Introduction

Despite the long-standing problem of school violence, relatively few comprehensive studies of violence in and around schools have been conducted. In sharp contrast, the links between neighborhood and family characteristics and violence have been the topic of extensive investigation in criminological research. In this chapter we summarize what is known about these relationships and integrate these findings with the literature on the study of school violence. Thus, our first objective is to show how and why an analysis of family and neighborhood conditions is essential to an understanding of school violence.

A second and equally important goal is to discuss the limitations of the common understanding of school violence. The conventional wisdom holds that school violence is a reflection of violence in the broader social context, that is, violence is imported into a school by the students, and by intruders from the neighborhood surrounding the school (see, e.g., Reiss & Roth, 1993). Although the evidence we will review finds this to be generally true, we will also find that the relationship between neighborhood crime and school violence is a complex one, and other factors (e.g., school context) must also be taken into account. Our conclusions warrant a sense of optimism concerning the development of school-based programs to reduce violence in and around schools. However, the level of optimism very much depends on the extent to which the complexity of the relationship is understood.

What follows is an integration of the literature on neighborhood and family conditions with the literature on school violence. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's (1979) “ecological” perspective on human development, our view is that schools and students attending school are embedded in a broader social developmental context. Our focus, then, is on “persons in context/’ and it is our assumption that individual behavior is the product of the interaction between individual development and social contexts (e.g., the family, school, and neighborhood). For the purposes of this chapter, “violence” is defined as “the threat of or use of physical force with the intention of causing physical injury, damage, or intimidation.”