Threat Assessment Can Help Prevent School Violence, but Reliance on a ‘Profile’ Doesn’t Work

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Careful threat assessment of young people believed to be at risk of committing gun violence in schools can avert violence when it focuses on specific behaviors—especially communications by the at-risk youth via personal conversations, texts, or social media.

That’s what child and adolescent and consultation-liaison psychiatrists said during a panel discussion on “Firearm Violence in Schools” at the annual meeting of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry in Atlanta.

“If you look across all of the school shootings, what is common is the idea of ‘leakage,’ ” said child psychiatrist Rebecca Klisz-Hulbert M.D., who has assessed young people at risk for school violence in the Detroit area. “These kids have communicated their intent [to commit violence] whether through in-person conversations, social media, text messages, or some other manner. This is increasingly what schools pay attention to.”

She is the program director for the child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship program at Detroit Medical Center/Wayne State University.

Most of the “leakage” occurs in personal conversations—the at-risk student tells someone of the intention to commit violence. However, social media can be a pernicious form of communicating a threat and of receiving support for it. “The scary thing about social media is that it is very possible to go online and find a like-minded group for just about anything,” including a group of people who will affirm a young person’s desire for revenge or other motivation for violence.

Reliance on Profiles Can Be Dangerous

More than 300 instances of firearm violence have occurred in K-12 settings since the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, according to the Washington Post’s database of school shootings. However, Klisz-Hulbert and other speakers noted that rampage shootings (mass or multivictim shootings) make up only a small number of school homicides involving guns; deaths of single victims by firearms related to gang violence or student suicides make up the majority of gun violence deaths at schools.

More generally, Klisz-Hulbert and other speakers emphasized that while school shootings understandably attract wide media attention, they constitute only a small part of the gun-violence problem in this country.

The probability of gun violence in schools appears to be related to the size of the student body. One protective factor appears to be a lower student-faculty ratio.

Klisz-Hulbert said reliance on some sort of “profile” of the average school shooter is the wrong way to approach prevention. “We can look at statistics and draw some generalizations, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the individual young person who could be at risk of [being violent].”

Moreover, reliance on a profile of traits believed to be associated with shooters can be dangerous and counterproductive. As an example, she cited the myth of “the quiet one.” “Kids will talk about the quiet one who wears all black—he’s going to be the next school shooter. But that’s really damaging because there is bullying associated with that profile, and it further isolates that young person. We have to treat each of these kids as an individual and customize the assessment to the situation.”

But a competent, thorough threat assessment can work to prevent violence. She cited the 2021 report “Averting School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” which looked at 67 averted school violence attacks plotted by 100 individuals between 2006 and 2018.

That report found that 89% of the plots were detected because plotters had communicated their intent. Nearly one-third of the plotters had conducted research on prior mass attacks, with some focusing on specific events such as the Columbine school shooting, and many had unimpeded access to weapons or had acquired firearms.

Plotters of the averted school shootings shared the following commonalities with shooters who carried out acts of violence:

• A history of adverse childhood experiences.

• A history of school discipline or legal involvement and of bullying or being bullied.

• An intention to commit suicide as part of their plot.

• A history of drug and/or alcohol use.

Assessments of a young person’s risk for violence rely on four key dimensions: the personality of the student, the dynamics of the student’s family, the dynamics of the school and the student’s role in that environment, and the dynamics of the social environment outside of school.

Importantly, an assessment must include collection of collateral history and information—and that means interviewing individuals other than the student in question.

“If a school refers a child to you and all you have to go on is what the kid tells you, it is impossible to do a fair assessment in that circumstance,” Klisz-Hulbert said. “You have to interview parents, witnesses, and whoever reported leakage of the threat.”

The Real Question: What Does the Student Need?

Psychiatrists participating in the assessment of a young person at risk to commit violence have two sometimes conflicting obligations: the duty to protect confidentiality and the duty to warn.

“We have a duty to obtain consent from the parent or guardian before we can do any type of mental health evaluation, but the duty to warn [anyone at risk of being harmed by violence] overrides the need to maintain confidentiality. We have to inform the participant that this is not a confidential evaluation and how and why the information will be shared. I always say, ‘My goal is to help the child, and to do that I am going to share this information with the school.”

Ultimately, the goal should be protecting school safety while also responding to the needs of a young person in distress—not merely removing the student from school, even when that may be necessary. “Schools may want to know, ‘Can the student safely return to school or not?’ But that is not the only important question. The real question is, ‘What does this child need?’

“I always emphasize maintaining contact with the student. A mental health assessment of a young person at risk of violence is not a ‘one-and-done situation.’ Just kicking the kid out of school does not solve the problem.” ■