Code of silence: Students' perceptions of school climate and willingness to intervene in a peer's dangerous plan.

Abstract

The current study presented 1,933 adolescents from 13 schools with a scenario about a hypothetical peer's plan to "do something dangerous" at school and asked how likely they would be to respond with four different actions: intervene directly, tell a teacher or principal, discuss it with a friend but not an adult, and do nothing. High school students were less likely than those in middle school to say they would approach the peer directly or confide in a teacher or principal. Students were most likely to favor taking action on their own over all of the other response strategies. Students with positive perceptions of their schools were more likely to say they would do something rather than ignore their peer's dangerous intentions. These relationships were mediated by students' beliefs that confiding in a teacher may have unfavorable consequences. Findings from this study support the important role schools play in creating a culture where students take responsibility for one another.Keywords school climate; adolescents; teachers; intervention; peers On March 5th, 2001, Charles "Andy" Williams stomped into Santana High School in Santee, California, and opened gunfire. In 6 min, he killed 2 students, injured 13 others, and stripped an entire community of its sense of security. As many as 20 students were privy to Williams' intentions to "shoot up the school on Monday," yet this information was never revealed to an adult (Figueroa & Rogers, 2005;Moran, 2001Moran, , 2002. The fact that peers knew but did not take action is not unique to this instance. Statistics in the Safe School Initiative report funded by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education reveal that in 81% of school shootings between 1974 and 2000, the attacker told someone about his plans-almost always a peer, sibling, or friend (Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002). Yet, these young people decided not to alert anyone in authority about the attack.Despite myriad popular press stories on this "code of silence" surrounding school shootings (e.g., Dedman, 2000;Moran & Kucher, 2001;Roth, 2001;Springer, 2005) and youth culture more generally, the extant literature that might help to explain the phenomenon is rather scant. This leads to the question, What is the psychology underlying the inaction of fellow students NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript who might have prevented harm by acting on their knowledge of a peer's dangerous intentions? While incidents of lethal school violence are rare, situations in which classmates have knowledge of a peer's plan to do something dangerous are not. Less "extreme" cases of students ignoring the dangerous behaviors of peers play out every day in schools. Our goal is to understand this code of silence. Thus, the current study presented adolescents with a scenario about a hypothetical peer's plans to "do something dangerous" at school and asked the participating youths how likely they would be to respond with four different actions. We looked at ...

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