school violence a qualitative case study

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Empirical study article, attitudes towards school violence based on aporophobia. a qualitative study.

• 1 Department of Socio-Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
• 2 Applied Psychology Service, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
• 3 Department of Psychology, Universidad Europea de Valencia, Valencia, Spain
• 4 Department of Psychiatry and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

School violence is a worldwide problem. Among the variables that influence its frequency, perceived socioeconomic status seems to be associated with a higher risk of exposure to violence and attitudes toward violence. The aim of this study is to examine attitudes toward violence based on socioeconomic discrimination (aporophobia) and its relationship with violent behaviors in the school context. For this purpose, 96 Spanish students of Primary Education (PE) and Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE) participated in this qualitative study through focus groups and thematic analysis. The results identified three types of attitudes toward violence directed toward those who are perceived as members of a lower status. The attitudes observed are related to self-esteem or feeling better, legitimization and socialization.

Introduction

Whether inside the school classroom or outside of it, in the surroundings of the school or even online, school violence remains a worldwide problem of difficult solution ( UNESCO, 2017 ). Several variables influence the occurrence of this phenomenon, among which impulsivity, empathy, attitudes toward violence, self-efficacy, anxiety, depression, substance abuse or parenting styles, among others, have been studied ( Varela et al., 2018 ; Álvarez-García et al., 2018 ; Ruiz-Hernández et al., 2019 ). In this regard, attitudes toward violence have been shown to be a variable closely related to school violence, as well as to the improvement of school climate in general terms ( Jiménez-Barbero et al., 2016 ; Fraguas et al., 2021 ). This attitude-violent behavior relationship in the school context has enough evidence that attitudes can be considered a predictor of behavior ( Kraus, 1995 ; Pina et al., 2022 ).

Schools are not immune to the cultural influence of the context. Along these lines, several factors have been considered risk factors for being a victim of school violence. For example, the stigma-based framework of violence ( Earnshaw et al., 2018 ) frames the complexities of violent behaviors in social stigmas. These stigmas cause the social devaluation of certain characteristics or identities, structural biases that are reproduced in policy, law, or cultural beliefs. In this way, stigmas, often influenced by social dominance orientation, stereotypes and prejudices, have an impact on interpersonal interactions ( Ho et al., 2012 ; Malecki et al., 2020 ). Thus, social, structural (e.g., school or family) and individual characteristics of youth interact to create conditions conducive or not conducive to bullying behaviors, especially when a traditionally stigmatized characteristic is at stake ( Malecki et al., 2020 ). In this framework, several variables such as poverty level, racial or ethnic identity, being part of the LGBTQ + community, or disability status have been studied ( Malecki et al., 2020 ).

Within the group of variables that influence the interpersonal interactions of minors, the socioeconomic status (SES) perceived by the group is a variable of interest. SES refers to the position a person occupies in the structure of society due to social or economic factors ( Galobardes et al., 2006a ). Some variables related to family socioeconomic status are the education of both parents (both as a quantitative measure, where the more years of study, the better the socioeconomic status; and as a categorical measure, focused on specific achievements, where the more successful the studies, the better the socioeconomic status), parental occupation (e.g., parental unemployment is a strong indicator of low socioeconomic status), household income (e.g., family affluence, annual household income and combined income of both parents) and household conditions (e.g., overcrowding, considered if the threshold of two or more persons per room is exceeded; and household conditions, considered by the presence of humidity and condensation, construction materials, rooms of the dwelling) ( Galobardes et al., 2006a , b ).

In general terms, a higher incidence of bullying problems has been observed in schools in disadvantaged areas ( Olweus, 1993 ; Woods and Wolke, 2004 ; Fu et al., 2013 ), with an Odds Ratio of 0.46 ( Woods and Wolke, 2004 ). Of all the family SES indicators, a strong association is reported between low parental educational level and child victimization ( Jansen et al., 2012 ). Similarly, there seems to be a relationship between the SES and the role assumed in a situation of violence ( Tippett and Wolke, 2014 ). Throughout the literature, it is observed that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds may act as perpetrators, bullying their peers more often, or be more vulnerable to victimization ( Alikasifoglu et al., 2007 ; Due et al., 2009a , b ; Wolke et al., 2010 ; Jansen et al., 2011 ). Specifically, in the meta-analysis conducted by Tippett and Wolke (2014) concluded that being a victim of bullying was positively associated with low family socioeconomic status, highlighting the influence of factors such as economic disadvantage ( Bowes et al., 2009 ; Lumeng et al., 2010 ) and poverty ( Glew et al., 2005 ). Specifically, it appears that coming from a lower socioeconomic background or being unable to afford the goods or resources available to other peers may expose children to peer victimization ( Tippett and Wolke, 2014 ).

In general terms, the data suggest that children living in low-income households should make a greater effort to avoid becoming involved in violence, although there are discrepancies in the literature in this regard. An example of this is reflected in the qualitative studies by Daly and Leonard (2002 , p. 12) and Davis and Ridge (1997 , p. 64). For some of the minors in these studies, not following or not being able to follow fashion trends was met with verbal abuse, teasing, or bullying from others. Likewise, economic disparity between schools is associated with an increased likelihood of being exposed to bullying ( Due et al., 2009b ). Higher rates of school violence have been observed in countries where social inequality is greater ( Due et al., 2009b ; Elgar et al., 2009 ). For this reason, it has been pointed out that the relationship between family socioeconomic status and bullying might be better understood at the societal level than at the individual level ( Tippett and Wolke, 2014 ).

From this social perspective, discrimination against those members of the community who have fewer resources has been associated with the term aporophobia, defined for the first time in our context by Cortina (1995) . Although initially this term did not appear in Spanish language dictionaries ( Cortina, 2000 ; Martínez, 2002 ), it is now accepted by the Royal Spanish Academy, who defines it as “exaggerated aversion to poor or disadvantaged people” ( Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). Thus, aporophobia refers to the feeling of rejection or fear of the poor, the underprivileged, those who lack outlets, means or resources, thus blaming them for the situation in which they find themselves ( Andrade, 2008 ). Likewise, such discomfort seems to be an induced and provoked sensation that is learned and disseminated through alarmist and sensationalist stories that show poor people as responsible for crime and as an alleged threat to the stability of the socioeconomic system ( Martínez, 2002 ).

The roots of aporophobic thinking are found in Smith’s (1976) Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith makes use of the concept of “sympathy” to explain why poor people arouse negative emotions. The observer determines the sympathy or antipathy response to another person’s emotions by allowing the observer to imagine oneself in the other’s position in an effort to understand why one is in the same situation as the other person and, thus, understand why one feels a certain way which, from an economic point of view, translates into feeling greater sympathy for rich people because of their greater association with happiness ( Bakke, 2011 ). In turn, the observer feels discomfort at the pain of others, so they sympathize to some extent ( Smith, 1976 ). For this reason, if someone who is poor asks for more compassion than the impartial spectator justifies, the observer ends up resenting the poor person and inducing them to enter fully into their hardship being able to justify this in the non-dissimulation of their painful situations, making them appear pathetic and despicable to others ( Smith, 1976 ; Bakke, 2011 ). Following Smith’s (1976) proposal, poor people are perceived as useless, lazy, lacking talent, let alone the ability to earn a living. In cases of extreme poverty or destitution, the very situation of hunger, physical pain, and emotional depression of the poor person is naturally repulsive to the observer and, therefore, compassionately impenetrable. Conversely, the poor person come to resent the observer for not considering the full reality of their situation. According to this author, the fear and disgust felt toward the poor person and the admiration for the rich and powerful one would be human in nature, in a way that it could not be manipulated or altered, since it is not only a way of preserving our moral sentiments, but is also necessary to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society.

Based on the conceptualization of the phenomenon by Smith (1976) , Cortina (2000) , Martínez (2002) , and Bakke (2011) , different psychological categories such as attitudes, beliefs and behaviors are associated with the concept of aporophobia ( Comim et al., 2020 ). Likewise, the concept of aporophobia is closely related to other widely studied social problems such as gender-based violence, hate crimes, racism, ethnic discrimination, xenophobia, and homophobia, with SES inequality being the common factor that could serve as a link between many of these ( Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). According to some authors, such discriminatory behaviors are mainly explained by perceived SES inequalities, regardless of other conditions such as race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or sexual orientation ( Cortina, 1996 ; Andrade, 2008 ; p. 70; Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). In this regard, poverty would be the common and precipitating factor of this type of social problems, understanding poverty as deprivation and inequality attributed to a sector ( Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). From the aporophobic logic, “poor” people have nothing to offer, making their presence uncomfortable because it reminds us that situations of homelessness are, to some extent, a responsibility of people who are well off and this, possibly, is wanted to be forgotten ( Andrade, 2008 ). Thus, it is not usually taken into consideration that “poor” people are not only “poor” because of their insufficient purchasing power of goods, but that they are also immersed within a complex network of socioeconomic, environmental and cultural conditions defined by the society to which they belong ( Ardiles, 2008 ).

Under this prism, aporophobia would translate into violent behaviors with a high prevalence. In this sense, the Network of Support for Social and Labor Integration ( RAIS fundación, 2017 ) indicates that, in the specific case of Spain, 47% of people in poverty have been victims of at least one hate crime due to aporophobia. Aporophobia as a psychological and social pathology has not been studied in depth despite the fact that its definition and the arguments that define it are quite clear ( Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). This lack of evidence carries over to the school context. Although poverty has been studied as a risk factor in school violence, there does not seem to be any study that delves into the problem from the point of view of aporophobia in the school context, especially through qualitative methodology. This vision is necessary since the interest is not to know the relationship between SES and aggressive behaviors and/or victimization, but from the point of view of aporophobia as a social pathology, the interest of study are the attitudes and violent behaviors directed toward those members of the community who are perceived as “poor” or of a lower status. Along these lines, qualitative indicators will vary according to the particular social context where the study of the same is conducted ( Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ). Under this premise, the objectives of this study are, on the one hand, to identify attitudes toward school violence based on aporophobic discrimination using qualitative techniques in schoolchildren. In addition, behaviors associated with these attitudes will be explored. On the other hand, a theoretical approach to the structure and dynamics that seem to maintain and justify these attitudes in the school context is intended.

Participant recruitment

For this study, a qualitative design was used with participants from three schools in southeastern Spain, two of Primary Education (PE) and one of them of Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE). The socioeconomic status of the areas of the schools included in this study is medium. The schools were selected incidentally. The census of these schools was high ( M = 663.33, SD = 458.29, range between 240 and 1,150). From among the students at the school, those enrolled between the fourth and sixth year of PE (9–11 years) and first and fourth year of CSE (12–16 years) were invited to participate. The target sample size was 90–120 students, obtaining a final sample of 96 participants. The mean age of the interviewees was 11.35 (SD = 2.09) with an age range between 9 and 16 years old. A total of 95.8% were born in Spain and 83.5% had a remarkable or outstanding academic performance. A large number of students had a high school diploma. A large number of students had at least one sibling (82.3%) and lived with both parents (86.5%). Regarding the educational level of the parents, in both cases it was more common for them to have basic or compulsory studies (35.4 and 35.4%). No other measures of socioeconomic level were taken because of the difficulties that children have in estimating these indicators ( Wardle et al., 2002 ). More information on the participants is available in the study by Pina et al. (2021a) .

