School Shootings and Trauma-Sensitive School Environment

School shootings are traumatic events that have detrimental impacts on children. Studies revealed that after the school shooting children can suffer from traumatic symptoms which cause difficulties in learning and relationships. Traumas negatively affect developing brain structures of the children which can lead to long-term problems. For that reason, the trauma sensitive schools (TSS) model, which aimed to provide safe and secure environments for children, can be helpful to support the children and to improve their well-being after the school shooting.

School Shootings and Therapeutic Interventions for Traumatized Victims

This study attempts an encapsulation of school shooting as a strand of mass violence with the purpose of presenting a perceived effective approach that could be therapeutically adopted for handling traumatized victims of school shooting incidents, particularly traumatized students. School violence involving firearms and high fatalities have been trending in many parts of the world. Pathetically, most of the students who are victims of school shootings receive inadequate or no therapeutic interventions that could help them to recover from the emotional trauma that usually accompany school violence. Students with trauma symptoms experience dysfunctional adaptation, leading to impairment of daily functionality, distortions in peer interactivity, and disruptive self-expressivity. This study leans on family system theory and elucidates how the application of this theory could help the traumatized to regain themselves psychosocially in order to maintain adaptation to function properly in the school or community.

Fear vs. Threat, School Shootings and Violence

The first recorded school shooting took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on November 12, 1840. The most recent school shooting took place on July 11, 2019 in Hartford, Connecticut. Over 500 school shootings have taken place since the Charlottesville incident. Sadly, school shootings are not an anomaly to many communities in America. Administrators, and particularly principals, are faced with significant challenges in creating an environment that is conducive to the development of a productive and safe school culture. The content of this manuscript will explore the existing administrative roles and responsibilities with respect to school safety and the implementation and supervision of those procedures. Also discussed in the manuscript will be the role that fear plays in the decision making process and how some decisions may be misplaced and could be redirected toward more favorable areas of emphasis (i.e., counseling, active supervision, alternative academic options, community outreach, and inclusive student opportunities).

The Columbine (School Shooting): Essence, Legal Qualifications, Forensic Diagnostics2

The the paper is devoted to the results of a comprehensive legal and linguistic study of the "Columbine" ("school shooting") subculture from the standpoint of criminology, criminal law, forensic science and forensic speech studies. Despite some conventionality of the well-established term "school shooting" borrowed from the English language, the author proceeds from the fact that any form of violent actions in educational institutions committed by a student (group of students) or an outsider in relation to teachers and students using weapons and improvised means should be understood as school shooting.Empirically, the study is based on the publications of Russian and foreign scientists, the results of semi-automated monitoring of social networks for the promotion of school shooting, as well as materials of criminal cases held in the archives of the investigative departments of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Volgograd, Moscow, Saratov, Tyumen, Chelyabinsk regions, Krasnoyarsk Territory and Republic of Khakassia. The author concludes that the the Columbine subculture is extremist-terrorist in its essence. The paper summarizes the most characteristic ideological attitudes of this subculture, signs of a person's involvement in the targeted community, examines the problems of the legal characterisation of school shooting acts and proposes criminalistic diagnostic complexes to examine extremist speech actions aimed at promoting Columbine. These complexes give a law enforcement officer clear criteria for recognizing information materials as extremist, as well as for holding liable or discharging an individual under Art. 205.2, 280, 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation depending on the presence or absence of mass executions propaganda aimed to intimidate the population in order to influence the authorities or other extremist motives.

Misinformation effects in an online sample: results of an experimental study with a five day retention interval

Traditional face-to-face laboratory studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of how misinformation effects develop. However, an area of emerging concern that has been relatively under-researched is the impact of misinformation following exposure to traumatic events that are viewed online. Here we describe a novel method for investigating misinformation effects in an online context. Participants (N = 99) completed the study online. They first watched a 10-min video of a fictional school shooting. Between 5 and 10 days later, they were randomly assigned to receive misinformation or no misinformation about the video before completing a recognition test. Misinformed participants were less accurate at discriminating between misinformation and true statements than control participants. This effect was most strongly supported by ROC analyses (Cohen’s d = 0.59, BF10 = 8.34). Misinformation effects can be established in an online experiment using candid violent viral-style video stimuli.

LOCO: The 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus

The spread of online conspiracy theories represents a serious threat to society. To understand the content of conspiracies, here we present the language of conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. LOCO is an 88-million-token corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy (N = 23,937) and mainstream (N = 72,806) documents harvested from 150 websites. Mimicking internet user behavior, documents were identified using Google by crossing a set of seed phrases with a set of websites. LOCO is hierarchically structured, meaning that each document is cross-nested within websites (N = 150) and topics (N = 600, on three different resolutions). A rich set of linguistic features (N = 287) and metadata includes upload date, measures of social media engagement, measures of website popularity, size, and traffic, as well as political bias and factual reporting annotations. We explored LOCO’s features from different perspectives showing that documents track important societal events through time (e.g., Princess Diana’s death, Sandy Hook school shooting, coronavirus outbreaks), while patterns of lexical features (e.g., deception, power, dominance) overlap with those extracted from online social media communities dedicated to conspiracy theories. By computing within-subcorpus cosine similarity, we derived a subset of the most representative conspiracy documents (N = 4,227), which, compared to other conspiracy documents, display prototypical and exaggerated conspiratorial language and are more frequently shared on Facebook. We also show that conspiracy website users navigate to websites via more direct means than mainstream users, suggesting confirmation bias. LOCO and related datasets are freely available at https://osf.io/snpcg/.

Youth-Led Resilience Promotion during Disaster Recovery: A Proposed Framework, Innovative Program, and Lessons Learned

Objective: Disasters, such as a school shooting or a global pandemic, harm psychological health and necessitate recovery. To complement adult-led disaster recovery and trauma-specific approaches, we propose a Youth-Led Resilience Promotion (YLRP) framework focusing on: 1) multi-tiered change, 2) resilience goals, 3) a promotion mindset, 4) youth strengths, 5) prosocial behaviors, and 6) capacity building through partnerships. The YLRP framework guided the development of a YLRP program in the aftermath of the Chardon High School shooting in Chardon, Ohio, which is detailed in a case study. Method: As part of a Community-Academic Partnership, twenty college student trainers delivered a multi-tiered, multicomponent resilience promotion intervention: universal resilience promotion to 1,070 high school students; targeted resilience promotion to 200 student leaders through workshops; and indicated resilience promotion to 30 student leaders through mentoring. Results: Student leaders formed a youth-led, after-school club to advance relational resilience through prosocial strategies. Lessons learned from implementing the YLRP program for six years (2012 – 2017) are provided to guide YLRP program developers and program implementers. Conclusion: A youth-led program equipping youth leaders to engage in prosocial strategies may contribute to the psychological resilience and recovery of students after a school shooting, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other potentially traumatic events.