School Violence Beyond Columbine: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

In the article “School Violence Beyond Columbine: A Complex Problem in Need of an Interdisciplinary Analysis” by Stuart Henry, he makes the argument that perpetrators of school violence typically have “previously been the victim of violence over time, and the extent of the extreme violent event is the outcome of the effects of reciprocal victimization at multiple levels rather than at just one.”(Henry p. 1256) I will explain what the above statement means by discussing the Individual level, the Group level, and the Institutional/ Organizational level where victims experience the effects of the violence. With each level, I can express examples of student victimization and demonstrate how “it is important to identify a wide range of violence at different levels of society that affect the school and see how these are reciprocally interrelated in the school setting as a process over time”. (Henry p. 1261) Within the individual level we can see student victimization in the case of a student against student and student against the teacher, however, usually it is student against student violence. The violence seen in level one can be predatory violence, where students use violence or threats to show that they are better than the other students. There is

It is imperative to identify the wide range of violence at different levels of society that affect the school systems and understand how it is interrelated into the school setting over periods of time. By doing this we can learn to grasp how violent acts, such as school shootings are the result of multiple “sub-violent, violent, and symbolically violent processes.” (Henry p. 1261) Therefore, unattended consequence when not taking in all these factors of the different levels of student victimization, you can continue to have more violence, that may escalate to dangerous