This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the authors’ university (ID: 2317/2019) and followed the recommendations of the COREQ guide for focus groups ( Tong et al., 2007 ). The selection of schools for the study was incidental, excluding those that, according to the data from the Observatory of School Coexistence of the Autonomous Community, had extremely low or high rates of school violence. Of the four schools initially invited, three finally participated, since one of them was unable to participate for reasons related to COVID-19.

All the students, teachers and parents/legal guardians belonging to the classrooms selected for the study were provided with written information together with informed consents about the objectives of the study. In these documents, they were asked to accept both the audio recordings in the focus groups and the publication of the data obtained in subsequent scientific publications.

For the creation of the groups, a maximum of four participants per classroom were randomly selected, with the common nexus of the groups being the school year. A total of 12 focus groups were conducted, with an average of eight participants and lasting between 41.5 and 54.47 min ( M = 48.85, SD = 4.89). Of all the minors invited, only 10 of them declined to participate in the research.

The inclusion criteria for being part of these groups were as follows: (a) being enrolled in one of the selected schools, (b) being between 9 and 16 years old, and (c) speaking and understanding Spanish. Meanwhile, the exclusion criteria were: (a) being enrolled in a grade lower than fourth year of PE or higher than fourth year of CSE, (b) refusing to participate or not submitting the informed consent signed by the minor and parents/guardians, (c) showing some type of cognitive limitation that prevented participation in the study, and (d) not attending the school on the day the focus groups were conducted.

All the group interviews were conducted during school hours. A member of the school management team accompanied the children from their classroom to a space specially prepared for the focus groups. Only the children and the interviewers were present in these spaces. Before starting the recording, the participants were again asked for their explicit consent, this time verbally. In addition, they were reminded that the audio recording would be destroyed after transcription. In the text file, any data provided that could identify the participant or another person was replaced by a code.

Data collection

For the exploration of aporophobia, focus group discussions were used following the methodology proposed by Krueger (1991) . These focus groups involve a data collection technique, of a qualitative nature employed on numerous occasions in research (e.g., Edwards et al., 2020 ; Miranda Miranda et al., 2020 ; Pina et al., 2021b ). For their formation, people with common characteristics that are relevant to the research topic are grouped together, in our case, minors from the same school and course. Prior to conducting the focus groups, a script was created in which general statements related to the topic of the study were generated. It was decided to opt for the study of attitudes toward aporophobia in the school context given the scarcity of qualitative research published with this approach. This script was previously tested on a pilot group of students not contemplated in the results of the study.

The focus groups were conducted by the first author with the assistance of the other authors. This first author is a male with extensive training and experience in focus groups, having published several studies using this methodology. There was no previous relationship with the participants in the groups. Before starting with the recordings, the interviewer spent between 5- and 10-min generating rapport with the participants, with questions outside the object of study and of trivial subject matter. Once this was done, about the objectives, functions and importance of the study of coexistence in the academic environment were explained.

The interviewer tried to remain neutral throughout the process, remaining free of bias, assumptions, or displays of interest in the participants’ responses. The rest of the authors of the study took notes and supplemented the interviews whenever necessary. Likewise, the interviewees were encouraged to provide as much information as possible, whether it was their own or an experience from a colleague or acquaintance, and to avoid focusing exclusively on their own experiences. More information on the questions is available in the study by Pina et al. (2021a) .

Data analysis

The data of this study were analyzed through a thematic analysis following the proposal of Braun and Clarke (2006) , assuming a constructivist and inductive approach. Once the focus groups were conducted, with the aim of identifying and describing certain patterns in the data, the transcriptions of the recordings were carried out as a first contact with these data. Following this method, the data should be transcribed with the supervision of a minimum of two researchers, taking notes and ideas that could be relevant to consider in later phases of the study. Once this was done, codes were generated using an inductive or bottom-up method, starting from the virgin data without the intention of framing them in an existing theoretical framework. These codes were subsequently discussed by all the authors of the study, divided into pairs, and, if no consensus was reached, multiple coding was carried out.

The codes generated were grouped into topics and subtopics, with the researchers relying on maps and tables for better visual representation, thus discarding codes irrelevant to the research. For the proper construction of topics, we chose to follow a constructivist perspective, exploring latent topics in the information collected and avoiding the simple description of data.

Once these steps were completed, it was decided to go back in the process to review the codes, adjusting them as necessary and thus ensuring congruence with the data collected. Finally, for a topic to be considered, it had to be present in a minimum of four focus groups, except for information considered very important by most of the researchers. After this definition, all the information was structured using a conceptual map.

The thematic analysis applied to the various focus groups identified three interrelated blocks of attitudes toward violence based on socioeconomic discrimination or aporophobia. Due to the complexity of their interactions, the information is presented separately. The extracted topics were titled as attitudes toward violence based on aporophobia (a) to feel better or increase self-esteem, (b) perceived as legitimate, and (c) as a way of socializing. Each of these blocks are divided into subtopics that elaborate on each of these attitudes ( Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Attitudes toward school violence based on socioeconomic discrimination or aporophobia.

Attitudes toward aporophobic violence in school to feel better

In the different focus groups, it was observed that attitudes toward violence based on aporophobia are strongly related to the need to feel better about oneself, whether the objective is to increase one’s self-esteem or to have fun. The ways to feel better are multiple. For example, possessing things that are considered better or novel by others can place the child in a position of power and take advantage of this to make fun of or even exclude the rest of the peers who do not share this status as can be seen in this example with video game consoles:

“I know a case that happened to a friend of mine, he had a Nintendo Switch when it had just been released. As I don’t have it, and neither does my other friend, he would say “I have a Nintendo Switch and I have Super Mario 11” and he would start bragging. He was bragging because it was more expensive, and they bought it to him, and he feels special.”

On some occasions, it seems that children consider it a positive thing to be envied by others for what they possess. In many occasions, this is given by the economic value of these objects:

“For example, you say that they are going to give you a present if you get good grades, and then people compare what they have with others. And they ask you, how much money did it cost? It cost me 100 and you prefer not to tell them how much yours cost because the most important thing is that you like it. They tell you that it’s better to say how much it costs because then you can tell how good it is.”

Status is not always marked by material possessions. In this regard, being a relevant figure in the school (popular) or having access to figures of power, such as having family members who are teachers or directors, can give certain power to children who use this to position themselves above others. Access to power figures seems to be more important at younger ages while, as adolescence progresses, it seems to be more important to be popular or to have followers. The following example would refer to this idea.

“he’s always laughing at others, but it’s because his mother is a teacher and he thinks he’s better.”

This type of attitude may be accentuated if the object (or relevant figure) itself is something that only the minor or a very small group of minors in the school possesses. The magnitude of the associated violent behaviors may be increased in relation to this, leading to the generalization of this type of behavior to a larger number of peers in the school.

Attitudes toward aporophobic violence in school perceived as legitimate

On occasions, minors consider it fair or legitimate to exercise violence toward peers based mainly on aspects related to the material objects they own or access to these relevant figures mentioned above. One aspect that seems to be of importance is the “branding” of the things owned. That is to say, the group seems to strongly penalize those minors who do not wear “prestigious brand” clothing in their social circle, with teasing and exclusion predominating. Objects or garments that imitate “prestigious brands” deserve special mention due to their high prevalence and intensity of the associated behaviors. If the footwear they wear is an imitation of one of these “brands,” the group can legitimize violent behaviors of greater intensity, even reaching the point of physical violence:

“If you don’t wear brand shoes, you wear imitations, they take it out on you.”

“Well, many times it usually happens because of the shoes. Because many times kids wear ones … That are not of a brand, right? Imitation, basically, right? And other kids go and say: look! These are Nike and they cost me 100 euros, and you don’t! You are wearing 10-euro shoes (laughs).”

“Maybe she’s wearing an Adidas T-shirt and I’m wearing a fake [Adidas] one and she says: ‘Oh, yours is from the market, whatever … Look at her, she’s wearing one from the market’.”

“Just because you’re wearing something fake you are less than me.”

The legitimization of violence based on what one has or does not have can lead minors to violent behaviors that are aimed at damaging or destroying the things of others that are perceived to be of lesser value:

“Sometimes they step on my sneakers and yeah, I don’t know. Because they don’t cost the same as theirs.”

“They also step on [your shoes] if you wear high heels or you are not fashionable.”

Although the clothes the children are wearing seems to be an important factor here, they claim that other aspects are even more relevant, such as whether an object looks ugly to them, such as the backpack or pencil case they have, or how expensive the cell phone they have is:

“If you have an iPhone, then you have more money, they can afford it. If they have an Android phone or that stuff, then they don’t have as much money, they can’t afford to buy an iPhone. If you have that you can do whatever you want.”

The idea of what you have varies by age. Younger students tend to have fewer possessions so they may make these distinctions based on the possessions their parents or guardians have:

“How many TVs, how many cars you have … If you have a Smart TV, you are God.”

An exceptional case of legitimization is based on something that the whole school considers basic, i.e., that everyone has or should have. When a minor lacks this element, there seems to be greater justification for violent behavior. Some of these things could be the school uniform: “Worse things happen to you if you wear the old school equipment. ” In this type of circumstance, the child who lacks this element may receive violent behavior from many schoolmates:

“I once, for a whole year, I wore a swim cap from when I was in first grade, a yellow one. Everyone started laughing at me because I didn’t have the red one until I bought the other one in second grade.”

Attitudes toward aporophobic violence in school as a form of socialization

Attitudes toward aporophobic violence seem to influence the social interactions of minors. Although social behaviors, such as exclusion, are observed in the examples reported above, they are not included in this section because exclusion has been understood as the manifestation of violent behavior and not as a motivating attitude. In this regard, here we include attitudes that guide socialization with peers based on what they have or do not have.

When a minor differs physically from what is established for their sex, this is perceived as a sufficient reason to tease, ridicule, or perform other actions. This type of behavior is performed especially when the recipients are boys with characteristics associated with the feminine stereotype:

“For example, I once heard that some kids were fighting because one of them wanted to play dodgeball, and those that were playing wouldn’t let him because he was wearing the old school equipment. And they said ‘You can’t play because you are not updated’.”

“The Fila brand shoes, the girls who wear them tell the others: why aren’t you wearing them? If you are not fashionable, you don’t play.”

In line with the above, there seems to be a social norm that leads children to relate more to those who are of the same status, i.e., those who have things of similar value or as new as those they own:

“There are shoes that I can’t wear because I have an allergy in my foot, so sometimes they leave me alone because I don’t wear the same shoes they wear.”

