Experts scrambling on school shootings

The recent youth homicides in rural schools represent a violence puzzling to psychologists.

By Scott Sleek
Monitor staff

Like the bubonic plague of medieval Europe, homicidal youth violence has moved from America?s impoverished inner-city neighborhoods to rural and suburban areas.

James Garbarino, PhD, uses that analogy to characterize the outbreak of bizarre, fatal shootings that occurred in schools across the country this past year?in communities more reminiscent of Hope, Ark., than South Central Los Angeles.

'What typically happens with epidemics is they first take hold in the most vulnerable parts of the population, and then move out to the more general population,' says Garbarino, a Cornell University professor who is interviewing boys jailed for murder and other violent acts as part of a study that will result in a book on violent adolescents. 'It?s quite possible that this surge of school-based shootings in small towns, in rural and suburban areas, is a kind of second stage of epidemic violence among our youth,' he says.

As summer break closes and children and teachers return to the classroom, psychologists like Garbarino fear the eerily similar tragedies in Jonesboro, Ark., Springfield, Ore., and other small towns are not just coincidental anomalies but will continue to occur?perhaps with greater frequency.

In fact, they worry that the recent shootings could represent a new strain of the violence virus?one they know little about. While youth homicide rates in major urban areas have dropped in recent years, rates in rural and suburban areas are constant or even rising, says W. Rodney Hammond, PhD, a psychologist who heads violence- prevention efforts for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

These incidents have caught behavioral scientists off guard, psychologists posit. After years of study, behavioral scientists have developed a fairly reliable profile of urban juvenile murderers, who are driven by such risk factors as poverty, the crack trade and a thriving black market for handguns. But those scientists understand far less about the rising number of homicidal boys from seemingly sleepy towns like Pearl, Miss., and Edinboro, Pa.

'Little is known about the characteristics that these rural youth share with juvenile murderers in urban areas or about what distinguishes them from those urban children,' Hammond says. 'It?s one of the most serious challenges that lies ahead for behavioral science and psychology.'

Distinguishing characteristics

Few psychologists reject the idea that the risk factors that plague inner-city youth have seeped into the suburbs and beyond. Youth are exposed to a growing amount of violent images on television, in movies, in video games and in popular music. Guns are more widely available than they were a generation ago. Drug abuse remains a problem among teen-agers everywhere. And street gangs even have satellite chapters in the suburbs and rural areas.

Although they have minimal empirical data to go on, psychologists have noticed some distinguishing characteristics among the rural youth murderers who have made headlines in recent months. These adolescents tend to:

? Kill and injure multiple victims in a single incident. The perpetrators don?t target only an individual as part of some interpersonal dispute (although sometimes an ex-girlfriend is among those killed), but seem to launch a shooting spree that results in many deaths and injuries

? Have no secondary criminal motive, such as robbery. The primary goal is to kill or harm others.

? Be younger. Statistically, most youth murderers are 15 or older. But the last six incidents involving shootings at small-town schools have involved youths no older than 14, according to Kathleen Heide, PhD, a University of South Florida criminologist and APA member who will chronicle her studies of more than 90 youth murderers in a book published this summer.

? Have a history of social problems. 'We do know that the phenomenon of rejection contributes to their increased aggressiveness over time,' says Duke University psychologist John Coie, PhD, who is helping pilot a violence-prevention curriculum called Fast Track. 'So, they?re more inclined to think that people are out to get them. And it?s that kind of reactivity that makes them more at risk for doing this.'

Other psychologists believe extreme narcissism, rather than despair or self-loathing, may make youth more violent. In a newly published study that involved 540 college students, psychologists Brad Bushman, PhD, of Iowa State University, and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, found that those who exhibited a strong degree of narcissism desperately want to maintain a high opinion of themselves and showed more aggression in a competitive game when someone challenged their self-concept by insulting them.

'Narcissists mainly want to punish or defeat someone who has threatened their highly favorable views of themselves,' the authors write in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 75, No. 1, p. 219?229).

The youths also seem to be driven by an intense need for attention, psychologists say. While urban youth tend to carry and use guns to wage power, to seek revenge on a rival or to simply protect themselves on the vicious streets, the murderers in these recent, rural incidents seem to be more interested in gaining national notoriety. In fact, many psychologists agree that the intense media attention devoted to these incidents creates a 'copycat' effect.

