How to Stop School Rampage Killing by Eric Madfis

Author:Eric Madfis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030371814
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© The Author(s) 2020

E. MadfisHow to Stop School Rampage Killinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37181-4_4

4. Preventing School Rampage Violence Through Student Bystander Intervention and Positive School Environments

Eric Madfis1

(1)School of Social Work and Criminal Justice, University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA

Eric Madfis

Email: [email protected]

The study of averted rampage has clear practical significance. By learning from the numerous instances where school rampage threats came to the attention of authorities and thus were thwarted, there exists the potential for future policies and interventions to be modeled on prior successes. In addition, empirical knowledge about how school rampage incidents have been averted is especially important because many of the most popular and widespread school disciplinary policies and security practices implemented in recent years not only cannot be reliably linked to preventing rampage but also may actually hinder the few preventative measures with an empirical basis.

The findings to follow1 reveal that it was people coming forward with knowledge about a prospective school rampage that has preempted these potentially deadly occurrences. However, even in many of these successfully averted incidents, numerous student bystanders exposed to threats still did not come forward; those who did were often not close associates or confidants of the accused students, and some of the people who did ultimately come forward did so as a result of being personally threatened or in order to deflect blame away from themselves rather than out of altruistic concern for others. This suggests that schools have not seen as radical a progression away from the student taboo inhibiting information sharing with authorities as previously asserted by scholars, practitioners, and the press. While numerous scholars and many of the school and police officials interviewed in this study acknowledge the important role that encouraging positive student bystander behavior plays in averting school rampage, few recognize how seriously ingrained the code of silence is among students. As a result, this chapter suggests that practitioners and scholars often overstate the degree to which students, after the extensive coverage that the Columbine massacre received, now take the threats of their peers seriously and report them to the authorities. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the lack of positive bystander behavior on the part of students likely reflects increasingly punitive and criminalized school environments that diminish trusting relationships between students and school staff.

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