“If you have the newest console, if it’s the best console out there right now, they don’t discriminate you if you play some games.”

In general terms, these attitudes hardly occur in isolation. A minor can exercise violence toward another for not wearing brand clothing and do so with the social legitimization of these behaviors and with the aim of increasing their own self-esteem.

This study is an exploration of attitudes toward violence against those with fewer resources in a Spanish sample and their relationship with different manifestations of violence. The results obtained are in line with a possible attitude-behavior relationship previously discussed ( Kraus, 1995 ; Pina et al., 2022 ).

From the perspective of school violence, data on the participants’ experiences obtained through qualitative studies allow a better understanding of this social phenomenon, favoring the specificity of the results, a prerequisite for the design of more effective intervention programs ( Merrell et al., 2008 ).

Regarding the hypothesis of our study, the results obtained show the existence of attitudes toward aporophobic violence in schools. Specifically, it is observed that these attitudes are related to the use of violence as a way of feeling better about oneself, perceived as legitimate and as a way of relating to peers. All these blocks interact with each other, thus forming a complex network of attitudes and behaviors that influence school coexistence problems that especially affect students from families of low socioeconomic levels.

At the time of this study, there is no knowledge of previous studies that explore attitudes toward school violence from the perspective of aporophobia. However, several studies have delved into the attitude-violent behavior relationship in the school context. For example, Pina et al. (2021a) concluded, in a study similar to this one, that attitudes toward school violence in the general population are related to violence to feel better about oneself, as a form of fun, perceived as legitimate, when directed at those who are different, when it has no consequences, as a way to resolve conflicts, as a way to socialize, and as a way to attract the attention of peers. Likewise, the study by Pina et al. (2021b) identifies four types of attitudes toward violence directed toward students belonging to the LGBTQI + community were identified, these being the use of violence as a form of fun, to feel better, when it is perceived as legitimate and as a way of relating to members of this community. The results presented in both studies partially agree with ours, sharing two of the topics obtained.

From the perspective of studies on aporophobia, there is previous evidence on the relationship between attitudes toward violence and socioeconomic status of students. Along these lines, a positive correlation has been found between attitudes toward violence and belonging to a higher socioeconomic level ( Massarwi and Khoury-Kassabri, 2017 ). Students with a high family income level in their samples present a higher risk of being bullies ( Barboza et al., 2009 ; Chang et al., 2013 ). In turn, adolescents from low socioeconomic status families would be at higher risk of victimization ( Due et al., 2009b ). Furthermore, Due et al. (2009b) suggested that the association between SES and bullying behavior may be more salient when SES among students varies markedly from the overall wealth of a school or community. These results would support those presented in our study where, according to the interviews, minors with greater economic resources could have greater access to valuable, novelty or “branded” objects, enhancing their attitudes toward violence and, therefore, increasing the risk of manifesting such attitudes in the form of school violence. However, there are studies that claim that socioeconomic status is not a variable statistically associated with being a perpetrator of school violence ( Wang et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Larochette et al., 2010 ; Magklara et al., 2012 ; Shetgiri et al., 2013 ). Taking this into account, it would be interesting to propose studies that consider violence among students from the same school who are perceived as belonging to different social statuses in order to reach more solid conclusions.

Regarding the topics obtained in our analysis, the children showed a wide range of attitudes toward violence as a way to feel better about themselves or to increase their self-esteem. Based on the data, the issue lies in the need to increase self-esteem, even though it may be apparently high ( Pina et al., 2021a ). Previous studies highlight that high and low levels of self-esteem have been related to increased bullying perpetration ( Tsaousis, 2016 ). Specifically, other works have found a positive association between self-esteem and being a bully, such that the probability of being a bully is higher when the student has high self-esteem ( Guerra et al., 2011 ). In our understanding, minors see in material things an opportunity to differentiate themselves from others and position themselves as a person of value in their social circle, using things as a way to “inflate” self-esteem. As has been observed in previous studies (e.g., Ruiz-Hernández et al., 2020 ), the legitimization of school violence is one of the most influential factors in the manifestation of violent behavior. This could drive violent behaviors in children who have more things than others simply because they have them, and these behaviors could become normalized in schools. In this regard, violence toward those who don’t own objects or garments is also observed in the focus groups of other qualitative studies, for example, in Morrow (2001) , Daly and Leonard (2002) , and Willow (2002 , p. 53). For many minors, especially among older age groups, social acceptance meant being able to dress similarly to others in their social circle, wearing brand-name clothing, for example ( Attree, 2006 ). Likewise, the children interviewed showed a wide range of attitudes toward violence as a way of socializing. In this line, it has been found that violence can be used to socialize, especially if social skills have not been developed ( Werner and Hill, 2010 ). Social skills, together with the level of maladjustment, indirectly predict involvement in bullying ( Postigo et al., 2012 ).

Based on our results, on direct experience and on what has been previously presented in the bibliography ( Middleton et al., 1994 ; Morrow, 2001 ; Daly and Leonard, 2002 ; Willow, 2002 ; Backett-Milburn et al., 2003 ; Attree, 2006 ; p. 53), we consider it appropriate to make a theoretical approach to the reality of aporophobia in schools. In this sense, there seem to be three fundamental dimensions that serve as a basis for establishing the hierarchical structure or status of the school. These three dimensions are: (a) the amount of expensive or brand-name items owned, (b) the exclusive or fashionable items owned, and (c) access to relevant or powerful figures. As our results show, children base their violent aporophobic attitudes on one or more of these dimensions. The reader should bear in mind that the culture of the school itself will mark what is considered expensive, novel or a power figure. This means that one object may be considered very valuable in one school, but of little or no value in another. In our understanding, the relational dynamics that arise according to these three dimensions generate four statuses in the schools. These would be: (a) high status, defined by those children who stand out in all three dimensions (for example: they have expensive or brand items, are fashionable and popular); (b) medium-high status, encompassing those children who have some of these resources considered special; (c) medium-low status, composed of children who do not stand out in any of these dimensions but do not lack anything considered essential and; (d) low status, which would include children who lack something that is considered basic in the culture of their school. Based on this structure, attitudes toward violence and aporophobic violent behavior would have a hierarchical character. In this sense, children who perceive themselves as having a higher status than others might have higher attitudes toward this type of violence in order to feel better or as a way of socializing. The rest of the group could legitimize/normalize those attitudes toward violence when they are directed from a member of a higher status to a lower status. In short, based on the proposals of various works ( Smith, 1976 ; Cortina, 1995 ; Martínez, 2002 ; Andrade, 2008 ; Bakke, 2011 ; Pozo-Enciso and Arbieto-Mamani, 2020 ), aporophobia in the school context could be defined as emotions, attitudes and/or behaviors of rejection of peers who are perceived as “poorer” or of lower social status. This perception is induced or learned through the culture of the school itself, laying the foundations of the socioeconomic system or status of minors. Thus, according to Attree (2006) review of qualitative studies, these disadvantages in childhood can lead to the perception that economic and social constraints are natural and normal, which has an impact on children’s life expectancy.

The conclusions reached in this study have a wide variety of implications for socio-community intervention and research. In terms of research, the qualitative approach to attitudes toward violence based on aporophobia is a novel contribution to this field of study. This study provides evidence to the previous quantitative studies, allowing us to explore the specificity, complexity, and variety of attitudes. Our results are useful to understand the school climate and school violence based on aporophobia, facilitating the proactive participation of children in knowledge-building about the subject.

Regarding socio-community intervention, our results suggest that it is important to include a change of attitude toward violence within the programs to improve coexistence in the academic area. As mentioned earlier, meta-analytic studies suggest that modification of attitudes toward violence is an effective perspective to improve the school climate ( Mytton et al., 2006 ; Fox et al., 2010 ; Jiménez-Barbero et al., 2012 , 2016 ).

Implications for research and practice

The findings of this study have a wide range of implications not only from a research point of view but also from a welfare point of view. First, this qualitative approach to attitudes toward violence makes a new contribution to the field. On the one hand, attitudes are usually approached from a quantitative point of view, with our results being useful for the research topic through the proactive participation of students. In this sense, the qualitative approach allows a better understanding of emotional experiences and how they occur in their contexts ( Callaghan et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, this study focuses on attitudes toward violence based on aporophobia. Studies dealing with this type of population are almost non-existent, so these results can serve as a basis for future research. Finally, our results and theoretical proposals suggest the usefulness of designing school violence prevention or intervention plans from the approach of changing attitudes toward violence. Some programs already address this problem considering attitudes with excellent results ( Jiménez-Barbero et al., 2016 ), however, it could be useful to improve the specificity of these programs, adapting them to the context of children with diverse characteristics, thus increasing their effectiveness.

This study has some limitations. For example, in qualitative studies it is not possible to generalize the results, so it would be interesting to replicate similar studies in other countries or social contexts. This type of work would allow us to explore the similarities and differences with the results described here. Another limitation of this study would be the small sample size. Although qualitative studies are characterized by limited samples, it would be interesting to carry out studies especially with primary school students or with secondary school students, specifically with larger sample sizes. Another limitation of this study is that no values were collected for the socioeconomic level of the participants or the school. According to Due et al. (2009b) , the association between SES and bullying behavior may be more salient when SES among students varies markedly from the general wealth of a school or community, so collecting this information will contribute more information to the study.

In our opinion, it would be advisable to complement the results of this study with quantitative studies, either by applying or creating instruments specific to this type of attitudes toward violence. Finally, the use of an incidental sample of three schools may not be representative of the adolescent population of the region or the country. In our understanding, the culture of the center will be what marks what is “good” or “bad,” “new” or “old” and, therefore, will have a direct influence on attitudes toward aporophobic violence. However, we believe that the formal structure and dynamics mentioned will be relatively stable between schools and can serve as a basis for the interpretation of similar studies.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Murcia (ID: 2317/2019). Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

DP and MM-T contributed to the conception and design of the study. DP conducted the interviews. DP, MM-T, EP-L, and JR-H conducted the qualitative analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. DP, MM-T, RL-L, and LM-A wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

The publication of this article was funded by the Applied Psychology Service of the University of Murcia.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank all the participants of this study, as well as their mothers, fathers, legal guardians, and the professionals of the schools for their participation.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords : attitudes, qualitative study, bullying, school violence, aporophobia, socioeconomic discrimination

Citation: Pina D, Marín-Talón MC, López-López R, Martínez-Andreu L, Puente-López E and Ruiz-Hernández JA (2022) Attitudes towards school violence based on aporophobia. A qualitative study. Front. Educ. 7:1009405. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.1009405

Received: 01 August 2022; Accepted: 01 September 2022; Published: 23 September 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Pina, Marín-Talón, López-López, Martínez-Andreu, Puente-López and Ruiz-Hernández. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: María Catalina Marín-Talón, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Towards 2030: Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. An Educational Perspective

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS ABOUT SCHOOL VIOLENCE: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

ABSTRACT The study aimed to understand the perceptions of elementary and high school students and teachers about school violence. This is a qualitative study that used the focus group as a form of data collection. Physical and verbal violence were the most common responses about identified forms of school violence. Psychological and socioeconomic factors, damage to family relationships, personal and educational problems were identified as predisposing factors for the occurrence of different forms of school violence. Educational actions, participation of the public authorities in a punitive manner (police) and the presence of psychology, psychiatry and social assistance professionals were identified as measures to curb school violence, in addition to greater family involvement in the school. It is understood that school violence can be faced through the valorization of human rights and the joint action of the school, family and community.

