he United States reported approximately 4,000 cases of rape or sexual battery, 11,000 incidents of physical attacks or fights in which weapons were used, 19,000 physical attacks or fights in which not weapons were used, 7,000 robberies, 115,000 thefts, and 98,000 cases of vandalism.
While these numbers appear to be holding relatively steady, John Cloud notes, "What has increased over the past five years is the multiple-victim, video-game-like rampages that led up to the Littleton abomination" ("What Can the Schools Do?" 38). Violent deaths among young people are also on the rise. In the ten years between 1985 and 1995, the number of juveniles murdered with firearms has increased 153 percent (Cloud "Of Arms and the Boy" 60), and an increasing number of schools have taken even casual talk of Columbine copycat plots extremely seriously. A Cleveland school closed down the Friday before Halloween this year to deal with a suspected plot by four boys, ages 14 to 15, that mimicked the Littleton massacre (Tartakovsky 42).
Cloud, asking "What Can the Schools Do?," quotes a number of statistics relevant to the problem: the typical adolescent is alone for 3.5 hours each day, spends 11 fewer hours with parents than did children in the 1960s, and has already seen 8,000 murders, real and fictional, in movies and TV by the end of elementary school. Teen suicide has increased 300 percent since the 1960s, depression in children has risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1950s, and the evening news in just the three years from 1993 to 1996 now devotes 721 percent more of its coverage to homicides (38-39).
In such a climate, increased violence in the schools
Seems almost inevitable. However, while many critics blame the
influence of movies, TV, music, the Internet, video games, and
other forms of mass media in provoking violent behavior,
sociologist Stanton Samenow expresses the views of many
professionals analyzing the...