Social Deterrence In School

Security cameras punctuate the perimeter of my school, a black fence separates the outside world from my secured campus, and police officers are staples of my everyday experience, and yet, they put me at ease. With the increased publicity and frequency of school shootings, such devices allow hundreds of schools like mine to promote their students’ senses of safety and their faculty’s sense of control about what goes on within the school. While many schools have adopted methods similar to those of mine, others are advocating for a new type of deterrence from violence, focused on addressing the social aspects of violence preventions. Such administrations emphasize psychological profiling and monitoring of students as supreme methods to ensure …show more content…
The two most frequently cited examples of social deterrence each fail to continually protect students, as training in conflict resolution and psychological profiling do not create lasting impressions upon most students. As a high school junior, I have gone through conflict resolution training voluntarily at school and participated in mandatory sessions for the museum at which I work. In my experience, they have made no lasting impact upon any of the present students or volunteers, as they simply reinforce non-combative, passive resolution, while failing to provide healthy methods for more violent dispositions to seek resolution. A boy with whom I volunteered got into an altercation only two days after attending one such session, and when asked why he reacted in such a manner, he reproachfully explained the difficulty of equating his impulses with societal expectation. That said, technological deterrence does not teach such skills either, but it lowers the potential dangers of such outbursts. In a scenario with technological deterrence present, a violent outburst would be limited to physical strength alone, while social deterrence would do nothing to stop such an expression of emotion from being accompanied with guns, knives, or other weapons. The second limitation of social deterrence lies in its reliance upon psychological profiles to identify potential threats. As Ralph W. Larkin explains, “the problems associated with profiling of school assaults are manifold,” and the most grievous of their shortcomings include misinterpreting a social relationship as an individual one, a lack of focus on the sources of such behavior, and accounting for the false positive (Larkin, 214-215). Though the first two errors pose a threat to the entire student body by evidencing an inadequate model for keeping students safe from