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Teacher and Peer Responses to Warning Behavior in 11 School Shooting Cases in Germany

Nora fiedler.

1 Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Friederike Sommer

2 Department of Police and Security Management, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Berlin, Germany

Vincenz Leuschner

Nadine ahlig, kristin göbel, herbert scheithauer, associated data.

The datasets generated for this study will not be made publicly available. The datasets analyzed for this study, i.e., original inquiry files from law enforcement authorities, cannot be shared for legal and privacy restrictions.

Warning behavior prior to an act of severe targeted school violence was often not recognized by peers and school staff. With regard to preventive efforts, we attempted to identify barriers to information exchange in German schools and understand mechanisms that influenced the recognition, evaluation, and reporting of warning behavior through a teacher or peer. Our analysis is based on inquiry files from 11 cases of German school shootings that were obtained during the 3-year research project “Incident and case analysis of highly expressive targeted violence (TARGET).” We conducted a qualitative retrospective case study to analyze witness reports from school staff and peers. Our results point to subjective explanations used by teachers and peers toward conspicuous behavior (e.g., situational framing and typical adolescent behavior), as well as reassuring factors that indicated harmlessness (e.g., no access to a weapon). Additionally, we found organizational barriers similar to those described in US-American case studies (e.g., organizational deviance).

Introduction

A key finding from the retrospective analysis of cases of severe targeted school violence (e.g., school shootings) is that these violent acts can be regarded as an endpoint of a long-term negative developmental pathway (e.g., Levin and Madfis, 2009 ; Scheithauer et al., 2014 ; Sommer et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, there is a consensus in the literature on school shootings that several types of warning behaviors and indicators of a personal crisis were observable by persons in the school, family, or peer context prior to a violent act ( Hoffmann et al., 2009 ; Rocque, 2012 ; Bondü and Scheithauer, 2014b ; Gerard et al., 2016 ). Perpetrators either gave warning to peers by announcing an attack (“leakage” cf. Meloy et al., 2012 ), made direct threats to kill toward potential victims, or displayed behaviors that can be regarded as indicative of a psychosocial crisis (e.g., sudden behavioral changes, social withdrawal, or school absenteeism). However, as international case studies reveal, warning behaviors were often not recognized or responded to by the perpetrators’ peers and members of school staff ( Daniels J.A. et al., 2007 ; Syvertsen et al., 2009 ; Scheithauer and Bondü, 2011 ). Newman et al. (2004) found the inability of the social support systems to identify and bundle warning behaviors—beside social marginality, individual vulnerabilities, access to guns, and cultural scripts—to be one of five necessary conditions for school shootings. It is significant to understand why warning behaviors that became apparent in the school context were not recognized or adequately identified by peers and school staff, and—if identified—a progression of a negative psychosocial development could not be averted through case management measures. In that respect, research findings from US-American case studies provide some explanations taking schools’ organizational structures, as well as peer group norms, into account ( Fox and Harding, 2005 ; Daniels J. et al., 2007 ; Pollack et al., 2008 ). In the following, we present structural barriers as well as challenges school staff and peers are facing when identifying, assessing, evaluating, and handling students’ warning behaviors.

Awareness of Potential Warning Behavior

Research provides evidence that a school’s organizational complexity and lack of resources are barriers to successful communication and crisis management. Fox and Harding (2005) consider “organizational deviance” as a structural obstacle, meaning that warning behavior of students is not recognized and properly handled by school staff and results from routines and behaviors in an institution that were established to serve a specific purpose. For instance, Fox and Harding (2005) found a general tendency in members of large organizations to primarily respond to behavior that disturbs an organization’s day-to-day functioning (e.g., aggressive behavior; “The squeaky wheel gets the oil”; “decoy problem”). However, this scheme of action may not be sufficient in cases of students’ trajectories leading to severe school violence. Many school shooters did not show aggression or apparent frustration prior to an attack, even while already engaging into planning behavior, but were more “invisible kids,” a term used by Bender et al. (2001) referring to students who did not draw much teacher attention on them. Moreover, a single school staff member’s autonomy in day-to-day decision-making and task segregation can result in “structural secrecy” and “loose coupling” leading to what is described as “institutional memory loss” in the literature ( Vossekuil et al., 2002 ; Fox and Harding, 2005 ). Due to a lack of time resources, information on student warning behavior is often not shared with colleagues or reported to authorities ( Harding et al., 2002 ). Instead, an observation remains fragmented within a school. Moreover, typical conflict situations in a school require quick reactions from educational staff who primarily rely on gut feelings instead of an informed decision-making procedure ( Leuschner et al., 2011 ). A pilot study conducted in 2009, the Berlin Leaking Project, indicated a significant lack of knowledge and uncertainty in risk assessment among German school staff ( Bondü et al., 2011 ). Teachers reported a strong need for general sensitization and intense expert training to create awareness for the topic. Additionally, participants have demanded increasing support and counseling from their local professional network ( Leuschner et al., 2011 ). “Information fragmentation” can also occur when observations of a student behavior are not exchanged with professionals from a school’s external network and local service institutions. Eventually, a lack of inter-institutional cooperation can become a significant barrier to effective case management and the initialization of supportive measures for an adolescent in crisis ( Harding et al., 2002 ). Finally, an insufficient documentation of observations is another structural risk factor: data on apparently harmless disciplinary incidents are often not recorded in a student’s file due to law restrictions or a well-meant “clean-slate” mentality. Information on a student’s social biography, family background, or psychological particularities literally “diffuses” and cannot be integrated in case assessment after a student transitions to secondary school or another school district. From a developmental perspective, this can have a harmful impact, since teachers at a new school will have difficulties to evaluate the progression of a student’s crisis properly.

Identification and Correct Interpretation of Students’ Potential Warning Behavior

In the majority of cases, peers—and not adults—were the first to identify behavioral changes ( Bender et al., 2001 ; Oksanen et al., 2013 ; Madfis, 2014 ). In most cases, peers of subsequent perpetrators had advanced knowledge about a planned attack but followed a “code of silence” and opted to withhold knowledge or concern from an adult ( Daniels J.A. et al., 2007 ; Syvertsen et al., 2009 ; Madfis, 2014 ). The “code of silence” is a behavioral norm followed by adolescents to protect a peer from trouble, implying not to share conspicuous information (e.g., leaking behavior, or a peer’s problems) with an adult or authority figure. Thus, for the majority of school shootings, indicators of a perpetrator’s negative psychosocial development were hardly visible to adults; consequently, school staff did not obtain the significant information necessary to identify a student in crisis. In a qualitative study conducted by the United States Secret Service as part of the United States Safe School Initiative (SSI), Pollack et al. (2008) interviewed 119 students that were involved as bystanders in school shootings that happened in the United States. The authors refer to bystanders as “students who had some prior knowledge that an attack was planned.” The study revealed that 59% of bystanders reported advanced knowledge about the perpetrator’s violent fantasies, often days or weeks prior to the attack, and 82% had their information directly from the perpetrator, but did not share it ( Pollack et al., 2008 ). Additionally, school staff face challenges in the identification and correct interpretation of students’ warning behavior potentially leading to school shootings. Predictions of school shooting behavior based on risk factors of former shooters using checklists (i.e., profiling) are inappropriate, as they would lead to a high amount of falsely identified students, which may result in stigmatization and unreasonable reduced sense of safety in schools ( Borum et al., 2010 ). School staff may tend to rely on personal presumptions or media-disseminated knowledge about school shootings without reliable information about students’ warning behavior.

Evaluation of Seriousness of Students’ Threats and Warning Behavior

Peer bystanders mostly underestimated the seriousness of a threat (e.g., threat was a “joke” or made “in jest”) or did not believe their peer would be able to carry it out. Pollack et al. (2008) found “misjudgment of the likelihood and immediacy of an attack” and “disbelief in seriousness of threats” as explanations to keep information to themselves. Finally, Wike and Fraser (2009) identified “high-risk-school cultures” among US-American schools with a school shooting attack, which described a social climate that encourages low school bonding and high “social stratification” and provides few opportunities for participation, rewards, and positive interaction between teachers and students, hence fostering bullying, harassment, and other forms of violence. On the contrary, Eliot et al. (2010) used a sample of 7,318 students from 291 schools from the Virginia High School Safety Study to examine the correlation of characteristics related to school culture with school. The authors found that the students’ willingness to seek help from an adult when confronted with a threat of violence increases with a supportive school climate and perceived support from teachers, as well as a positive attitude toward the school ( Eliot et al., 2010 ).

Finding an Appropriate Response to Students’ Warning Behavior

One effort in preventing school violence in the United States is described under the term “zero tolerance,” referring to a range of policies that seek to impose severe sanctions (e.g., suspensions and school expulsion) for minor offenses in hopes of preventing more serious ones ( Borum et al., 2010 ; Muschert and Madfis, 2013 ). However, due to the lack of empirical evidence of any positive effect in deterring or reducing school violence, zero-tolerance policies have been questioned and even criticized as measures contrary to the principles of a healthy child development ( Gregory and Cornell, 2009 ; Borum et al., 2010 ). The challenge of finding an appropriate response to students’ warning behavior can be illustrated by Sommer et al. (2016) who analyzed interventions of school staff when confronted with a student’s psychosocial crisis at risk for a school shooting (cf. Bondü and Scheithauer, 2014c ). While in most cases school staff responded to the student crisis or warning behavior by initiating resource-oriented measures, finding appropriate interventions in high-risk cases (e.g., student in possession of guns, detailed execution plans) proved to be a particular challenge. Often lacking sustainable knowledge or networks to accessible experts (e.g., prevention officers and psychotherapists), school staff mostly dealt with the students’ critical behavior within the institution, which might have resulted in feelings of overstraining and unsafety ( Sommer et al., 2016 ).

