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
U
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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1247
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
1248 American Behavioral Scientist
“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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1249
(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.
1250 American Behavioral Scientist
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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1251
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
1252 American Behavioral Scientist
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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1253
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,
1254 American Behavioral Scientist
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.
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1255
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
1256 American Behavioral Scientist
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).
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1257
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)
1258 American Behavioral Scientist
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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1259
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,
1260 American Behavioral Scientist
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
Henry / School Violence Beyond Columbine 1261
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
1262 American Behavioral Scientist
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.