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Reprinted from the Journal of the ASCA,
Professional School Counseling, December 2000, Volume 4, pages
77-80.
Even though statistics show that school violence is diminishing,
it is still a threat no school can afford to dismiss. To make
schools safer requires the effort of staff, students, and parents.
But it is the skill of counselors that can provide what may be most
needed, an effective violence prevention program. From my long
experience working with students, I believe such a program is
neither difficult to explain nor expensive to put into
place.
Unhappiness, combined with the strong feeling in the
perpetrator that others should be punished for the way he feels, is
by far the main reason that anyone strikes out at another human
being. Why the unhappy boy or man lashes out at the particular time
he does, however, cannot be predicted. What can be predicted is that
almost all unhappy boys and men carry within them the potential for
violence, and in our schools there are many unhappy students.
Therefore, the key to reducing violence is to do what I believe can
be done in every school - reduce the number of unhappy students. The
fewer there are, the fewer school problems including
violence.
Any school such as Columbine High has, at any time,
a specific number of very unhappy students, any one of whom is
potentially violent. No one knows this exact number, but if violence
occurs, it will be committed by one or two students from this group.
For example, in a high school such as Columbine of 2,000 students
with no violence prevention program in place at the time of the
incident, there may have been 20 students unhappy enough to do what
Harris and Klebold did. Therefore, to totally prevent what happened
may have been impossible.
But, if a year prior to the
incident, Columbine had a violence prevention program in place, it
would not be unrealistic that the number of potentially violent
students could have been reduced from 25 to 5 students. And making
the reasonable assumption that neither Harris nor Klebold would have
acted alone, if even one of them were in the group of 15 who were no
longer violent, the incident could have been prevented.
In
retrospect, a lot of information about the unhappiness of Harris and
Klebold has been made public. But prior to the violence it is
doubtful that anyone at Columbine, or any other similar high school,
could have picked up enough information to predict any violence much
less that it would have been committed by these young men. What was
needed then and is still needed is a violence-prevention program
(VPP), not only in Columbine, but in every school in the United
States. Such programs would not only reduce the incidence of
violence, they would reduce the incidence of all behavior problems
in school. The cost of violence far exceeds the cost of an effective
VPP.
What is being done now in Columbine and almost every
school in the country is to enhance security. This step - security
guards, X-ray machines, and restricted entrances and exits - is
being taken because everyone can see it. It also gives
administrators and school boards the sense that something visible is
being done. But short of what is done in airports, the chance of
enhanced security preventing much violence is small for the amount
of money it costs. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done if there is
plenty of money available, but if money is short, it will be much
more effective to spend it on a VPP run by well-trained counselors
who have no responsibilities other than this program.
I would
estimate one such counselor for every 1,000 students would be a good
number to start. In Columbine this would have meant two full-time
counselors with no other responsibility except the VPP. I recognize
that in a time when most school boards are reducing the number of
counselors, this may seem to be a large increase. But compared with
the cost of even average security, the salaries of two counselors
would not be out of line. Well-trained counselors can reduce the
number of unhappy students significantly. In fact, the sight of more
security personnel and equipment may become an attractive challenge
to violence-prone students.
During 11 years at the beginning
of my career, I worked as the psychiatrist for a California Youth
Authority facility for 400 adolescent and young adult, delinquent
woman. I became personally involved with reducing the unhappiness of
what I was sure were some of the unhappiest young women in the
school. Then, as now, I did not prescribe psychiatric drugs. I only
counseled and supervised other counselors. I realized that girls
were not as violent as boys, but our girls had a much higher rate of
unhappiness than the girls found in any public school. Nevertheless,
during my 11-year tenure at this school there were many fewer
"girl-fights" than occurred in most public high schools.
What
I did, which the counselors in a violence-prevention program would
need to do if the program were to be successful, was I made it my
business to get to know two specific groups of girls. The first
group was obvious; it included the girls we knew from their records
had a history of violence or had a way of dressing or wearing their
hair that provoked negative attention in our school. That would be
similar to the obvious trench coat Mafia group at
Columbine.
But it was the much less obvious second group that
was the key to the success we had in preventing violence. This group
was made up of girls who were most in touch with what was going on
in the school. They knew who was unhappy and what the unhappiness
was about. Such a group exists in every high school, it just takes
time to determine who comprises it.
These girls for the most
part liked the reform school. They appreciated what we were trying
to do, and they did not want our school marred with violence any
more than we did. To find out who they were, I spent a lot of time
hanging out in the cottages or in the school. I ate lunch with the
girls and talked to the housemothers and teachers to get suggestions
of whom I should see. When I found one and talked to her enough so
she began to trust me, she usually directed me to others. After a
while I developed a reputation at the school for helping the girls
that they suggested to me. Very often when I would call a girl to my
office, that same girl had heard about what I did and wanted to talk
with me.
I did not even have to guarantee that I would keep
what the girls told me confidential. In fact, I told them not to
tell me anything that could get them into serious trouble with any
girl or her friends that she recommended to me. But, they still told
me because they knew that if someone was a danger to herself or
others, I would try to handle it without telling more than I had to.