To summarize, a growing body of case studies and research on organizational risk factors has produced valuable insights into the phenomenon of severe, targeted school violence from a social framing perspective. The identification of social and structural risk factors, organizational deviance, and a negative school climate along with a better understanding of why peers of subsequent perpetrators underestimated the seriousness of threats points to opportunities of school-wide prevention and measures with a focus on the individual perpetrator (e.g., risk assessment). The purpose of this study is to identify barriers to information exchange in German schools with a school shooting incident and to highlight organizational risk factors as well as risk factors resulting from peer group norms. Additionally, the paper will discuss underlying mechanisms and individual assumptions of peers and teachers that had an impact on the identification of conspicuous behavior and to investigate them more closely. With regard to preventive efforts, the following research questions will be addressed: (1) Which measures of case management were initiated either within the schools, or with the help of a school’s professional support network? (2) How did peers respond to threats and leakage, and what can we learn about adolescent code of silence and peer evaluation of conspicuous behavior? (3) Which assumptions and specific factors can be found in the material that led teachers and peers to assess a conspicuous behavior as concerning or alarming? How did teachers and peers attempt to explain a behavioral change in the perpetrator that in retrospect can be considered a warning behavior?

Eventually, by integrating research findings from United States studies on school risk factors with results from the analysis of German school shooting cases, we aim to introduce an environmental perspective—in addition to the identification of individual risk factors—on the developmental pathways toward school shootings. A study on motives and specific constellations of individual risk factors of the perpetrator (e.g., mental disorders) provides an understanding of why an individual commits a violent act. In addition, a deeper investigation of social and organizational risk factors will help to explain why warning signs were not taken seriously, or individual support measures failed, which could eventually open new windows for prevention (e.g., by enhancing the expertise of persons within the social environment of an adolescent in crisis, such as school staff and peers) and simultaneously increase their feelings of safety. Overall, the study serves the purpose to bring light to the question why past acts of severe targeted violence could not be averted by school-related interventions.

Materials and Methods

Case selection.

Based on a definition from Bondü and Scheithauer (2014a , b) of school shootings, the following inclusion criteria to select a case were applied: (1) violent act was planned and executed by a current or former student of the school; (2) potentially lethal weapons were used (including non-shooting weapons, such as bombs or large knives); (3) the perpetrator had an intention to kill multiple victims associated with the school context; and (4) the perpetrator was not older than 25 years old when committing the violent act. Using the GENIOS and LexisNexis media databases, online archives of a total of 340 daily and weekly newspapers were systematically screened for the following search terms: “Amok (rampage),” “School Shooting,” “Terroranschlag (terroristic attack),” and “Mordanschlag (assassination attempt).” Through this search, 46 cases of potentially lethal school violence were identified, with a total of 11 meeting our inclusion criteria. The inquiry files from those 11 cases of German school shootings were obtained from the law enforcement authorities by the TARGET Research Group during the project “Incident and case analysis of highly expressive targeted violence (TARGET)” between 2013 and 2016. The average age of the perpetrators ranged from 13 to 23 years ( M = 17.5, SD = 2.8); two were females and five committed suicide after the attack. Table 1 summarizes all cases that were included in the analysis. To preserve the anonymity of the perpetrators and follow strict data protection guidelines according to German law, the perpetrators’ names will neither be published in the following sections, nor will the material analyzed and reported allow for their identification. We used inquiry files instead of media reports to avoid bias by subjective theories of journalists (cf. Danner and Carmody, 2001 ). The obtained files included court reports, judgments (if the perpetrator did not commit suicide following the shooting), comprehensive police investigative, as well as witness reports, forensic-psychiatric expert assessments, and additional personal documents written by the perpetrator (e.g., diaries, unpublished testimonies, or personal essays).

Cases of school shootings in Germany used for qualitative analysis.

Qualitative Analysis

We conducted a qualitative retrospective case study mainly based on a content analysis approach ( Kohlbacher, 2006 ) to analyze witness reports. Statements from school officials, teachers, friends of the perpetrator, and other peers were obtained during the police investigation. Information included warning behaviors and crisis symptoms that were recognized prior to the attack, subjective explanations for behavioral changes of the perpetrator, assumptions about the perpetrator’s motivation to commit a shooting, and detailed reports about the implemented measures once a conspicuous behavior was observed and which information was exchanged with others. We used the ATLAS.ti software, version 7.5 to develop our coding scheme. The coding procedure was initialized by an open coding of the first randomly selected case and was refined and enhanced based on the material of three additional cases. The analysis was mainly performed by one investigator (a female psychologist), who worked independently at the beginning of the thematic analysis. The coded material was continuously discussed with two other colleagues (one male sociologist and one female psychologist) to reach consensus on the main concepts. To assess the credibility of codes and themes, the entire research process was recorded, reviewed, and reflected upon by the investigators and discussed with three other members of the research team.

During that stage, the development of our coding scheme was shaped by an inductive approach with openness to find new meaning in the data. Data collection and analysis were developed together in an iterative process. The concepts emerging from the data were then integrated with preliminary theory-informed categories (e.g., barriers to effective identification of risk factors, warning behaviors) allowing us to generate more specific hypotheses and develop explanatory codes. Thus, all data have been organized around certain topics (e.g., code of silence), key themes, or central questions. To generate those categories, we integrated existing theories and findings from the literature on school shootings, as well as results from the sociological study of barriers to effective information exchange in schools. The first four cases, as well as all remaining cases, were then coded with the developed final coding scheme. The coding scheme reflecting theoretical constructs was refined by clustering open codes together into categories that were guided by theoretical concepts but simultaneously grounded on the empirical data. It includes definitions for all codes, categories (e.g., warning behaviors, or seriousness assessment factors) and sub-categories (e.g., violence-specific warning behavior, general crisis symptoms, or “alarming” and “reassuring” factors), as well as examples when they were applied. We examined the subjective explanations from school staff and peers once they became aware of a conspicuous behavior drawing on the retrospective analysis of witness reports. This was followed by an in-depth analysis of why a certain behavior was not adequately identified as warning behavior, and why the respective observation was not shared or reported. Additionally, we obtained information on the frequency of case management measures that were initiated by the schools and their professional network, as well as distinguished specific responses from peers that had observed leakage or a threat, or had other knowledge that a school shooting was planned.

Research Question 1: Measures of Case Management and Student Support

Case management measures were divided into measures that were initiated within a school drawing on the expertise and the professional background of school staff and related professions (within institution), and measures that were implemented within the larger professional network of a school. These required information exchange and cooperation between local institutions (e.g., a school psychologist, youth counselor, and police) or the student’s family (between institutions). Table 2 reports the frequencies of measures that were initiated along the developmental pathway in the analyzed cases.

Measures of case management in school shooting cases in Germany.

Measures Within the School

In all 11 cases, a school official or teacher at least once initiated some type of supportive face-to-face conversation with the student as a response to a conspicuous behavior. This included making an effort to understand a student’s behavior by asking questions, or actively encouraging the respective student to open up after he or she was seeking someone to talk to. Surprisingly, the school counselor was involved in case assessment and management in only two cases. Furthermore, in 10 cases, schools responded to conspicuous behavior, or a behavior that has already been identified as warning behavior, with a pedagogical measure. This included light disciplinary measures (e.g., doing additional homework), the advice to cut back on a negative behavior to avoid severe consequences (e.g., as a response to aggressive tendencies), mediation, and conflict resolution (e.g., after a threat has been made in a conflict situation with a peer). In addition, conversations took place seeking to solve mainly academic problems instead of discussing a student’s concerns and problems at home (e.g., when a student’s academic performance dropped suddenly). In seven cases, stricter regulatory measures were implemented as a means to sanction the respective problem behavior (e.g., disciplinary difficulties). In four cases, a student was expelled from school or dismissed from vocational training after a major disciplinary issue (e.g., repeated or extended absence from school, student refused to follow instructions from school staff, or lacked compliance with legal guidelines). Regarding school-internal information exchange and case evaluation, we found that in eight cases, a school staff member chose to communicate the concerning observation to a colleague. However, our data reveal that a structured information exchange and assessment (e.g., the information was stored in a written document, or forwarded to the principal, and some criteria were applied to assess the behavior) was conducted in not more than two cases. Unfortunately, we were not able to obtain a proof of validity of the criteria or guidelines that were applied in these two cases and could not find any details about their origin in our material.

Professional Network Cooperation

In all 11 cases, a school staff member or the principal made an attempt to talk to a parent of the perpetrator (or vice versa) at least once, informing them about conspicuous behavior, a decline in academic performance, or disciplinary difficulties. This indicates that at some point during their negative developmental pathway, every perpetrator showed a behavior that urged school staff to establish cooperation with the families. However, further analysis revealed that this cooperation was often not sustained and intensified in the long term as no specific agreements or follow-up meetings were scheduled. In seven cases, schools forwarded a case to an external mental health institution for an in-depth diagnostic investigation or counseling or with the goal to send the student into long-term therapy (e.g., when noticing aggressive tendencies, social withdrawal, or suspecting family problems). Six students were hospitalized at some point during their psychosocial crisis, mostly short time for crisis intervention (e.g., after showing self-destructive tendencies or attempting suicide). The police got involved in four cases after a student made a threat providing concrete details about a potential offense. Surprisingly, despite being closely associated with the school context, school psychologists were only involved in three cases, and some witness reports point to an insufficient availability due to a lack of time resources.

Research Question 2: Peer Responses to Threats and Leakage

We identified how peers responded to violence-specific, highly alarming warning behavior including threats, leakage, and having information that an attack was planned or knowing a perpetrator had access to a weapon. Estimating the effect of a peer response on the perpetrator’s motivation in terms of making him or her overthink or postpone the final decision to execute an attack is neither feasible nor useful in retrospect. Nevertheless, from a theoretical perspective, we found responses ranging from potentially facilitating an attack (e.g., making jokes or completely ignoring a threat) to probably averting an attack (e.g., discouraging the threatening peer from carrying out the original plan, or sharing information with others by seeking help from an adult). Table 3 reports the number of cases with reported peer responses.

Peer responses to threats and leakage in school shooting cases in Germany.

In all 11 cases, at least one peer had some piece of knowledge about the perpetrator’s plans, or that he/she was considering a school shooting attack. In nine cases, a peer actively tried to discourage the perpetrator from executing a threat or leakage (e.g., by trying to minimize a perpetrator’s revenge fantasies or anger, highlighting positive aspects, or showing that one does not approve such behavior). In eight cases, a peer made an attempt to engage the perpetrator into a deeper conversation in order to obtain more information, learn more about a perpetrator’s actual motivation and struggles, and express their concern as a friend. Contrarily, being confronted with a threat, leakage, or planning behavior, in five cases, peers socially withdrew by reducing contact to the perpetrator, or ultimately ended the friendship. Peer reports reveal that either they were highly alarmed and anxious and tried to avoid the perpetrator entirely, or—in three cases—they did not expect the perpetrator to execute a threat or leakage. Nevertheless, peers were deeply irritated by the perpetrator’s behavior and could not identify with the friendship anymore. Furthermore, despite that some perpetrators leaked repeatedly, or made multiple threats, peers in four out of 11 cases reported retrospectively that they did not take these statements seriously, and—in three cases prior to reducing contact—laughed at the perpetrator and made jokes about a potential school shooting. In three cases, a peer was asked to help a perpetrator either in preparing an attack or serving as an accomplice in the attack. Simultaneously, in two of these cases and one other, other peers have reacted to the perpetrator’s violent plan by incitement (i.e., “go and do it”). Witness reports of the respective peers revealed, however, that none of them expected that the perpetrator would execute a school shooting and intended to use irony and jokes to “demonstrate the madness of the plan.” In seven cases, a concerned peer shared an observation within the peer group, discussing the probability of an attack. In five of these cases, code of silence was ignored and an observation or concern was reported to an adult (a teacher or parent).

