsh, 2000; Welsh et al., 1999), where researchers do address different levels, their analysis typically treats these in isolation rather than as an interactive matrix.


Table 1 Characteristics of the Constitutive Elements of School Violence Structural Level of Offense

(A) Source of Violence

(B) Nature and Extent of Harm Caused

(1) Individual

Student, teacher, administrator, staff, or counselor using or abusing power over others

(2) Group

Clique, gang, teacher Bullying, hate crime, union, or parental social systematic protection of control/discipline; poor teaching; family family members neglect or abuse Discriminatory teaching Symbolic and real violence Academically practices, tracking, through academic disadvantaged disciplinary practices wasteland, limiting students; women involving invasive educational potential and students; students security, authoritarian moral and social with anger and militaristic governance development, self-control issues; and zero-tolerance undermining self-esteem, innovative policy, normalizing creating depressions, teen teachers; parents violence as masculine, suicide, alienating and who trust system, accommodating marginalizing, labeling educational homophobia and subordinating, learning impoverishing the environment, and learning environment; school climate feeds into image of offenders as alienated angry student victims who become violent; corruption of the morality of successful students Social toxicity and popular Undermining social capital, Community culture; school board social disorganization, relationships politics, curriculum, and polarization hiring decisions Mass media hype of sex Alienation and Social and and violence, video war fragmentation of society, institutional trust, games, gun availability, broken world, vengeance societal integration culture of fame, ideology, collective paramilitary culture, abandonment gendered culture, promotion of competitive ideology celebrating winners and condemning losers

(3) Institutional/ Organizational

(4) Communal/ Neighborhood

(5) Societal/ Cultural

Emotional violence, verbalsocial threats, physical violence, corporal punishment, sexual violence, predation

(C) Victim Profile Student (weak, vulnerable, mental illness, depression), teacher, administrator, staff Marginalized, weak students; teachers


It is clear from the research on violence summarized earlier that harms beget harms and that harmful actions over time can affect individuals or groups in such a way that their reaction or solution to their own victimization is for them to commit harm on their oppressors or against the system symbolized by the school as a means of escaping their situation or restoring their sense of control. If we combine these elements and levels in a typological matrix (see Table 1), we can distribute examples of the kinds of activity that constitute school violence according to the definition established above and can incorporate and redistribute the “causes” (i.e., subviolence) identified by Muschert (2007) as sources from where we can explore their interactive effects. The argument then is that sources of violence (column A) operating at multiple levels of society reciprocally act on and through members of schools, school and institutional processes, communities and neighborhoods, and cultural and social orders, each of which are transformed by the harm (column B) into various levels of victims (column C). Although some members of the school, community, or society are resilient to these harms, which are accommodated, for others, the harms are cumulative and mutually reinforcing, each feeding into the wider context in which it is enmeshed at the different levels. Over time, victims (C) themselves become sources or the medium of sources of further violence. In short, victims are not simply the passive recipients of harm but also an active source of harm to themselves or others. In much of the early research and analysis on school violence, commentators typically focused on Level 1, student-on-student or student-on-teacher violence (e.g., Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998; but see Laub & Lauritsen, 1998). Certainly, Level 1 violence includes much student-on-student violence, such as predatory economic crimes in which students use violence and threats to extract material gain from other students. It can also include physical violence, such as fighting between students because of disputes about girlfriends or boyfriends or because of verbal challenges to manhood, reputation, or insults. Much interpersonal violence occurs around proving issues of gender dominance and masculinity. Level 1 violence can also include the relatively rare but dramatic serious rampage homicides, where an individual attacks the whole school or collective elements in it, such as fellow students, teachers, and/or administrators in suicidal-homicidal explosions of hate, rage, or depression. However, the more recent evidence generally shows that when these incidents occur, the “individual” source of violence has previously been the victim of violence over time, and the extent of the extreme violent event is the outcome of the effects of reciprocal victimization at multiple levels rather than at just one. For example, Newman et al.’s (2004) study of multiplevictim school homicides, drawing from a variety of data sources, shows that although individual psychological problems, including mental illness, depression, suicidal ideation, or family relational problems, are evident in up to 85% of school shooters (Newman et al., 2004, p. 245), it is critical “to determine how the shooter’s mental state interacted with his social exclusion to foster hopelessness, despair and rage” (Newman et al., 2004, p. 244).


