Collaborating to End Mass Violence

The 1999 Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, was a watershed moment that has echoed through the years and made school shootings a phenomenon with which American communities must grapple. For Dr. Eric Madfis, who was a high school student at the time in Massachusetts, it's an event that profoundly influenced his life.

Madfis is a sociologist and a professor of criminal justice in the School of Social Work & Criminal Justice at UW Tacoma. He is at the heart of the creation of the Violence Prevention and Transformation Research Collaborative (VPTRC), and he is working with other criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, educators and local community organizations to find ways to stop violence in general, with a focus on mass and school shootings and hate crimes in particular.

"There was a mass shootings working group started by the Washington state legislature," said Madfis. "That work resulted in a number of different laws including school safety centers and mandated threat assessment across the state. I testified in favor of that." Madfis said that members of the Vatheuer Family Foundation saw his testimony and offered to collaborate with him, and fund the VPTRC, which does research in restorative and transformative justice, and how those practices can help in healing where tragedies have occurred, and in preventing future incidents. At the heart of that research is threat assessment and work with communities and school districts to identify ways to prevent shootings and violence.

A traditional response to threats of violence by students involves treating all such threats harshly with penalties such as suspension and expulsion. In a 2020 interview with UW News, Madfis described how threat assessment differs from the traditional approach. "Threat assessment focuses upon the substantive analysis of existing threats rather than attempts to forecast the future behavior of people based on typical personality profiles, mental health issues, broad warning signs, or other aggregate data pertaining to individual or demographic characteristics."

"Instead of a zero-tolerance response, there is a lot of research that suggests threat assessments reduce school exclusions, suspension and expulsions," Madfis said. The research includes looking at issues surrounding race, class, and gender as well: researchers have found that most school mass shootings are carried out by white males in middle class or affluent communities.

The VPTRC held its first event in December, a training for practitioners doing threat assessment in K-12 schools and universities across the Pacific Northwest. "We had speakers who were K-12 threat assessment officials, as well as college and community safety officials and administrators from all over Washington," said Madfis. There were 75 people from around Puget Sound and beyond in attendance, along with UW Tacoma students, faculty, and staff.

The VPTRC is hosting another gathering on May 9, called "Mass Shootings in the United States: What makes us unique?" Several guest speakers will be on hand including Dr. Adam Lankford, professor and chair of criminology at the University of Alabama, Dr. Daniel Gascón, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Dr. Kristina Anderson Froling, founder of the Koshka Foundation for Safe Schools, which also helps fund the VPTRC. Froling is a survivor of the Virginia Tech mass shooting in 2007, and is now based in Seattle.

Along with Gascón and Lankford, Madfis contributed to and edited a book called "All-American Massacre: The Tragic Role of American Culture and Society in Mass Shootings," published in 2023. He is also the author of two other books and dozens of academic articles dealing with mass shootings, school violence and prevention.

"Adam Lankford is probably the most prolific author about mass shootings in the world," Madfis said. "We worked on "All-American Massacre" together, and it's all about different causes of mass shootings. So, we talk about masculinity, mental health, politics, media influences, racism, gun access and a lot of other things that contribute."

Madfis is currently collaborating on an upcoming book with a survivor of the Columbine school shooting who is now a teacher. The book deals with restorative practices in preventing and healing from school shootings.

He notes that communication is key in preventing mass shootings. "The culture of the community really counts. Administrators and teachers who are in touch with the students, and students who don't feel bound to a code of silence, and can talk to school officials, are a big part of prevention." This event hosted by the VPTRC is one opportunity of many to raise awareness and build relationships across the Pacific Northwest to further such crucial violence prevention work.

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