But that did not mean that I kept anything that was potentially
harmful away from the superintendent. Basically, the girls trusted
the superintendent and me to never use their information to get
anyone punished or in trouble. Occasionally, a girl had to be
segregated for a short time until we could resolve the problem. It
was a narrow line to walk, but mostly I was able to stay on
it.
The violence-prevention counselor is not a police officer
who seeks out and punishes wrongdoers. Even in the girls' school,
none of the girls I dealt with was involved in a serious crime. They
might be planning to do something wrong, or they may have done
something wrong, but to find this out was not my role. My role was
prevention, and the only way I can prevent violence or any other
undesirable behavior is to build a strong satisfying relationship
with the unhappiest students and with the students who can help me
find them. A few students played both roles, the source of
information and also the subject of a problem.
I cannot
overestimate the importance of doing this. In Columbine, the trench
coat Mafia were well known. That at least two of them were
potentially violent was learned too late. What seemed to render them
less dangerous was they were good students. But that is no
protection against their being violent; I'm sure the Unabomber was a
very good student. What all these violent students share is exactly
what the violence-prevention program is designed to address. They
lack good relationships with warm, caring responsible adults. The
job of the VPP counselor is to be that adult for these students. The
success of the program will be directly related to how well the
counselors can do this.
My contention that these students are
disconnected from responsible caring adults is supported by one of
the most important, and yet least known, research programs I have
ever read. Everyone who works in a school should read this research,
called Protecting Adolescents from Harm (Resnick et al.,
1997). It could just as well have had a subtitle, Protecting Others
From Harmful Adolescents. What this extensive research points out
conclusively is that only two groups of people can prevent
adolescents from harming themselves and others: parents and
teachers.
At the Ventura School, many of these unhappy girls
became my biggest successes. I succeeded because I was able to
convince them that I did not want to punish them, I only wanted to
get to know them and to help them. The idea that an adult authority
figure would deal with them when they were unhappy and not try to
blame, punish, or even excuse them for what they were doing was an
approach that very few adolescents had experienced. Klebold and
Harris did not have this kind of relationship with their parents or
with any teacher in school. Most adults look at young people in
trouble as if they are guilty, and if the adult is to relate to
them, they have to prove their innocence.
It is not that
their parents or teachers did not try. I'm sure they did, but
because of what happened, apparently no adult succeeded with these
two young men. The reason they didn't succeed is that neither their
parents nor their teachers knew how to make this relationship. But
this inability to relate is not restricted to adults and teenagers.
In my book, Choice Theory (1998), I claim that the inability
to relate or connect is a problem for everyone in our society. It is
the root cause of marital, family, school, and workplace problems.
In fact, I further claim (p. 9) that we are no better able to relate
to each other at the end of the Twentieth Century than we were at
its beginning. We have made great technical progress and some
political progress. I defy anyone to identify any large group of
people anywhere in the world that is relating better to one another
now than it was at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. For
example, there is no evidence that husbands and wives are more
happily married as of the year 2000 than they were in 1900 (Popenoe
& Whitehead, 1999).
In Choice Theory (1998), I
contend that because of the psychology that 99% of the people in the
world use - what I call external control psychology - it would be
difficult to reduce any of the human problems such as violence,
unloving sex, mental illness, or addiction. To have any chance of
solving these problems, it is important to give up external control
and replace it with choice theory. While the details of choice
theory are too much to explain in this brief article, it is what I
did at the Ventura School and exactly what I recommend that the VPP
counselors do.
The world is dominated by what I call the
seven deadly habits of external control psychology - criticizing,
blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing.
A bribe is a reward with the aim to control. These habits destroy
relationships and, in doing so, cause almost all the problems with
which people struggle. In actual fact, the problems such as mental
illnesses are the way people choose to resist the control of others
or keep their own anger in check.
Choice theory contends that
whenever people have difficulty with others, they should never use
the deadly habits. Instead, they should choose only to do what could
bring them closer or keep them closer. Doing this is not difficult.
In fact, whenever we have any problem with our long-term good
friends, we do this all the time. We do not use the seven deadly
habits because we don't want to lose our friends. Unfortunately,
when we have difficulty with almost everyone else, we immediately
put the seven habits into practice and make things
worse.
Finally, although I can only touch on it here, we will
never have the kind of success in school that we so desperately want
until we can get external control out of the classroom and replace
it with choice theory. Just as a rising tide raises all ships, we
need to do far more than most schools do now to create classrooms in
which almost all students both succeed and enjoy school.
(For additional articles by William Glasser, visit his website)
Dr. William Glasser is an internationally recognized
psychiatrist who is best known as the author of Reality Therapy, a
method of psychotherapy he created in 1965 and that is now taught
all over the world. In 2005, he was presented with the Life
Achievement Award by the International Center for the Study of
Psychiatry and Psychology for his enormous influence as a
psychotherapist and author. |