Other levels that can contribute to the troubled individual’s “state of mind” include teachers’ selective attention to certain students, their sometimes sexual predations with students in their charge, and their physical violence toward students (Barak, 2003). Olweus, Limber, and Mihalic (1999), and more recently, Benbenishty and Astor (2005), have reported on the importance of including teachers’ bullying of students in analysis of school violence. Teacher bullying can be perpetrated emotionally, ranging from humiliation and disrespect to physical violence and to sexual harassment. The interaction of teacher bullying and peer subculture bullying can produce a complete rejection and perception of total hopelessness among its victims that can turn them into violent offenders. After Columbine, critically important Level 2 violence became evident when the role of collective policing of peer group pecking orders through violence, bullying, and exclusion became apparent. Such peer group policing rejects those who are different from or less accomplished, good-looking, or datable than those at the top of the school social hierarchy: “The internal pyramid of the popular and the untouchable, sustained by exclusion and harassment, pushes the vulnerable, the unsuccessful to the margins” (Newman et al., 2004, p. 20). Newman et al. (2004) point out that “among adolescents, whose identities are closely tied to peer relations and positions in the pecking order, bullying and other forms of social exclusion are recipes for marginalization and isolation, which in turn breed extreme levels of desperation and frustration” (pp. 229-230). As indicated above, this level of violence can feed into the individual-level violence, producing resentment and reaction among victims that can build over time. Indeed, Newman et al.’s research reveals that four out of five offenders in rampage school shootings had been socially marginalized into outcast cliques (Newman et al., 2004, p. 239), and between half and three quarters of shooters (depending on the data source) had been victimized in a variety of ways, including being bullied, threatened with physical violence, persecuted, or assaulted or having their property stolen, for a considerable period of time, in many cases, for years, prior to the decision to commit mass violence (Newman et al., 2004, pp. 241-242). The authors say that “very few of these boys seem to meet the physical and social ideals of masculinity—tall, handsome, muscular, athletic, and confident” and that “in three out of five cases, the shooters had suffered an attack on their masculinity, either by being called gay or ‘faggot’ by being physically bullied, mercilessly teased or humiliated, sexually or physically abused, or having recently been rejected by a girl. Unable to protect themselves from attacks on their manliness, they found a bloody way to ‘set the record straight’ (Newman et al., 2004, p. 242). What the shooters want is to end their torment in a way that reclaims their social standing. . . . Powerless in their normal day-to-day existence, school shooters gain a few moments of invincibility when they wield a shotgun and are not afraid to use it. . . . School shooters want their exit to send a final, powerful message, not only to their tormentors but to everyone who hurt or excluded them. (Newman et al., 2004, pp. 248-249)


It is for this reason that school shooters select certain targets: School shooters often target those at the top of the social hierarchy, the jocks and the preps, at least in their initial hit lists, a pattern that supports the notion that it is the entire institution that is under attack. School shooters are seeking to overturn—possibly destroy—the status system that has relegated them to the miserable bottom. (Newman et al., 2004, p. 249)

At Level 3, we find examples of institutionalized educational practices that reinforce societal oppressions, marginalization, and privilege based on race, gender, age, and ability, such as labeling and tracking, that can undermine student learning, particularly for female students relative to males, whose extroversion and exuberance, when acknowledged by teachers, can produce long-term anger and depression among females as well as undermine their self-esteem. Yogan (2000), for example, argues that tracking undermines students’ integration into the school community, reduces the exposure of students to diverse viewpoints, and reinforces divisions that exclude rather than integrate, leading to alienation and undermining of self-esteem. Such exclusionary educational practices can also undermine males’ confidence in school, producing a sense of powerlessness in spite of their gender privilege, and are linked to male anger and violence (Pollack, 1998; Yogan & Henry, 2000). Also important, as Mills (2001) argues, is the ways that school discourse normalizes boys’ violence, thereby reinforcing masculine privilege, male domination, and oppression over women and other men as idealized forms of masculinity, such as through popular competitive sports and its supporting culture. These effects can be further accentuated by the promotion of a competitive ideology that celebrates winners over losers, thereby corrupting the winners into “succeeders” and casting the losers as worthless. This idealized image of masculinity celebrates violence as a valid property of masculinity and marginalizes and delegitimates other forms of masculine expression, as does tacit school support for homophobia (Mills, 2001). Indeed, as Benbenishty and Astor (2005) point out, recurring daily or weekly violence in schools is more tolerated by school administrations and teachers than is violence in any other context. They point out, however, that rather than this being a developmental outcome of students’ maturing, “school organization, climate and social dynamics have independent and quite large contributions to victimization in schools” (Benbenishty & Astor, 2005, p. 142; see also Welsh, 2000). Others also illustrate how systems of authoritarian school discipline (Adams, 2000) and militaristic school security, employing metal detectors, surveillance cameras, identity tags, and drugsniffing dogs that turn schools into a prison-like atmosphere (Thompkins, 2000), can affect students, as can the anonymity of large school size and nonparticpatory governance structures (Welsh, 2000). The effects of these institutional practices are that the students’ trust in the school and in their fellow students, and their ability to learn effectively, are undermined. Here we can see the emergence of “social relationship


