Terror, Suicide, Media, and the Contagion that Spreads School Mass Shootings

Abstract

Professor Ron Avi Astor has worked for decades to shape how American schools prevent violence. The widespread adoption of numerous evidence-based practices was fueled by a seemingly endless number of mass school shootings since the late 1990s. These prevention interventions, such as social-emotional learning, positive school climate, and multi-tiered systems of support, likely contributed to large reductions in day-to-day school violence in many states. But mass school shootings have persisted. Local schools are often rated by students as safe, even while their greatest fear is being shot at school. Now he argues the field needs to revisit interventions from two important literatures: cluster suicide prevention and terrorism prevention. He argues that mass school shootings have been functioning as a form of national terrorism, fueled by suicidal despair and sustained by media contagion (copycat behavior), with the primary goal of being remembered through the media. Tools already used to reduce contagion, or copycat behaviors, could be effective in lowering the frequency of mass shootings. Astor will unpack why a harm reduction strategy modeled on suicide and terrorism media reporting guidelines could interrupt the copycat cycle. This approach could also help reduce suicides and the national anxiety associated with the random nature of the mass school shootings.

Francis Huang

Professor / SIG Program Chair

My research interests include school climate, school violence, and threat assessment. My methodological interests focus on the analysis of clustered data (multilevel modeling).