School Safety and Violence: Research and Clinical Understandings, Trends, and Improvement Strategies

Feeling and being safe provides an essential foundation for children to learn and develop in healthy ways. I will summarize the current research and clinically based understanding about K-12 school violence and school safety. I summarize prevalence rates that underscore that school violence is tragically common. I then outline the spectrum of experiences that undermine safety in schools: from normal moments of misunderstanding to microaggressions to mental illness to international acts of verbal/cyber cruelty to “grey zone” sexual-social-emotional experiences, harassment, and rape as well as natural disasters, assault, murder, and suicide. I then summarize research-based policy and practice steps that we can take that will dramatically enhance how safe students feel and are in schools: (1) Supporting prosocial universal K-12 improvement efforts for all students; (2) Supporting coordinated educational, “at risk” and targeted K-12 interventions; (3) Addressing weapons in schools; and (4) Preventing school shootings. Schools are one of the safest places for children and adolescents to be physically. However, this is often not true psychosocially. Today, there is so much that we do understand about how to promote individual and organizational health as well as prevent school violence and intervene most helpfully when it does occur.