Research Question 3: Subjective Explanations and Factors Influencing the Identification of Warning Behavior

Witness reports from school staff and peers helped to understand why some behavioral changes of the perpetrators were identified as a warning behavior, or indicators for a psychosocial crisis, and others were ignored, trivialized, or not taken seriously within the school context. Thereby, we examined the following: (1) behavioral changes that were recognized in the first place and increased awareness of school staff and peers, (2) subjective explanations that school staff and peers gave to themselves to justify or contextualize a behavior, and how this led to information diffusion; (3) factors that were used to evaluate the seriousness of a behavioral change once it has been identified as warning behavior that could not be explained otherwise; and (4) action steps that were taken as a consequence of the seriousness evaluation. Figure 1 illustrates factors influencing the identification of warning behaviors recognized in 11 cases of school shootings in Germany.

Subjective explanations and factors influencing the identification of warning behavior.

Becoming Aware of a Conspicuous Behavior

School staff, in general, became aware of a student in crisis when the perpetrator made a direct threat or showed an interest in violence. “On a Monday morning being asked about the past weekend, he talked about a movie he had seen, where a character was brutally thrown against a wall by an offender, and blood was running all over the place. He was fascinated by the fact that anyone could harm another person in such a way, and seemed to approve of this behavior. I had the impression he found a certain enjoyment in watching how others got tortured. All students in class could hear this, it was during third grade.”

In addition to these violence-specific behaviors, school staff were naturally more likely to recognize indicators of a psychosocial crisis that became apparent in the classroom, were linked to academic success, or could not be ignored because the behavior disrupted daily routines (“The squeaky wheel gets the oil.”) as well as disciplinary difficulties, aggressive tendencies, and sudden behavioral changes. After learning from a colleague about a perpetrator’s conspicuous behavior in class, the school principal tried to obtain additional information: “After hearing this, I had a closer look at the grades he got recently. I had to come to the conclusion that there in fact was a decline in important school subjects, which was definitely an information to be concerned about.” As opposed to this, from all general crisis indicators, peers predominantly noticed social withdrawal and isolation, mostly referring to it as a well-known personality trait or tendency based on their experiences with the perpetrator. “When I called him at home, he would respond immediately. I assumed that he rarely left the house to go out. He was the typical ‘quiet type of guy,’ almost invisible. I never thought he could do something like a school shooting.” “She was mostly online and glued to her computer all day. She didn’t want to engage in any activities with us.” or “He often was alone in the classroom, and didn’t have any real friendship with anyone.” Additionally, peers became aware of violence-specific warning behavior, such as an interest in violent media, ego-shooters, and weapons. Furthermore, they were the primary recipients for leakage, planning behavior, or direct threats.

Subjective Explanations and Identification of a Warning Behavior

After becoming aware of a behavioral change, our data indicate that school staff as well as peers intuitively attempted to find explanations for an underlying motivation of the shown behavior. This includes explanations based on a situational dynamic, a perpetrator’s developmental stage, peer group norms, or other individual characteristics of the student. Moreover, differences are shown in the explanation for conspicuous behavior between peers and school staff. For instance, peers explained a leakage in combination with revenge fantasies with a perpetrator’s strategy to manage anger and regulate emotions after a conflict with a teacher. Being asked about a leakage made by a perpetrator during seventh grade, following a conflict with a teacher (“Someone should shoot him [the teacher] dead.”), a peer retrospectively reported: “He always said this when he was angry at a specific teacher. I‘d say everyone has made such statements once in a while. That was not a plan nor an intention to be taken seriously.” A similar situational explanation was provided by the peers during police investigation in another case, being asked if they never questioned the statements made by the perpetrator: “Yes, we did ask him, why he would want to kill Ms M. He responded that he wants to kill her, because she said she wants to make sure he‘ll get expelled from school as soon as he gets a bad grade in a school report. According to him, she said this to him in person. He often had to stay behind after school when he didn‘t finish homework.” Likewise, other leakages and even threats were interpreted as a joke by the peers, relying on a perpetrator’s non-verbal communication cues while making the statement (e.g., tone of voice, smiling), as the following quotations reveal: “It‘s 3 weeks ago that he mentioned casually such a school shooting would be cool when we chatted about school shootings in general. But, he never said this in a serious tone. To me, it sounded like a joke so I didn‘t care about this a lot.” or “Well, yes, she was kind of interested in this [school shootings]. She also mentioned she wanted to do something like this, too. Anyway, there was always a touch of irony in her voice, so everyone of us thought she was making jokes or craving attention.” A perpetrator’s interest in weapons or ego-shooter consumption was explained by a social peer group norm, which was socially approved and therefore not concerning: “We knew he often played Counterstrike, we all did. He was pretty good at it. Everyone in school admired him for his gaming skills.”

As opposed to this, school staff explained aggressive behavior as caused by rebellion and a lack of discipline, whereas academic failure was perceived to be a consequence of a perpetrator’s laziness instead of an indicator to a long-term critical development. “By ‘popping up on the radar’ I mean that he showed rebellious and attention-seeking behavior. He refused to follow instructions from colleagues, and tried to get attention from classmates by giving childish answers to the teacher’s questions.” Interestingly, school staff reported to have noticed sudden behavioral changes during the course of the negative development. While the majority of these new-quality behaviors were primarily alarming to teachers in the first place, most of them were eventually explained by typical adolescent behavior, and some were actually regarded as an indicator to a positive development. In one case, a perpetrator suddenly joined private tutoring—1 week before the shooting. “His math teacher urged him to join tutoring for quite a while. However, he never showed any interest in following her recommendation, until last Tuesday, when he showed up for the very first time. We were positively surprised.” Having a closer look at these results, we found that the availability of a subjective explanation for a conspicuous behavior generally indicated harmlessness and resulted in underestimating seriousness. An observation was consequently neither shared (e.g., within the peer group, school, or professional network) nor was a further investigation or case management procedure initiated, leading to information diffusion.

Evaluation of the Seriousness of a Warning Behavior

Only when no explanation was found, a conspicuous behavior was identified as a warning behavior, followed by an evaluation of its seriousness and—if concerning—a step to take action and respond. Our data revealed several additional factors that were taken into account to evaluate seriousness that were either alarming or reassuring. For instance, a once identified warning behavior was evaluated as non-serious when the perpetrator’s capability to execute a threat was doubted by the peers ( “He said he could never upset his parents, or harm them.” ), the perpetrator—presumably—did not have access to weapons, or the time span between a threat or leakage and a potential attack was overestimated. Being asked why he did not report his knowledge about a perpetrator planning an attack to the police, a peer responded: [What made you think an attack would not happen too soon?] “Just because I didn‘t think she would be capable to carry out her threats. I didn‘t even consider she would prepare the Molotov cocktails on her own. Additionally, I found her problems rather manageable and comparatively small. That‘s why I never asked her about the threats.” Consequently, the observation of the respective warning behavior was not shared or reported, leading to information loss. The perpetrator’s behavior was then neither monitored nor was help provided for him or her. As opposed to this, the repetition of a leakage or threat is mostly alarming, as well as when a perpetrator’s behavior was considered similar to a peer’s subjective assumptions about the behavior of a “typical school shooter”: according to peer statements in our data, this included violent media consumption, social isolation, or other conspicuous behavioral expressions. “During the first times he said this, I just listened and thought by myself a lot of students claim this without ever carrying out a plan. It was, when he started to say these things repeatedly, and additionally mentioned to have an armed weapon at home, I told him to stop talking about this and such an idea would be complete nonsense.” [What led you and your friends to the conclusion that he was a “typical school shooter?”]. “He socially withdrew and was isolated. Apart from that, we knew he had all those weapons in his room and obsessively watched horror movies.” Likewise alarming was an unexplainable conspicuous behavior that led to the impression that anger or aggression was inhibited and continued to grow below the surface. “It was his way of speaking. There was a seriousness and certainty in his voice. I found him deeply agitated yet controlled. No loud yelling or venting his rage. When he said this, his voice was low-keyed. And he looked to the side with pure contempt.” Eventually, if a warning behavior was accompanied by one of those factors, it was evaluated as serious, and further action was taken by sharing information with either other peers or—in some cases—an adult. Moreover, school staff discussed the respective case among colleagues, reported an observation to school officials, involved the professional network, talked to the parents, or initiated measures for case management.

The goal of the present study was to find answers to the question why past school shootings could not be averted by interventions from persons in a perpetrator’s school environment. Specifically, we aimed to understand why behavioral changes that retrospectively were identified as warning behaviors or symptoms of an individual crisis were not recognized, or—once noticed—were not evaluated as alarming signs. We focused our analysis on the initiated measures within the school as well as in cooperation with the student’s parents and professional network (research question 1). With regard to research question 2, we found peer’s reactions to alarming behavior to be varying in dependence of peer group norms as well as perceived seriousness of threats and leakage. When analyzing behavioral indicators that lead to an increased awareness of school staff and peers (research question 3), analysis revealed violence-specific behavior to be most likely recognized by school staff and peers. Regarding symptoms of psychosocial crisis, school staff mostly noticed academic failure and disrupting behavior in the class, while peers were more aware of the perpetrator’s social withdrawal and isolation. Interestingly also, the interpretation and evaluation of the identified indicators differed between school staff and peers. Peers misinterpreted threats or leakage as a joke or even understood the classmate’s anger toward a particular teacher. As a result, they underestimated the seriousness of the student’s intentions, also because they doubted the perpetrator’s capability of executing a threat. School staff explained sudden behavioral changes with typical adolescent behavior due to puberty or minor mental health issues. A closer evaluation and case management was only initiated if school staff or peers found no explanation at all for the perpetrator’s actions, identified “typical” indicators of a potential school shooter, or got the impression that the respective student kept anger hidden from their social environment.

