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Violent Versus Nonviolent Kids
What keeps some children from becoming violent, even if they have been exposed to risk factors? Researchers have identified strong protective factors that help resilient children avoid behaving violently. Protective factors are assets that promote a child's positive development. They can be internal, such as a belief in oneself, or external, such as support from family or community (Anderson, 1995). Many protective factors can be fostered in the school setting. These include:
- Positive role models; exposure to a greater number of positive rather than negative behaviors
- Development of self-esteem and self-efficacy
- Supportive relationships, including those with teachers and friends
- A sense of hope about the future
- Belief in oneself
- Strong social skills
- Good peer relationships
- A close, trusting bond with a nurturing adult outside the family
- Empathy and support from the mother or mother figure
- The ability to find refuge and a sense of self-esteem in hobbies and creative pursuits, useful work, and assigned chores
- The sense that one is in control of one’s life and can cope with whatever happens (American Psychological Association, 1996)
A strong bond to the institution of school is another powerful protective factor for young people. However, for this bond to form, schools need to provide reasons and opportunities for students to bond, and also teach skills that students can use to make positive contributions to the institution (Comprehensive Health Education Foundation, 1994).
Opposite from protective factors are those experiences that cause children to have greater tendencies toward violence. No one cause, social ill, or life experience inevitably leads to violence. However, specific factors put children more at risk of resorting to aggression or violence when they feel afraid, threatened, or angry (American Psychological Association, 1996; Comprehensive Health Education Foundation, 1994; Prothrow-Stith, 1994; Walker, 1995). These risk factors originate outside the school walls, but can exert a powerful influence on the learning environment. They include:
- Poverty, which affects one in every five children
- Domestic violence, which may take the form of neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or emotional maltreatment of children (children are also profoundly affected by witnessing violence in the home, which can draw them into a cycle of violence)
- Exposure to violence in society and the media, which researchers have found causes some children to become desensitized to violence and others to become more fearful of violence
- Easy access to guns and other weapons
- Ethnic or racial conflict, which creates tension that can quickly escalate into violence
- Gangs, which are both a cause and a consequence of violence and which adopt violence as a way of life
- Substance abuse, which shares many of the same risk factors as violence. Reducing access to drugs may reduce violence
Public health experts concerned about youth safety recommend fighting violence the same way they combat disease: reducing the risk factors known to increase the likelihood of violence, while at the same time increasing the protective factors that work against violence.
Research also underscores the need for early intervention with children most at risk of adopting violent behaviors (Walker, 1995). Efforts to stem violence have shown early intervention
to be safer, preferable, and more cost-effective than waiting until violent behaviors become a habit (Prothrow-Stith, 1994). Children who exhibit chronic patterns of aggressive behavior in the early elementary grades are at risk not only of continued aggression, but also for delinquency and substance abuse (Larson, 1994; Lochman, White, & Wayland, 1991).
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Date of Last Update: 09/19/2001
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