Assessing threats of school violence: Implications for counselors.

Although school violence has been impressed on the consciousness of the American public in recent years, there is evidence to suggest that violence among adolescents is on the decline (Koplan, Autry; & Hyman, 2001). However, recent school shootings across the nation in such places as Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Littleton, Colorado; and Santee, California have created widespread concern about school safety. Various agencies have been working to develop intervention strategies and to identify warning signs of school violence. Among them are the United States Department of Education (Dwyer, Osher, & Warger, 1998), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (O'Toole, 2000), and the United States Surgeon General (Koplan et al.). In their book Psychology in the Schools, Reddy et al. (2001) recently presented an overview and critique of three approaches to threat assessment and offered a fourth approach for consideration. The purpose of this article is to review the Reddy et al. article and then to examine implications for counselors. ASSESSMENT APPROACHES Reddy et al. (2001) made a distinction between general aggression and targeted school violence. Targeted school violence entails the intentional harm or murder of a specific individual or individuals. Although general violence is much more common among adolescents than targeted violence, the focus of the Reddy et al. article is on identifying risk factors associated with targeted violence. The three current assessment approaches to targeted violence include behavioral profiling, guided professional judgment and structured clinical assessment, and automated decision making. Finally, the authors describe an alternative method, the threat assessment approach. Behavioral Profiling Historically, profiling has entailed carefully investigating a crime scene "to generate a set of hypotheses about the characteristics--physical, demographic, personality, and others--of the person most likely to have committed the crime" (Reddy et al., 2001, p. 161). However, profiling has also been used to identify potential perpetrators of violence. This method attempts to identify characteristics of an individual and predict the likelihood that he or she will commit a crime in the future. Prospective profiling has some problems associated with it. For example, there is substantial risk of false positives, of identifying a student, based on his or her profile, who will not become violent. Moreover, "the accuracy of school shooter profiles is questionable" (Reddy et al., 2001, p. 162). Because incidents of targeted school violence are so uncommon, it is unsound practice to make generalizations to previously nonviolent students. Moreover, there is no empirical support for the validity of prospective profiling. Finally, prospective profiling may label and stigmatize students as dangerous and may violate their civil liberties. Guided Professional Judgment Guided professional judgment, also known as structured clinical assessment, commonly involves a professional interviewing a student and using instruments or checklists to help make a decision about the student's potential to be violent. One problem with this method again relates to the low incidence of targeted school violence and one's ability to evaluate risk from a dubious base rate. Second, because no empirical research has been done to identify risk factors for targeted school violence, professionals may not know what information to gather. Related to this issue is the questionable practice of using existing research on general violence as a basis to assess the risk of targeted school violence. Finally, Reddy et al. (2001) pointed out that standard psychological measures have not been validated as predictors of targeted school violence. Automated Decision Making The third risk assessment approach is termed automated decision making. …