These Deadly Times: Reconceptualizing School Violence

This article written by Ivan Watts and Nirmala Erevelles who propose a theory that teases out the causes of school violence and examines the systemic causes that are rooted in oppressive social conditions.  They explain that social, political, economic and ideological structures work together to create a violent school environment.  Urban schools are embedded in conditions of poverty and violence, where even children have to struggle for their day-to-day survival in contexts that offer little opportunity for hope and redemption.  In these chaotic school environments, behavior modifications and failed attempts by the teachers to control the class become a part of daily school life while learning is put on the back-burner.  When incidents occur, rather than getting students the help they need, they are often expelled due to zero tolerance policies, which are in about 90% of public schools.  Expulsion of the student from school leads to the student more frequently becoming associated with street violence, crime and poverty, which is likely the central to their problems in the first place. 

Children in these conditions develop a feeling of being trapped with no way out; there are rarely jobs with livable wages available and access to quality education does not exist.  Violence becomes a desperate mode of survival for these students, who have nowhere to turn.  The idea that we live in a society where everyone has access to the same opportunities is not only false, but also psychologically harmful to children who are forced to live with the feelings that they are a failure because they are unable to achieve success in this “equal” society. 

This article explains ethnographic studies of urban schools that have found that parents explicate the conditions of these schools and state that in the schools they experienced racism, lowered teacher expectations, dumbed-down curriculum and the guidance into vocational tracks rather than college.  Many teachers and school officials do not understand that children know when they are not respected and they know when teachers look down on them and this has serious effects on the self-esteem of minority students.  In is not surprising that students feel oppressed and have no outlet for these hurtful feelings and violence is often the result.  This article noted that students who attended urban schools were twice as likely to become victims of school-associated homicide. 

It is important to realize that school violence can not be separated from the social, political and economic conditions in which it is embedded.  This article explains that these conditions are considered to be “socially toxic,” with the toxins being community violence, child abuse, domestic violence, family disruption, poverty, despair, depression and rejection.  An important model is noted called “an accumulation of risk model,” which explains that children are capable of dealing with social pressures until they reach a saturation point, at which they become violent and disruptive.  Children in urban areas are resilient, but one can only take so much stress before they begin to act out; these children need loving support and they deserve the same opportunities available to middle-class white students.