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“It’s Better to Overreact”: School Officials’ Fear and Perceived Risk of Rampage Attacks and the Criminalization of American Public Schools

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An Erratum to this article was published on 07 April 2016

Abstract

In recent decades, highly-publicized school rampage attacks with multiple victims have caused widespread fear throughout the United States. Pulling from in-depth interviews with school officials (administrators, counselors, security and police officers, and teachers), this article discusses officials’ perceptions of fear and risk regarding rampage shootings and how this relates to their justification for and acquiescence to the expansion of punitive discipline and increased security. Data collected in this study provide additional understanding of the causes of enhanced discipline and security from the perspective of those tasked with administering school safety in the wake of Columbine. Utilizing insight from moral panic theory, the findings suggest that, when the genuinely high potential cost of school massacres fused with an exaggerated perception of their likelihood and randomness, school rampage attacks came to be viewed as a risk that could not be tolerated and must be avoided at nearly any cost.

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Notes

  1. All names mentioned are pseudonyms to assure the confidentiality of respondents.

  2. In fact, mass murder, of which school rampage violence constitutes a subset, is the only form of homicide that is committed by non-Hispanic whites in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population (Fox and Levin 1998; Madfis 2014c). While it is certainly not the case that all school rampages have been committed by whites (for example, the Red Lake Senior High School killer was Native American, the Virginia Tech shooter was Korean American, and the shooter at the Tasso da Silveira Municipal School was Brazilian), the vast majority of rampage killers have in fact been white. As a result, some (Schiele and Stewart 2001; Madfis 2014c; Wise 2001) have linked theoretically white racial identity and privilege to rampage killing.

  3. Much of the data addressed in this article was culled as part of a larger project investigating not only officials’ attitudes about school rampage threats and the response to them, but knowledge about incidents of school rampage that were planned but ultimately averted (please see—source removed so as to maintain the author’s anonymity). Particular schools were chosen for this study so as to enable comparisons between geographically and demographically similar schools that both have and have not experienced substantial threats of rampage violence. Though the author conducted many interviews with officials at schools that successfully averted a rampage (and who, as a consequence, might be thought to have especially exaggerated fears and anticipated risks associated with that particular type of event), the findings from this article were culled almost exclusively from the perspectives of respondents who had not experienced a significant threat of rampage in their own schools. Ultimately, the data indicated that, while differences between schools which had and had not nearly avoided a violent tragedy were certainly discernable, these dissimilarities were far less significant than anticipated, as school officials discussed their fears and perceptions regarding rampage attacks in remarkably similar ways. This speaks to the impact that the moral panic over Columbine (as opposed to any individual experience with a similar incident) has had upon American public schools as a whole. For more details about the sampling strategy and data analysis, please see (Madfis 2012).

  4. Additionally, student deaths resulting from homicide in schools averaged 31 per year in the period from 1992 to 1999 (pre-Columbine). This contrasts with the post-Columbine period where the average was only 19 per year from 1999 to 2011 (Robers et al. 2014).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge generous research funding provided by Northeastern University’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict.

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  1. Social Work Program, University of Washington, Tacoma, Campus Box #358425, 1900 Commerce Street, Tacoma, WA, 98402, USA

    Eric Madfis

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Madfis, E. “It’s Better to Overreact”: School Officials’ Fear and Perceived Risk of Rampage Attacks and the Criminalization of American Public Schools. Crit Crim 24, 39–55 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9297-0

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