violence” as a result of powerless angry youths using violence to resolve issues arising from their alienation (Cintron, 2000; Kramer, 2000; Staples, 2000). Level 4 violence includes the community and neighborhood as an offender, such that socially toxic neighborhoods, with high crime rates, social disorganization, high rates of population turnover, or a relatively unstable or transient population, can create a socially toxic context for a school (Garbarino, 1999). This form of contextual effect is often tied to impoverished inner-city neighborhoods. The study of inner-city urban gangs has long demonstrated that fact as gangs form to protect those in the defeated communities that the society has abandoned. As demonstrated by Jock Young’s (1999) Exclusive Society, inequalities of wealth and privilege that marginalize whole sections of the population on the basis of class and race produce relatively deprived communities with high unemployment and high levels of street crime. These communities on the wrong end of a polarized society have become cut off from the mainstream, “creating micro societies with their own rules and regulations in which gangs can flourish,” where “residents believe they cannot be policed or protected, where they believe the most powerful force there is the gang” (Pitts, 2008, as cited in O’Hara, 2008, p. 5). These gangs create alternative opportunities for income based on drug economies, become entrenched, and recruit ever-younger youth into their fold. The hierarchy of violence and terror that they create in the neighborhoods and schools and the territorial turf wars policed by gang members are both attractive and terrifying to a neighborhood’s youth. It is not that these inner-city areas lack community, but as in the small rural towns, the community becomes the problem. The analysis of rampage shootings that took place in middle-class or stable communities, with close-knit relationships and high levels of parental involvement (Newman et al., 2004), reveals that community can have differing effects. These researchers found that such tight-knit neighborhoods could produce an informationally suffocating context in which the dark side of small towns that become blind to the problems festering among teens, where the social networks and friendships that make them “wonderful places to raise the kids” stifle the flow of information about the marginal and the troubled . . . [such that] people who observe menacing behavior keep it to themselves. (Newman et al., 2004, p. 20)

Also evident from Newman et al.’s (2004) study is that not unlike the marginalization that creates excluded groups and gangs in urban communities, in suburban and rural communities, this occurs within the school through peer group hierarchies of masculinity, supported by school athletics programs, that exclude students who do not conform to the ideal and whose anger and rage over time can explode in the classroom rather than on the streets. Level 5 violence is the more distant in its obvious effects on the production of school violence. We live in a culture of materialism with limited moral direction in which human lives are tied to achievement—greed and accumulation for its own sake,


devoid of moral meaning. This materialist backcloth provokes violence in some as a reaction to hopelessness and powerlessness and as an attempt to assert one’s will to make something happen that breaks out from the mundane, everyday experiences of boring routine and daily suffering (Staples, 2000). This includes the struggle of dualcareer families and single-parent families to survive economically, each of which have children who are left to fend for themselves. Mass media’s focus on sensational violence and the cult of fame is also a cultural context that shapes school violence. The media’s sensationalization of violence exaggerates its incidence so that youth are swamped with violent messages and images of death that, when combined with other conditions, can brutalize them and result in their seeking protection not from parents, teachers, or police, who are seen as ineffective, but from gangs and with knives and guns (Thompkins, 2000). Moreover, this media and popular cultural imagery is exploited by the commercial music industry through (a) rap and hip-hop culture, which is often misogynistic and hateful and can feed into the alienation and anger of youth (Thompkins, 2000), and (b) though heavy metal rock and goth culture, which in the case of Columbine “gave vent to feelings of alienation” (Larkin, 2007, p. 15). The media provides “‘cultural scripts’—prescriptions for behavior” that “lead the way toward an armed attack” (Newman et al., 2004, pp. 229-230). Indeed, Newman et al. (2004) argue that rather than being erratic or impulsive, school shooters ruminate on their difficulties, consider a variety of options, try a few—although generally to no effect—and then decide on shooting as a last resort. That decision is not random, though. It is a consequence of cultural scripts that are visible in popular culture. (p. 246)

As I have previously argued, cultural violence amplifies the aggressive tendencies of young males: It devalues humans, reducing them to symbolic object images of hate or derision; it trains youths to use violent skills; it celebrates death and destruction as positive values; and it provides exciting and colorful role models who use violence as the solution to problems, glorifying the most powerful and destructive performances via news media infotainment. (Henry, 2000, p. 27)

