Why do so many school antiviolence programmes backfire? And why do policymakers keep making the same mistakes? The authors of Responding to School Violence examine the pervasive rise of school security measures since the Columbine shootings, highlighting the unintended consequences of policymaking too often shaped by fear and sensationalism.

Probing an array of now ubiquitous tactics and programmes--metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, and more--the authors show how increasingly punitive schoolhouse dynamics negatively affect student safety and even...

Social Constructionist Theory has become a transcendent perspective appearing in a variety of disciplines from sociology, psychology and psychotherapy, to geography, political science and post-modernism. It integrates the symbolic interactionist tradition of social psychology with the labeling theory from the sociology of deviance, and with sociological phenomenology, to provide insight into the ways social interaction becomes objective social reality, constitutive of social institutions and culminating in social structure. When applied to crime and justice, as in this volume, the theoretical...