'These are kids who feel very isolated in their emotional pain and use aggressive behavior in an attempt to let people know how distressed they are,' says Jeremy Shapiro, PhD, a Cleveland psychologist who studies youth?s attitudes toward guns. 'When they see the kind of attention that comes to people who commit these crimes, they think, ?Oh my God, that?s what I?m looking for.? And robust findings in the psychology literature show that troubled youth find negative attention better than no attention at all.'

A wake-up call

Psychologists also believe that the recent school shootings reflect a complacency among rural and suburban school officials compared with their city-dwelling counterparts. Urban school officials and law enforcers have taken concrete steps to stamp out violence. Students have to pass through metal detectors when they enter the school, for example. And in cities like Boston, police and civic activists have beefed up community policing and antiviolence education programs in recent years and have dramatically reduced the rate of juvenile crime. 'But the rural and suburban schools just aren?t savvy about this,' says Robert Zagar, PhD, a former school psychologist who conducts evaluations of juvenile offenders for the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois. 'I had one principal tell me there?s no violence in his school. I just rolled my eyes. It?s there. He just doesn?t see it.'

Yet if schools become too vigilant about tightening security, they can lead more students to feel mistrusted and alienated?which can lead to more violence, says Gary Melton, PhD, a University of South Carolina professor and director of the university?s Institute for Families in Society.

'You may get circumstances in which people are more wary of each other and aren?t watching out for each other,' says Melton, who sat on a panel of youth violence experts that convened to help the U.S. Justice Department gain insight on the school shootings. 'As a result, there?s a significant change in the perceptions of what the real level of danger is. The more reason kids think that they have to be afraid, and the more disconnected they are, the higher the delinquency rate.'

Stemming the tide

Some of the unique aspects of these cases require a closer look, Hammond testified in April before a congressional panel investigating the shootings. In fact, the CDC is stepping up its monitoring of school-associated deaths to document whether these recent multiple-murder incidents represent a trend.

But studying the phenomenon is onerous for several reasons, he says. They include:

? Legal interference. Researchers will have difficulty interviewing these children when they?re in the midst of legal proceedings and protected by their attorneys. And they may also have trouble identifying causal factors that are untainted by the child?s postarrest experiences. For example, they may have trouble discerning whether some of the disturbances a child exhibits prompted them to commit the crime or stem more from the trauma of being jailed.

? Few cases. Although the rural school shootings seem to be escalating, the phenomenon is still rare. Scientists simply lack enough cases to draw strong scientific conclusions, Hammond says. (For now, descriptive research may be helpful, he adds.)

? The risk of overextending. Is it at all possible to predict which children are potential murderers, and to intervene before they kill? Some psychologists say such an effort may be the equivalent of casting a fishing net too widely.

'Many scientists believe that if you try, based on our present knowledge, to invent a screening tool to identify who?s at risk for engaging in a homicidal act, you would probably identify a lot of kids who engage in antisocial behavior but who may not kill,' Hammond says. 'For instance, all the kids in these murders had access to a firearm. But does that mean we should argue that any kid with access to a gun is a potential killer?'

Still, behavioral scientists know enough about youth violence in general to begin making some efforts to prevent school murders, he says. Plenty of violence-prevention programs have shown promise in the inner cities. Such programs, many of them being used in elementary schools, teach children to praise others, avoid insults, resolve conflicts peacefully, manage their anger and speak about hurt feelings. Many of them also provide parenting training programs for high-risk families.

Although it?s not yet clear whether those prevention strategies are applicable in suburban and rural regions, where demographic factors are significantly different, schools and community leaders have no reason not to try them, Hammond says.

'In this kind of situation,' he says, 'we can?t afford to not act on preventing the suggested risk factors, even if the scientific information isn?t complete.'

Further reading

? American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics. Raising Children to Resist Violence: What Can You Do? (1995).

? Garbarino, J. 'Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment' (Jossey-Bass, 1995).

? Heide, K.M. 'Young Killers: The Challenge of Juvenile Homicide (Sage, 1998).

? Zagar, R. Adolescent Killers: Are There More Medical Risks? In Alan Schwartzberg (Ed.), 'Adolescents in Turmoil' (Greenwood Publishing, 1998).