Mass shootings in schools raise important questions about how best to keep individuals safe and increase survivability in such situations. One of the most common techniques used is lockdown drills, which train individuals to build time and space between them and the threat. Despite their use in 95% of public K-12 schools nationwide, their efficacy…

This study uses open source information to examine school shootings in the United States for the 1990-2016 period. We innovatively created a national-level database to address the gaps in existing research and identified 652 school shootings. These shootings included 473 intentional shootings (encompassing 354 with known offenders and 119 with…

Title IX prohibits sex-based harassment (SBH) in all federally funded educational activities, yet little is known about SBH in K-12 schools. We used the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data (N = 96,440) to examine rates and school-, district-, and state-level predictors of SBH in K-12 schools. Results found the vast majority of schools had…

The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) is a comprehensive, school-wide program that was designed in the mid-1980s to reduce bullying and achieve better peer relations among students in elementary, middle, and junior high school grades. Key program elements are described and a number of cultural adaptations to U.S. schools are noted. Several…

Although many bullying prevention programs aim to involve multiple partners, few studies have examined perceptual differences regarding peer victimization and the broader bullying climate among students, staff, and parents. The present study utilized multilevel data from 11,674 students, 960 parents, and 1,027 staff at 44 schools to examine the…

The current study examined the relations among self-esteem, approving normative beliefs about bullying, school climate, and bullying perpetration using a large, longitudinal sample of children from elementary, middle, and high school. Self-report surveys were collected at two points in time over the course of 1 year from 7,299 ethnically diverse…

In this post 9/11 era Western cultures are focusing on values that support war and violence. In this article an ethnographer explores the impact of these values on schools. These values, seen through the lens of restorative justice, include: (a) punishment, (b) adversarial relationships, (c) monopolization of power, (d) problemization and…

The nature of student violence in America's schools has changed over the past two decades. Research suggests that there are two distinct kinds or "subtypes" of aggression in youth-reactive aggression and proactive aggression. Reactive aggression is characterized as a "hot-blooded," automatic, defensive response to immediate and often misperceived…

In an effort to assess students' perceptions of victimization in their schools, as well as their schools' safety, over 1,900 students from elementary, middle, high, and alternative schools were administered a 154-item questionnaire. The responses on the items were used to establish the psychometric properties of 19 theoretically driven scales and…