STANDARD PRACTICES: NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

During the past thirty years an impressive amount of energy and money have been invested in preventing school violence. These programs, based on standard explanations, have yielded only modest results. Many schools offer prevention programs that are inadequate and ineffective. Many have violence prevention training in name only. As a ten-year-old bully expressed it: “The school does have a bullying prevention program but I do not know anything about it. There are posters in the lunchroom, but I don’t pay attention to them.”¹ Standard practices tend to mirror standard explanations about the causes of violence. As such, these practices tend