High School Violence in Decline, Study Finds

Amid turbulent national debate over school shootings, government researchers are reporting a largely unheralded decline in high school violence in the 1990s, with many fewer students saying that they carried a weapon or engaged in fights than at the beginning of the decade.

In four biennial surveys of more than 45,000 high school students nationwide between 1991 and 1997, the number of youths who said they carried a weapon to school fell by 28%, the researchers found. The number of students who said they got in a schoolyard fight fell by 9%. And the proportion who carried a gun on or off campus dropped 25%.

Reconciling those positive trends with the more recent mass killings on school campuses is difficult, the researchers and other analysts say. But the study, made public today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., suggests that various efforts to reduce schoolyard dangers have been effective despite the rare outbreak of inexplicable mayhem.

“This is real progress,” said study coauthor Thomas Simon, a behavioral scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a separate study in the same journal, which this week was devoted to violence research, North Carolina researchers reported that child abuse-related deaths are far more common than official statistics indicate. They attributed the discrepancy to errors in interpreting death certificate data.

Regarding the school violence study, Simon said it is unclear how students’ feelings and behavior might be affected in the long run by recent tragedies such as the fatal shooting of 12 students and a teacher in Littleton, Colo., last April. But because the study draws on such a large number of students, it “is more representative of what is really happening with kids today,” he said.

In Los Angeles County, students have experienced a comparable decline in hostilities and the potential for violence, according to school district data. The 0.06% of students in all grades who were caught with weapons in 1997-98 was nearly one-third the level of the 1990-91 school year. And documented battery has fallen by 30% over the same period.

The trends described in the national study “are consistent with some of the [encouraging] things we’ve seen in the schools themselves and among the students,” said Wesley Mitchell, chief of the Los Angeles School Police Department.

At the same time, the study conveys an image of high school life in America today that is far from serene, recent improvements notwithstanding. In 1997, 36.6% of youths surveyed said they were in a physical fight, about 15% said they were in a fight on campus, and 8.5% said they had carried a weapon to class in the previous 30 days.

Also, progress was not uniform in all groups surveyed. Defying some of the trends were Latino students, who were somewhat more likely to report being threatened with a weapon or getting in a fight on school property in 1997 compared to 1993, the researchers found. A possible reason for that ethnic disparity, one of the researchers speculated, was that past violence prevention programs may not have sufficiently reflected Latino culture.

Finally, there was no significant drop in the number of students who reported being afraid to go to school, which held at about 4%. Students’ perceptions of their safety may be out of line with reality, perhaps because of news media saturation coverage of isolated incidents, scholars said.

Debate Over School Safety

The challenge for parents, students and policymakers is deciding which version of school life is more accurate: the downward trends in violence found by the Centers for Disease Control researchers and others, or the harrowing news videos of frightened students running for their lives at a few now infamous high schools.

The debate over school safety has heated up lately after the fatal shootings of 22 students and teachers at five campuses since March 1998. A Los Angeles Times telephone poll of 1,602 Californians last June found that about 50% of respondents said state schools were unsafe, and 10% of parents with school-age children said their youngsters had been victimized by campus violence.

Barry Glassner, a USC sociology professor and author of “The Culture of Fear,” said the school violence trends parallel those of U.S. society. “While crime rates have been declining for years now,” he said, “the fear of crime remains high and the disparity between perception and the actual statistics is striking.”

The Centers for Disease Control study drew on surveys of students in public and private high schools in urban, suburban and rural areas. It was part of a larger ongoing project known as the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, which presents high school students with a 90-item questionnaire on safety, sexual issues, tobacco and alcohol use and other matters. Some questions about weapons did not appear on the questionnaire until 1993.

In the study, the researchers found that fighting among students went down the greatest among girls, from 34% in 1991 to 26% in 1997.

Between 1993 and 1997, one of the biggest drops was in the proportion of students who said they had carried a weapon to school in the previous month, to 8.5% of those surveyed. Significantly, though, most of that decline was in gun carrying, while carrying other weapons to school did not decline significantly.

Chief Mitchell of the Los Angeles public school police said that conformed with department data showing that some students have switched from guns to knives.

On the whole, he credited a variety of measures for reducing actual and potential violence on campuses, from metal detectors at schools to programs for teaching students nonviolent ways to reduce conflicts to a growing economy.

In Ventura County, officials detected slightly more students carrying weapons in 1997-98 than in the previous school year--a rise from eight to 10 weapons possessions per 10,000 students.

Simon, of the Centers for Disease Control, said some of the nationwide reductions in violence and the potential for violence appear to reflect initiatives put in place in the early 1990s. “It’s possible we’re reaping the benefits of those efforts now,” he said. “But there’s a lot more to do because the level of violence in schools is still unacceptably high.”

Researchers acknowledge that some respondents may give false answers in such surveys, but Simon said that they checked the validity of answers by retesting some of the students. In addition, he said, there is little incentive to cheat because the survey was anonymous.

Survey of Child Abuse

Also appearing in the AMA journal is a study suggesting that the death toll from child abuse in the United States may be as much as three times greater than previously believed. About 9,467 children age 10 and younger were killed by abuse between 1985 and 1994, compared to an earlier government estimate of 2,973, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina.

Overall, they estimated that 800 children and infants a year are killed by abuse. A death is classified as such if the perpetrator is identified as a caregiver and the victim shows signs of prior physical abuse.

The researchers based the new estimate on a close analysis of death records for children in North Carolina over 10 years beginning in 1984. Out of the 220 deaths the researchers classified as child abuse deaths, state health records counted only 68, largely because of clerical errors translating death certificate data into vital statistics.

Extrapolating from North Carolina to the nation as a whole is reasonable, the researchers said, because all states use the same coding system to classify deaths. They also found that the child abuse death rate in North Carolina rose 12% annually over the years studied. Improved record-keeping may make it easier to prevent abuse-related deaths, they said.

Another study in the AMA journal pegs the cost of treating gunshot injuries at $17,000 per victim. The 134,445 injuries in 1994 cost $2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs, $1.1 billion of which was paid for by taxpayers, according to the study, led by a Duke University researcher.

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Positive Trends in Campus Safety

In surveys of more than 45,000 high school students nationwide from 1991 to 1997, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that hostilities and the potential for violence dropped significantly.

Source: Journal of the American Medical Assn.