THE ADR REPORT
News and Strategies for Alternative Dispute Resolution Practitioners
Volume 3, Number 11
May 26, 1999

News and Analysis:
Countering the Culture of Violence
By Richard V. Denenberg

The carnage in Colorado has left the impression that schools are helplessly in the grip of a "culture of violence," sustained by gory imagery and lyrics, pervasive spiritual decay, an excess of guns, and a deficiency of serotonin. Schools can do little in the short term to reshape the social, constitutional and physiological setting, but they can take immediate practical steps to create a competing vision-a culture of nonviolence-by training students to recognize and deal with the potential destructiveness of unresolved conflict.

Although it ended in a pathological apocalypse, the Columbine High School incident began as a garden variety inter-group dispute that was ignored and allowed to fester. The missed warning signal was not the scores of home made pipe bombs or the sawed-off shotguns but the persistence of the feud between the "Trench-Coat Mafia" and the "Abercrombie and Fitch Army." A trivial sartorial difference, aggravated by bullying, harassment and taunting, left Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold feeling "cornered," according to an acquaintance, and bent on savage reprisal.

Despite the powerful emotions unleashed by the dispute, as advertised on a Web site, in an class essay and in a video, no one intervened, betokening a failure to see animosity as an augury of disaster. Not every grievance or grudge turns lethal, obviously, but the risk that long-simmering conflict may become violent cannot be lightly dismissed.

The tribalization of the high school scene-into mutually antagonistic bands of jocks,
preppies, Goths, nerds, freaks, geeks and outcasts of various idiosyncratic stripes-parallels the diversity in America's neighborhoods. There, conflict among racial and ethnic groups is routinely ameliorated by community mediators, who achieve success by enlarging each group's understanding of the others and by fostering engagement and healthy emotional expression. The mediators seek to restore harmony and instill empathy — a trait notably lacking in the Columbine gunmen, whom the Jefferson County prosecutor aptly described as "people without feeling" by the time they attacked. Each group is encouraged to view the
world from the other's perspective. Mediators wear buttons that proclaim, with
self-abnegating pride: "When I listen, people talk."

As part of the President's recently launched grassroots campaign to prevent youth violence, the community mediation approach should be emulated by the schools. Regrettably, today's students have little understanding of nonviolent ways to resolve tension. In the aftermath of another high school gun tragedy, the May, 1998, rampage by freshman Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon, the US Department of Education pointed out that "children who are at risk for violence often need to learn interpersonal, problem?solving and conflict resolution skills at home and in school." The department called for "teaching the child alternative, socially appropriate replacement responses-such as problem?solving and anger
control skills."

The department's exhortation echoed the findings of education researchers David W. and Roger T. Johnson. A few years earlier, writing in the journal Education Today, they warned that allowing students to "remain apart from classmates and be socially inept and have low self-esteem, increases the probability that students will use destructive conflict strategies."

A study conducted by the Johnsons found that before being trained in mediation, "most students had daily conflicts, used destructive strategies that tended to escalate the conflict...and did not know how to negotiate. After training, students could apply the negotiation and mediation process to actual conflict situations, as well as transfer them to nonclassroom and nonschool settings," such as the playground, the lunchroom, and the home.

Unfortunately, schools rarely present alternatives to aggression, perhaps because teachers themselves are unfamiliar with the subject. In a survey of 348 Oregon schools conducted for the state's education department around the time of the Springfield incident, more than half agreed with the proposition: "Many teachers do not have appropriate conflict resolution skills." And fully 81 percent of the schools responded that the statement was true of
students as well.

An elite cadre of students could be trained to mediate among their peers. Broader benefits would be obtained, however, by treating conflict resolution as a life skill, to be diffused throughout the student population. By rotating the role of mediator, students internalize the value of non-violence and the art of accommodation, lessons that they can apply even when they have a stake in a dispute. Mediators deal with rumors, damaged friendships, misunderstandings, fights, bullying and disputes over personal property.

There have been a variety of imaginative experiments in giving young people the
wherewithal to address disputes that might spiral out of control. A few examples:

In Clackamas County, Oregon, near Portland, McLoughlin Middle School trainee mediators are asked: "What problems do you see students struggling with…that might show up in mediation sessions?" They are also instructed to explain their role as mediators to their classmates:

1. We don't take sides.
2. We don't make decisions for you.
3. We don't decide who's right or wrong.
4. We are here to help you negotiate.

The ground rules include "no physical fighting or threats." The young mediators also participate in sessions designed to help overly aggressive students whose conduct is linked to dysfunctional family life.

In Boston, a Spinal Cord Injury Violence Prevention Club recruits wheelchair-bound teens-casualties of gang gunplay. (Several of the Columbine victims suffered such injuries.) Wounded in body and soul, one youth wrote in the program's newsletter: "When you are lying there, gasping for air, bleeding, going into shock, rushing towards death, all that hard core is gone." Club members offer "a positive alternative to retaliation" in their home neighborhoods, according to project coordinator, Joan Vaz Serra Hoffman, helping to break the revenge cycle.

In upstate New York, Ulster-Sullivan Mediation has developed the Suspension Re-Entry Program, which draws upon the ancient notion of reintegration of an offender into the community. The program facilitates the return of students who have been suspended for making serious threats or using physical force against a teacher. A mediator brings the teacher and the student together for a kind of spiritual healing. The suspension is treated as a cooling?off period. Clare Danielson, executive director of Ulster?Sullivan, explains that the program offers "the opportunity to work out the past difficulties in the relationship and establish a new way of being with each other."

In the case of violence, curriculum reform is a realistic alternative to social reform that may never come. The "Fourth R" should be resolution-resolution of the conflicts that seethe beneath the surface of adolescence. Students who understand the hazards are more likely to take cognizance of ominous behavior at an early stage, enhancing their own safety.

Finding time for this subject in the school day will help ensure that youngsters survive long enough to absorb the other branches of knowledge, and it will inure to their benefit later in life, when they encounter the stresses of the workplace.

Richard V. Denenberg is the co-author with Mark Braverman of  The Violence-Prone Workplace: A New Approach to Dealing with Hostile, Threatening, and Uncivil Behavior, which will be published in December by Cornell University Press.