Statement from Jane Grady
Assistant Director
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
University of Colorado at Boulder
Schools are no longer safe havens. Like many social environments in our society today, schools are feeling the impact of our country聮s juvenile violence problem. Although the youth violence problem is often perceived as continually increasing, recent rates of general juvenile violence actually have decreased. What has changed is the lethal nature of juvenile violence. Youth violence today more often results in serious injury or homicide.
Between 1988 and 1993 the youth homicide rate more than doubled, while adult homicide rates stayed the same. The violence that is being committed by adolescents has become more deadly. This lethality is almost entirely attributed to guns. What once was a schoolroom brawl with fists may now be a schoolground shooting spree.
No two school shooting incidents are the same. As evidenced by the tragic Columbine High School shootings, it is not just urban high schools that are vulnerable to school violence. The access, availability and use of guns is a common theme for most of the school shooting incidents during the 1990s. Guns give youth the feeling of power, and during adolescence, abstract reasoning about the consequences of gun use and the capacity to read social cues are incomplete. Therefore, guns in the hands of youth is a particularly deadly combination.
The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder has worked on integrating research knowledge on juvenile violence with practice and policy for the past seven years. Currently, CSPV is working on a project in which CSPV has identified outstanding violence prevention programs that have met a very high scientific standard of program effectiveness and has described these programs in a series called Blueprints for Violence Prevention. For more information contact the center at 303-492-1032 or visit the Web site at .