Today school violence is becoming very rampant and it has continued to become a recurring problem in various educational premises. These problems are never easy to understand and neither are there simple solutions to quell these issues (Arnold 1981). That is why the question the society is asking is, what causes the occurrence of a series of events related to violence that often result to death or fatal injuries to innocent students during an occurrence like school shooting?
Many psychologists would refer the roots of such violence to be from experiences of individual imbalance, poor parenting and lack of ways to uphold traditional practices and eventually having a guilty conscience which drives most of the perpetrators of this kind of violence to action. Parents are regarded as role models of their children as they grow up but today’s parents are doing very little to help nurture their children as they grow up.
Most of them spend their time trying to fend for their families that they forget to give time and advice to their children. For this reason, once they get the information of an incidence that concerned violence in a school they get surprised and often wonder how the issue could have occurred. The fact is there are parents who don’t care what their children do; some don’t discipline their children so as not to appear bad before their children’s. The problem faced by many parents is they think whatever a child does will always be a less harmful action this is the perception until the story turns into a deadly result for instance, a shoot out.
The other cause of violence is the incapacity of an individual to handle emotional crisis and psychological crisis. Many teenage youngsters will turn to violence as way of solving their accumulated problems both which are internal and external. One of the factors leading to emotional crisis and physiological crisis is the fact that every student to some degree level is under stress to attain good grades academically. Some of these teenagers end up having a kind of mental imbalance due to psychotropic medications during such actions.
Such people are often noted to be on medicated drugs from the time they commence school throughout their school years and even beyond. Often their doctors are involved in altering and increasing the dosage as they get older. The kind of medication that they are given includes Ritalin, Prozac and Luvox. It is not known to what extent the drugs affect the brain chemistry and the future behavior of an individual but if the problem is not looked in to, it is good to be aware that any chemical that alters the behavior of a person, it is bound to have after effects such as mental imbalance especially when the prescription is stopped.
According to information I have gathered, most eye witnesses are recorded to almost having the same kind of statements that ‘they thought the perpetrators were only joking’ until they start shooting. In my point of view most of the people who conduct such violations go through periods of feeling unconnected to the world around them, being ignored by their peers, parents and other people in general and as a result they turn to violent acts like shooting/any other kind of violations in way to try and seek attention (Lucinda 2007). In addition, they may be too frustrated as a result of lacking positive influence from their peers and the action they take is a cause for revenge.
For many of them they seek power and revenge. Once they are in possession of a gun then they feel they have the power, once they take the action of pulling a trigger and shooting someone they feel they have quenched their desires. In my opinion the mentioned causes of school violence are problems that can be dealt with through public policy solutions so as to try and reduce the number of school violence taking place across the nation (Goldstein & Conoley, 1997). By using public policy solutions, it means we are trying to decrease the causes or contributing factors of school violations and eventually eliminate it all together.
References
Arnold P.G. (2004). New perspectives on aggression replacement training: practice, research and application. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons.
Conoley J. C. and Goldstein A. P. (2004). School violence intervention: a practical handbook. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Lucinda A. (2007). School Violence Current Controversies. Berkeley, CA: Greenhaven Press.