As a starting point, we identified the measures and interventions that were initiated by school staff, as well as responses to warning behavior from peers. In all cases, school staff responded with measures within a school and contacted the student’s parent. Following this, we perused police witness reports for statements that provided insight into subjective explanations used by peers and teachers in an attempt to make sense of a conspicuous behavior. Furthermore, we extracted a list of alarming and reassuring factors that were considered when evaluating a conspicuous behavior. First, our data revealed that in a large number of occasions when a warning behavior was adequately identified, a perpetrator’s social system responded appropriately. In all 11 cases, at some point along the negative psychosocial pathway, a school staff member or peer engaged in a one-on-one conversation with the perpetrator, as well as collaborated with the parents initiating a conversation about him or her. Moreover, for a variety of reasons—not necessarily based on the assumption of a school shooting—almost all cases were referred to counseling, diagnostic investigation, or therapy, or talked to a school psychologist at least once. However, despite these measures, none of the perpetrators was stopped from executing his/her attack. Data showed that students’ decline in grades or violence-related behavior often resulted in sanctions instead of resource-orientated support to prevent an escalation of the student’s psychosocial crisis. This result stands in line with research on US-American cases in which school suspensions and expulsions reinforced the student’s crisis that escalated toward the violent act (cf. Borum et al., 2010 ; Muschert and Madfis, 2013 ). Our analysis revealed that—in retrospect—these behaviors were symptoms of a negative psychosocial development, and school officials and staff did not have information about a student’s trouble (e.g., family or social problems) and insufficient coping mechanisms. Following this, an isolated conspicuous or threatening behavior was—probably due to structural barriers and a lack of knowledge—evaluated without taking the whole picture into account. This ultimately resulted in responses that were more likely fueled by an understandable fear rather than coming from a perspective of preventing a negative psychosocial development. Research on developmental pathways toward school shootings gives evidence that perpetrators made efforts to cope with their psychosocial strain that accompanied the planning and fantasizing about the later violent act by opening up and communicating their problems to others ( Sommer et al., 2020 ). These often hidden and ambiguous attempts of functional coping were mostly interpreted as a reflection of the perpetrator’s positive development but consequently went unnoticed or unacknowledged by school staff or peers.

In the majority of cases, violence-specific behavior, such as threats, leakage, and planning behavior, induced concern or even fear in both school staff and peers alike. As opposed to this, general crisis symptoms that were more subtle or hidden (e.g., depressive tendencies and social withdrawal) were not given much attention. This is in line with studies from Fox and Harding (2005) that pointed to the “decoy problem” in large organizations. Students, or perpetrators, respectively, who disrupted a school’s daily routine by showing aggressive behavior, or became apparent through academic failure or school distance—all being familiar behaviors to school staff and easily recognizable in the classroom—popped up on the radar, which resulted in a deeper investigation or a pedagogical reaction (“The squeaky wheel gets the oil.”). While this perceptive bias generally ensures an organization’s day-to-day functioning, it can result in overseeing more “invisible” warning behaviors of quieter students ( Fox and Harding, 2005 ). Bender et al. (2001) refer to these “Invisible Kids” in an article highlighting the importance of paying attention to students that internalize anger and, thus, will more likely display subtle behavioral changes (e.g., depressive symptoms, self-destructive tendencies, and emotional withdrawal) instead of overt aggression, even when in severe crisis. Furthermore, our data revealed that school staff as well as peers relatively quickly attempted to find subjective explanations for a concerning behavior, which ultimately resulted in minimizing or trivializing it. While in general, we would encourage a perspective on adolescent behavior that is not based on fear as it can lead to stigmatization or exclusion of individual students ( Borum et al., 2010 ), we assume that some warning behaviors would have been evaluated as alarming, if more background information about a student’s situation had been available. Since our funding resources, as well as methodological considerations (e.g., retrospective bias), did not allow the conduct of in-depth interviews with officials from the schools where a shooting happened, we can only rely on witness reports when making assumptions about institutional information loss, i.e., information fragmentation and information diffusion that were found in a United States case study ( Fox and Harding, 2005 ). Whereas we found various indicators to information exchange between two school staff members in 10 cases, these conversations in at least nine cases did not follow a structured protocol and were most often not documented or elaborated in a larger team-based case discussion. To sum up, not knowing if any other warning behaviors had been previously identified resulted in underestimating the seriousness of a conspicuous behavior, and the respective behavior was therefore not documented or exchanged within a school’s professional network or among school staff and peers, respectively.

As previously found in US-American case studies, peer “code of silence” additionally fostered information fragmentation in the German cases. The result that in only five cases the classmate’s conspicuous behavior was reported to an adult stands in line with research by Pollack et al. (2008) as well as Madfis (2014) , discussing variables that influence the bystanders’ decision to reveal information to school staff regarding threats. Those students who were unwilling to come forward indicated that they anticipated getting into trouble or being interrogated if they share certain information ( Pollack et al., 2008 ), leading to the general finding that positive relations with teachers or other adults serve as a necessary condition for breaking the “code of silence.” Moreover, a study focusing on averted rampage attacks suggests that school shootings might, at least in part, be prevented if the school’s culture is sufficiently positive for students to feel comfortable telling school staff about conspicuous behavior. Similar to our results, in cases of averted school shootings, bystanders neglected to come forward with threatening behavior because they lacked certainty about the respective student’s intentions or interpreted threats and leakage as innocent comments or jokes ( Madfis, 2014 ).

Moreover, in some cases, the lack of knowledge about the perpetrator’s problems, as well as early yet unspecific indicators of a personal crisis, resulted in overly strict disciplinary measures when—in retrospect—measures for student support would have been more appropriate for intervention in order to prevent an individual crisis ( Borum et al., 2010 ). Finally, our data revealed that most schools at that time did not have specific guidelines for case management and only involved school psychologists or other counseling experts relatively late in an attempt to stick to their own resources and expertise. This result stands in line with research on cases of psychosocial crisis potentially leading to school shootings ( Sommer et al., 2016 ), in which school staff even in cases of high risk (e.g., access to weapons and repeated threats) preferred to initiate measures within the school routine instead of collaborating with the professional network. It can be only hypothesized that school staff hesitated to involve external stakeholders to preserve the student from stigmatization and avoid reputational damage to the school. Furthermore, in cases that were subject to structured assessment, a diagnostic investigation of mental health problems, or even temporary hospitalization, our data indicate that experts were not sufficiently trained in threat assessment and the handling violence-specific warning behavior, e.g., revenge fantasies. Furthermore, schools and other institutions involved in case management were generally not aware of the importance of long-term case monitoring. Mostly, after a first evaluation and primary response to a warning behavior, a case was considered completed, without further inquiry into the effectiveness of the intervention measures or a monitoring of the perpetrator’s psychosocial development. This, for instance, even resulted in misinterpreting a—retrospectively—conspicuous behavior shortly before the attack as an indicator to a positive development of the student.

Limitations

Our case data are based on witness reports obtained during police investigation and therefore carry some inherent methodological limitations that need to be considered carefully. First, our findings rely on the subjective, retrospective perspective of peers and school staff who still might have been emotionally or cognitively influenced at the time of police investigation—even weeks after the attack. Especially for those peers or teachers emotionally involved with the perpetrator, trauma-induced anxiety, memory gaps, or cognitive distortion together with a subjective fear of legal consequences or irrational feelings of guilt might have ended up in witness statements that differ from what someone would answer when being asked by a scientific interviewer. Moreover, it can be assumed that being asked about the perpetrator’s development and conspicuous behavior induced high levels of stress, which is found to negatively affect both accuracy of eyewitness identification as well as accuracy of recall of crime-related details ( Deffenbacher et al., 2004 ). While it is certain that police investigation was only conducted when a witness voluntarily joined, and appeared to be mentally and emotionally stable and accountable, we cannot deny the potentially traumatizing impact of an act of school shootings on survivors. More specifically, we can only roughly imagine the thoughts and feelings of a peer who had some information prior to the attack, but did not report it, or of a teacher who had some conflict with a perpetrator. On top of that, since the primary purpose of police investigation after an attack is to investigate motives, reasons, and responsibilities, it is possible that, when being asked about warning behaviors, witnesses naturally attempt to minimize an alarming behavioral change or deny a bad gut feeling retrospectively. Moreover, when analyzing rare events such as school shootings, we must take into account the low generalizability of findings when making assumptions about the “population” of school shooters or when drawing general conclusions for prevention (for an overview, see Harding et al., 2002 ). The deduction of sufficient conditions for the identification, evaluation, and management of conspicuous behavior is dependent on the comparison of our cases with averted violent acts (cf. Madfis, 2014 ). Thus, our results are only valid for those 11 cases under study and, therefore, fail in transferability to similar objects of investigation from other countries.

Implications and Outlook

Based on what we know today after an attack has happened, and following an intense case study, we can draw the conclusion that the majority of warning behaviors were misinterpreted or their seriousness underestimated due to insufficient communication about the student within the school and within the professional network (i.e., information fragmentation). Additionally, peer code of silence, a lack of knowledge about early unspecific indicators of a negative psychosocial development, and a lack of structured procedures for information exchange and documentation (i.e., information diffusion) as well as for effective case management including a long-term monitoring resulted in unspecific responses to violence-specific warning behaviors (i.e., threats or leakage). More broadly, persons in the school environment of a perpetrator did not have sufficient knowledge, information, and official guidelines that allowed them to simultaneously take violence-specific warning behaviors, general crisis symptoms, and a student’s overall situation into account in order to draw conclusions about a negative psychosocial development. These findings, while certainly limited to our sample, however, point to opportunities of prevention when being taken into account together with results on organizational deviance and institutional information loss. An empirically based preventive intervention should include strategies to ensure that (1) school staff is trained to recognize a student crisis based on indicators that are not limited to academic and disciplinary difficulties, or alarming violence-specific behaviors; (2) an individual teacher or peer shares a bad gut feeling with at least one other person, even when he or she initially doubts its significance; (3) schools as complex organizations should follow a formal protocol that includes reliable criteria when evaluating the seriousness of a warning behavior, e.g., a direct threat, and take various perspectives into account; and (4) schools should establish a procedure for case management and involve partners from their professional network more often and early enough. To sum up, based on our findings, we recommend the implementation of an organizational structure that allows a person who observes a warning behavior to easily access knowledge about the student’s background, as well as to share an observation and obtain information on warning behaviors that were previously observed by others. This would most probably result in a more accurate evaluation of the seriousness of a concerning behavior as well as increase a person’s willingness to report a warning behavior—even when it does not appear to be alarming in the first place. Additionally, peers can help to avert school shootings if they become aware of a leakage, threat, or other warning behavior and are encouraged to break the code of silence and preferably “over-share” a concern or uncertainty (e.g., through an open school climate, or the opportunity to report anonymously) ( Pollack et al., 2008 ; Eliot et al., 2010 ; Madfis, 2014 ). Finally, our analysis revealed an increased need for expert knowledge and skills when dealing with students who show violence-specific warning behavior or are suspected to engage in planning behavior. To our view, providing mental health professionals, as well as school psychologists with specific guidelines regarding the diagnostic investigation and treatment of adolescents who repeatedly communicate threats, violent fantasies, or leakage would increase effectiveness and sustainability of a professional, community-based case management. As the purpose of qualitative research is not to provide generalizable findings, the results of our study may serve as a foundation for future quantitative or mixed-methods studies. However, by using the chosen approach, we introduced and described new emerging concepts such as the subjective explanations of conspicuous behavior, which were not visible to us beforehand and have not yet been a subject of investigation in this detail. To our knowledge, the present study is the first investigation focusing on responses by school staff and peers in a sample of German cases of school shootings. Future research should put an emphasis on cross-national differences as well as intercultural influences when examining the relevance of a perpetrator’s social environment in averting school shootings.

