Lethal school violence: linking conflict, relation and intended victims

Paper in proceeding, 2016

The lethal violence in school are mainly associated with the acts of multiple killings in the educational institutions, so called school shootings. These types of attacks are also challenging to prevent, since the perpetrator often are impossible to profile in advance. Instead of focusing on the perpetrator, the aim in this study is to highlight the relation between school, perpetrator and victim. By developing a typology of lethal school violence in a dominating European context, based on key concepts from previous research. The previous studies of the phenomena are challenged by both definition problems and data collection problems, and previous typologies are often weak in explanation if they are applied in another context. The results indicates that there are three types of lethal violence in the school setting, defined as motivated of interpersonal revenge, institutional revenge and societal revenge. By conducting a study exploring the schools role in the events instead of the offender, the aspects and importance of the school setting in the event becomes stronger and can become the ground for further prevention measurements related to school safety and security.