Deadly Lessons Understanding Lethal School Violence (2003) / Chapter Skim
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1. Introduction
1. Introduction
Pages 9-16
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From page 9... ...
In recent years, the general violence of American society has engulfed the nation's young (Cook and Laub, 1998~. From 1985 to 1994, the United States experienced a historically unprecedented epidemics of lethal youth violence that took the lives of young victims, shattered inner-city communities, and ruined the prospects of many young people across the nation (Blumstein, 1995; Moore and Tonry, 1998; Cook and Laub, 1998~.
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From page 10... ...
to undertake a detailed study of lethal school violence, giving special attention to these particular events. Specifically, the NRC was asked to convene a committee to "conduct a study regarding antecedents of school violence in urban, suburban, and rural schools, including the incidents of school violence that occurred in Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Tonesboro, Arkansas; Springfield, Oregon; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Fayetteville, Tennessee; Littleton, Colorado; and Conyers, Georgia." Congress also requested that the study should be conducted through the development and analysis of detailed case studies describing the circumstances leading up to the events, what happened in the events, and how the community responded both before and after the event.
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From page 11... ...
Without a strong science base to rely on, the committee would have to abandon its usual procedures of reviewing an extant literature, arbitrating the disputes contained therein, and synthesizing the results. It would instead have to engage in original research something that is often thought to be done better by individual scholars pursuing their theories rather than a committee trying to reach a shared understanding.
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From page 12... ...
On the other hand, it pointed to a set of incidents that seemed to have distinctive characteristics. The distinctive characteristics included not only the fact that the incidents occurred in schools and were committed by students, but also that they resulted in multiple deaths and serious injuries in a single incident.
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The committee didn't think it made sense to exclude this incident, since it was certainly more probable than not that someone could have died in this kind of incident. The committee therefore decided it would be a mistake to apply its operational definition lethal school violence including multiple victimizations too rigidly.
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From page 14... ...
These are the sources the committee used to understand the incidents of lethal school violence involving multiple victims: the cases that describe six specific incidents; a statistical database constructed for the committee's purposes from several existing sources; and several literatures that had something more or less directly relevant to say about this phenomenon. Perhaps the most valuable resource we had was the commitment and expertise of the case writers who developed the cases, all senior scholars with a significant amount of experience in qualitative methods and most with substantive knowledge in the area of youth violence.
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From page 15... ...
There are also some findings that upset some conventional assumptions about the phenomenon we studied, and there are some pretty clear ideas about where the priorities for future research may lie that could strengthen the science base for understanding and preventing particular kinds of lethal school violence. The report is organized in the following way.
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From page 16... ...
If it turned out that the antecedents to lethal school violence in inner-city schools were different from those in suburban and rural schools, then we would have some evidence pointing toward a firmer conclusion that this was a separate strain of violence. But there was another reason to Took at lethal violence in inner-city schools.
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