Assessing Adolescents Who Threaten Homicide in Schools: A Recent Update

Abstract

Our paper, following this update on the problem of adolescents who threaten homicide in schools, published in 2002, remains relevant to contemporary discussions of how such problems might be managed. While new five years ago, the ideas expressed in this paper have become widely accepted today. It is by now recognized, for example, that individual psychiatric assessment of a student who is thought to be potentially homicidal, or at least violent to his fellow classmates, is not enough. There also needs to be a clear assessment of the school climate, involvement of law enforcement if medium or high threat, the student’s family and a detailed analysis of the computer the student may have used, to examine Internet activity, ranging from websites frequented to online relationships developed via chat rooms. Since this paper was written, a great deal also has been learned about cyber-bullying. The Internet has become a major new tool for bullying, allowing children to intensify their bullying in various virtual environments and modes of communication. These virtual modes provide a shield of sorts, perhaps empowering the student to say things he would not normally say to someone face to face; this has increased the vitriol of the bullying and has lead to several suicides. We dedicated our Peaceful Schools project to a victim of one such cyber-bullying death. He hanged himself after receiving a relentless stream of threatening instant messages The media of course follows angles that will get readers and viewers. While tragic events such as these suicides received scant media attention, perhaps due to the unwritten media taboo on reporting on suicide. Sexier, as the media might put it, angles on bullying were reported with some zeal There was a fair amount of coverage of the release of a new anti-bullying video game called ‘‘Bully,’’ published by Rockstar Games in October 2006, a game labeled by one attorney (Houston Press, Nov 30–Dec 6, 2006, pp 27–28) as the ‘‘Columbine simulator’’ and legal attempts were made to block the sale of it. Set in the fictional boarding school Bullworth Academy, the game is not particularly shocking: there is no blood, no killing, no automatic weapons. But the protagonist employs negativity, physical violence and trickery to gain control of school bullies. So a sort of bully-at-heart protects the weaker children, a perverse morality tale in many ways. The boy who has a soft spot for losers and geeks and anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of bullying, takes up for them in a variety of violent interactions. He also becomes a sort of makeshift private eye, doing such surveillance work as photographing girls in the act of cheating on their boyfriends. When the final bell rings the bully rewards altruism and punishes other bullies. He is really a bullying non-bully, a role many of us adopt in the adult world. There has also been further research on Columbine, as the diaries of Klebold and Harris were recently made public. The research suggests that both were strongly influenced by first-person shooter video games, including ‘‘Doom’’ and ‘‘Quake.’’ Some have pointed out that their interest approached an addiction. Their parents restricted their computer use after a criminal trespass indictment suggesting that this restriction may have precipitated the immediate attack on Columbine, by denying the ‘‘drug’’ and the sublimatory outlet it provided. S. W. Twemlow Menninger Department Psychiatry, Baylor College Medicine, 2801, Gessner Drive, P.O. 809045, Houston, TX 77280-9045, USA