In addition to commercial cultural exploitation are national policies on gun availability and gun culture that make available the means to exercise power over others, but such “access to high powered weapons and explosives . . . did not cause the shootings; rather it enabled the shootings and bombings to occur” (Larkin, 2007, p. 15). Larkin (2007) argues that beyond the tolerance of intimidation, harassment, and bullying at Columbine perpetrated by its “jocks,” particularly, football and wrestling team members, it is important to examine the context of “religious intolerance” perpetrated “by evangelical students who established themselves as a moral elite in the high school


who saw themselves as superiors who had the right to proselytize other students on campus” (Larkin, 2007, p. 196). Important, too, is the role of “paramilitary culture,” which “culminated in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City” (Larkin, 2007, p. 196). Finally, the “culture of celebrity in postmodern America” is important in that it glorifies notoriety and fame, and it is through these broad societal-cultural themes that the specific modalities of video games, television, rock music, adolescent subcultures, and mental illness can be considered meaningful (Larkin, 2007). More broadly, societies that fail to invest in support networks for those most affected by income inequalities and that fail to provide basic levels of health care and social support for their weakest members have higher levels of anxiety, fear, and violence. Government policies that support extreme individualism and that underfund collective responsibility promote a sense that no one cares, and this feeds into the sense of hopelessness that is expressed by those who become violent teen offenders. In summary, what we have learned since Columbine is that it is not enough to limit the analysis of school violence to incidents of particular types of student violence. Rather, it is important to identify a wide range of violence at different levels of society that affect the school and to see how these are reciprocally interrelated in the school setting as a process over time. In this way, we will be able to comprehend how violent acts, including extreme expressions, such as rampage school shootings, are outcomes of multiple subviolent, violent, and symbolically violent processes. Moreover, as Barak (2003) argues, we need also to recognize that those in schools are not immune to processes of violence in the wider society, which he refers to as “structural violence: postcolonial violence, corporate violence, underclass violence, terrorist violence and institutional-structural violence” (p. 134). Although these wider manifestations of cultural and structural violence are rarely considered when examining specific forms of violence, he says that such acts of structural violence are the products of a complex development of social and psychic forces that have allowed masses of people the ability to deny, with only minimal, if any feelings of shame and guilt, the humanity of whole groups of people, that their actions or inactions victimize. In sum, these states of cultural and institutional denial of victimization contribute to the socialized lack of empathy for, and dehumanization of, the Other, each a prerequisite for the social reproduction of structural violence. (Barak, 2003, p. 135)

The culture of denial bleeds into the institution of schooling, allowing schools to accommodate violence and subviolent victimization that is the bedrock for the more dramatic manifestations of the process.

Conclusion I have argued here that to understand the genesis of school violence, we need to adopt an interdisciplinary, multilevel analytical approach. In this way, we are able to


better see the interconnected processes that produce school violence. Such an approach sensitizes us to the ways lower-level and more diffuse harm production can produce victims who, over time, can come to resent their victimization and react violently against it. In particular, social exclusion can occur in multiple ways that are both evident and concealed. In particular, they can be the product of social hierarchies in the social networks of peers, bolstered by societal-cultural discourses of masculinity and violence and supported by school systems through their own hierarchies of power. Although we can examine the psychological processes and situational explanations why students acted violently, we need to step outside of the microcontexts to explore the wider framing discourses of gender and power, masculinity and violence, and social class and race that produce social exclusion, victimization, anger, and rage. We need to see how these discourses shape the school curriculum, teaching practices, the institution of education, the meaning of “school,” and its associated educational policy. How do parents, both in their absence and in their presence, harm the lives of students? We need to proactively engage in the deconstruction of hierarchies of power that exclude, and in the process create, a wasted class of teenagers who feel hopeless, whose escape from hopelessness is blocked, and whose only way out are violent symbolic acts of self-destruction and other destruction. We also need to challenge the ways in which the economic and political structure of American society reproduces and tolerates hierarchies of exclusion and structural violence. This needs to go beyond cultural causes of school violence to see how these cultural forms are integrated with structural inequalities. Any adequate analysis of school violence, therefore, has to locate the microinteractive, institutional practices and sociocultural productions in the wider political economy of the society in which these occur. Ignoring the structural inequalities of power in the wider system reduces the cause to local and situational inequalities of power, suggesting that policies can be addressed to intervene locally, such as at the level of peer subculture or school organization. Although these levels of intervention are important, they alone are insufficient.

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Stuart Henry, PhD, is Director of the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He is author or editor of 24 books on aspects of crime, law and justice. A version of this article was first presented at the 30th Annual Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) Conference in Springfield, Illinois, October 25, 2008.