Vicious Violence: Countless Causes?

I will state this now: I do NOT condone any types of violence at all. Please keep this in mind throughout this post.

This week's tutorial paper posed a question which is at the heart of a heated debate: Who is responsible for school violence?

Toshio Ohsako (1997) took ten separate studies on school violence from countries on every continent. While they all had different types of violence depending on certain factors, Ohsako (1997, p. 12) classified violence into three broad groups:

Physical Violence (hitting, kicking)

Verbal Violence (name-calling, insulting)

Psychological Violence (isolation, ignoring)

Similarly to Ohsako, I determined violence can be caused by five different sources. Depending on the country, state/province, and community, these factors can vary in degree and applicability. Many of these come from Ohsaka (1997, p. 13-4), although some other studies by Oliver and Candappa (2007) and Yaakov Iram (1997) are represented.

Student Relations

Personality clashes, bullying, alienation of a cultural or socio-economic group, isolation of an individual or sub-culture, gender clashes, gang violence

Teachers and School Environment

School culture that condones violence, existing violence, how teachers recognize/handle bullying, poor pupil-teacher relationships, poor academic performance, culture of bullying, irrelevant curricula

Societal Problems

Media's intensifying coverage of school violence, political coups or general unrest, civil wars, gang violence, overcrowded or irregular transportation, alcohol and drugs

Parental/Familial Issues

Broken homes improper parenting, lack of "family values with good moral and religious guidelines," poor parental support, inconsistent or unjust discipline,

I would largely blame society and bad parenting for American school violence. Here's why:

Society because of the widespread media attention given to perpetrators of violence (which I think exacerbates the problem and lays blame in the wrong areas) and the culture of student coddling (pushed mainly by developmental psychologists afraid of damaging self-esteem)

Parents because of poor parenting (sheltering their child, providing a bad example), nonexistent or inconsistent discipline (give in to their child's "demands," cater to their every whim), and lack of supporting teachers (side with their children and assume the teacher is at fault: what I call "angel-child syndrome)

Like I said, there are many different causes of school violence, all unique to certain communities, cultures, and societies. I think the absolute worst thing we can do is blame violence on one thing (like gun control) and widen our scope, looking at all possible causes and solutions. I also think we can realize that many districts take preventing violence "to the max" and adopt useless and ridiculous "zero tolerance" policies which do nothing but encourage overreaction and knee-jerking. For their part, the media should not rile the public up about how one thing is causing the destruction of our schools when clearly that's not probable: it will always be a multitude of causes which impact schools.