Data Availability Statement

Author contributions.

HS and VL contributed to the conception and design of the study. NF, KG, NA, and FS organized the database. NF performed the qualitative analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. FS, VL, NA, KG, and HS wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision and read and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Federal Ministry of Education and Research for funding our research, as well as the German law enforcement authorities for providing the requested inquiry files.

Funding. The project TARGET (13N12646) was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Initiative of Freie Universität Berlin.

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Attitudes Towards School Violence: A Qualitative Study With Spanish Children

Affiliation.

• 1 University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain.
• PMID: 33491553
• DOI: 10.1177/0886260520987994

School violence is a social issue of particular interest both for intervention and research. Attitudes towards violence have been reported in the literature as relevant variables for evaluation, prevention, and intervention in this field. This study aims to examine in-depth attitudes toward school violence. The sample consists of 96 participants from Spanish Elementary Education and Compulsory Secondary Education schools. A qualitative study was conducted through focus groups and thematic analysis of the data. The results identify a habitual set of attitudes towards violence in children. These are related to violence as a way to feel better or increase self-esteem, as leisure or fun, perceived as legitimate, when violence is exercised against those who are different, when it has no consequences, to resolve conflicts, to socialize, and to attract the attention of peers. These results could serve as a basis for the creation of evaluation tools, as well as the design of prevention and intervention plans based on attitude modification.

Keywords: attitudes; bullying; child violence; qualitative; violence; youth violence.

• Qualitative Research
• Violence* / prevention & control

Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data, United States, 1990-2016 (ICPSR 37935)

Version Date: Sep 30, 2021 View help for published

Freilich, Joshua D., Chermak, Steven M., and Connell, Nadine M. Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data, United States, 1990-2016. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-09-30. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37935.v1

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Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Joshua D. Freilich , John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Steven M. Chermak , Michigan State University; Nadine M. Connell , Griffith University

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37935.v1

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This study provides an evidence-based understanding on etiological issues related to school shootings and rampage shootings. It created a national, open-source database that includes all publicly known shootings that resulted in at least one injury that occurred on K-12 school grounds between 1990 and 2016. The investigators sought to better understand the nature of the problem and clarify the types of shooting incidents occurring in schools, provide information on the characteristics of school shooters, and compare fatal shooting incidents to events where only injuries resulted to identify intervention points that could be exploited to reduce the harm caused by shootings. To accomplish these objectives, the investigators used quantitative multivariate and qualitative case studies research methods to document where and when school violence occurs, and highlight key incident and perpetrator level characteristics to help law enforcement and school administrators differentiate between the kinds of school shootings that exist, to further policy responses that are appropriate for individuals and communities.

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This data collection may not be used for any purpose other than statistical reporting and analysis. Use of these data to learn the identity of any person or establishment is prohibited. To protect respondent privacy, some of the data files in this collection are restricted from general dissemination. To obtain these restricted files researchers must agree to the terms and conditions of a Restricted Data Use Agreement.

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Data for all incidents were compiled from the search for information from 60 unique search engines.

This study collected qualitative data that is not included in this release. Qualitative data will be included in a future update.

Methodology

Study purpose view help for study purpose.

The purpose of this study is to better understand the causes of school shootings, and to provide data that can be used to reduce the harm cased by shootings.

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• Have occurred on or after January 1st, 1990.
• Have occurred in the United States.
• Lead to a criminal justice response.
• A gun must have been fired (including accidental discharge but not BB or pellet guns).
• Have occurred on K-12 school grounds (Parking lots, after school activities, and school busses are included. Bus stops, walking to school, pre-schools, universities, and school board meetings at non-school locations are excluded.)
• Involve at least one injury or death.

The investigators then employed a multi-tiered effort and reviewed existing databases, chronologies and listings, official records, law enforcement reports (e.g., from the FBI; NYPD; Secret Service), scholarly works (e.g., Hagan & Pah's database; Capellan's database; K-12 School Shooting Database; schoolshootingdatabase.com; schoolshooters.info, etc.), newspaper accounts/listings (for e.g., USA Today; Washington Post), other media's listings (e.g., CNN; NBC), online encyclopedias (e.g., Ballotpedia; Britannica; Wikipedia), blogs, and watch-groups/advocacy reports/listings (e.g., Brady Campaign; Everytown). The investigators also comprehensively searched and scraped the Internet and conducted keyword searches using major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and leading newspapers like the New York Times, to locate relevant events.

Sample View help for Sample

All incidents identified from the universe and meet inclusion criteria.

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All school shootings occurring on K-12 school grounds in the United States from 1990-2016.

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The data are compiled all publicly available information on the cases. The collected open source material includes media reports, government documents, court records, social media and other sources.

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The variables describe the various characteristics of each school shooting. There is information about each perpetrator, including information about their motivations, whether or not they were a student at the school, some information on their home life and family history, and gang affiliation. There is also victim data, such as the number and severity of victims injuries, number of fatalities, and whether the victims were students or teachers. There is also information about the characteristics of each school, including the type of school and what violence prevention strategies were in place. Finally there is information on media coverage and police involvement in the aftermath of each shooting.

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Not applicable.

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The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

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School Violance: A Qualitative Case Study

No school violence prevention or safety program can be succeeded without the inclusion of the related parties’ meaning-making strategies. This qualitative study examines how school violence is understood by students and teachers, who are the two primary parties in any school environment. 27 teachers, one vice principle, and 125 students from 4th to 8th grades from a private school were asked to respond to open ended questions about their perceptions on the nature of violence in their school including reasons and the possible ways of prevention. Content analysis was used while analyzing the data. Integration of the results into the existing school violence program was discussed.

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Over the years, school violence has gained attention due to an increase of aggressive behaviors and actions within school systems across the United States. As a result, it has prompted school districts to develop plans that address school violence efficiently to promote safe school environments. There is gap in current literature as it pertains to addressing school violence in the middle school setting. The purpose of this study was to explore the views of teachers and administrators concerning effective ways to implement proactive prevention strategies to attain better approaches to preventing school violence. This case study methodology were framed by Bronfenbrenner\u27s ecological theory to determine the association between school violence, students, parents, teachers, administrators, and other middle school staff members. Data were collected through 8 individual, structured, participant interviews with the use of an audio recorder. The resulting data were hand coded to create th...

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School violence can be understood as any behavior that is intended to harm other people at schools or near school grounds. This may include bullying and victimization, or more severe forms of violence involving weapons. To respond effectively to school violence, school personnel and leaders must understand the influences on their schools that come from individuals, the surrounding community, and cultural and political spheres. Careful and ongoing assessment of the needs of any given school is also a prerequisite to effective intervention. The severity of violence, the exact location of violent acts, and how different groups on a school campus experience violence are all key details to understanding and measuring problems. With this information, schools are then able to choose intervention programs that will utilize a whole-school approach. Sometimes, existing Evidence Based Programs can address the needs of a particular school and surrounding community. Other times, schools need to either modify existing interventions or create their own to address the particular forms of violence that exist in their schools and communities.

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Ex-assistant principal charged with child neglect in case of boy who shot teacher

The Associated Press

Signs stand outside Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., Jan. 25, 2023. Denise Lavoie/AP hide caption

Signs stand outside Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., Jan. 25, 2023.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A former assistant principal at a Virginia elementary school has been charged with felony child neglect more than a year after a 6-year-old boy brought a gun to class and shot his first-grade teacher .

A special grand jury in Newport News found that Ebony Parker showed a reckless disregard for the lives of Richneck Elementary School students on Jan. 6, 2023, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday.

Parker and other school officials already face a $40 million negligence lawsuit from the teacher who was shot, Abby Zwerner. She accuses Parker and others of ignoring multiple warnings the boy had a gun and was in a "violent mood" the day of the shooting.

Criminal charges against school officials following a school shootings are quite rare, experts say. Parker, 39, faces eight felony counts, each of which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Associated Press left a message seeking comment Tuesday with Parker's attorney, Curtis Rogers.

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Court documents filed Tuesday reveal little about the criminal case against Parker, listing only the counts and a description of the felony charge. It alleges that Parker "did commit a willful act or omission in the care of such students, in a manner so gross, wanton and culpable as to show a reckless disregard for human life."

Newport News police have said the student who shot Zwerner retrieved his mother's handgun from atop a dresser at home and brought the weapon to school concealed in a backpack.

Zwerner's lawsuit describes a series of warnings that school employees gave administrators before the shooting. The lawsuit said those warnings began with Zwerner telling Parker that the boy "was in a violent mood," had threatened to beat up a kindergartener and stared down a security officer in the lunchroom.

The lawsuit alleges that Parker "had no response, refusing even to look up" when Zwerner expressed her concerns.

When concerns were raised that the child may have transferred the gun from his backpack to his pocket, Parker said his "pockets were too small to hold a handgun and did nothing," the lawsuit states.

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A guidance counselor also asked Parker for permission to search the boy, but Parker forbade him, "and stated that John Doe's mother would be arriving soon to pick him up," the lawsuit stated.

Zwerner was sitting at a reading table in front of the class when the boy fired the gun, police said. The bullet struck Zwerner's hand and then her chest, collapsing one of her lungs. She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and has endured multiple surgeries as well as ongoing emotional trauma, according to her lawsuit.

Parker and the lawsuit's other defendants, which include a former superintendent and the Newport News school board, have tried to block Zwerner's lawsuit.

They've argued that Zwerner's injuries fall under Virginia's workers' compensation law. Their arguments have been unsuccessful so far in blocking the litigation. A trial date for Zwerner's lawsuit is slated for January.

Prosecutors had said a year ago that they were investigating whether the "actions or omissions" of any school employees could lead to criminal charges.

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Howard Gwynn, the commonwealth's attorney in Newport News, said in April 2023 that he had petitioned a special grand jury to probe if any "security failures" contributed to the shooting. Gwynn wrote that an investigation could also lead to recommendations "in the hopes that such a situation never occurs again."

It is not the first school shooting to spark a criminal investigation into school officials. For instance, a former school resource officer was acquitted of all charges last year after he was accused of hiding during the Parkland school massacre in 2018.

Chuck Vergon, a professor of educational law and policy at the University of Michigan-Flint, told The AP last year that it is rare for a teacher or school official to be charged in a school shooting because allegations of criminal negligence can be difficult to prove.

More often, he said, those impacted by school shootings seek to hold school officials liable in civil court.

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