This book, with the subtitle of an authoritative guide, does an admirable job as just such a reference and serves as a useful guide for clinicians, law enforcement personnel, and administrators. It is a handbook written for a wide audience within the academic communities of colleges and universities, as well as those professionals connected to them. Well sourced throughout the text, the book reviews various kinds of violence that pose a risk to those on campuses, describes prevention strategies, and reviews methods for dealing with the aftermath of violence. It is comprehensive in its approach, covering forms of violence that most people would readily associate with colleges and universities, as well as less common forms of violence.
As I wrote this review, in the summer and fall of 2012, bomb threats closed the campuses of the University of Texas at Austin, North Dakota State University in Fargo, and Hiram College. Soon after, another threat was made against Louisiana State University. Hiram is an outlier on this list, a liberal arts college set in farm country outside of Cleveland, Ohio, with an enrollment of just 1334 students (and the alma mater of this author). Yet the threat of a bomb in such an idyllic setting as Hiram's campus underscores the message of the first section of the book, that leaders of educational institutions must give up the idea that such acts of violence could never happen on their campuses.
The necessary first task of a text on this subject is to set the stage for administrators and clinicians to accept that the risk of violence has the potential to touch every college and university community in the nation. The authors discuss violence in epidemiological terms, with chilling examples of fatal violence episodes from the history of higher education in America. They introduce a theoretical framework in which to understand and analyze episodes of violence. They discuss situations on campuses and in college communities that contribute to the risk, including how alcohol can be a catalyst to violence.
The second section of the book focuses on prevention strategies, highlighting the variety of ways in which an institution can work to reduce and manage the risk of violence. A chapter is dedicated to administrative efforts through developing policies and procedures to address risk factors. Another chapter details efforts to create barriers to violence through environmental protection and safety strategies, discussing both pros and cons to the options provided. This section has a chapter dedicated to the role of law enforcement on campus and finishes with a chapter on how to prepare for the aftermath of violence within the community that provides concrete examples of how to manage the trauma that a victimized community inevitably experiences.
Most of the book, 175 of the 300 pages of text, is made up of the third and final section, “Strains of Campus Violence.” The chapters include expected topics such as sexual assault, hazing, rioting, and avenger violence (where the perpetrator perceives the violence as the only possible recourse for a perceived injustice, like the incident at Virginia Tech). There also are discussions of suicide, hate crimes, homicide, arson, and bombing. Each chapter details the prevalence, demographics, risk factors, prevention strategies, and appropriate responses to these forms of violence. The information is well organized and comprehensive and would be useful to any clinician with an interest in these areas.
Violence Goes to College presents a balance of theoretical discussions framing the challenges of violence within a specific population and practical advice on prevention, intervention, response, and treatment. It is an excellent addition to the literature on violence analysis and prevention.
Footnotes
Disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None.
- © 2013 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
