Violence Prevention and Safe Schools
Strategies that empower students to deal constructively with interpersonal conflicts, cultural differences, and the violence embedded in American culture need to be grounded in day-to-day experience. The fundamental challenge is to engage young people in learning the skills and processes that will enable them to manage and resolve conflict constructively. When youth experience success with negotiation, mediation, or consensus decisionmaking in school or other youth-serving settings, they are more likely to use these conflict resolution processes elsewhere in their lives.

Schools alone cannot change a violent society; however, they can:
  • Teach alternatives to violence.
  • Teach students to act responsibly in social settings.
  • Teach students to understand and accept the consequences of their behavior.

Conflict resolution education provides youth with the knowledge, abilities, and processes needed to choose alternatives to self-destructive, violent behavior when confronted with interpersonal and intergroup conflict. The expectation is that when youth learn constructive ways to address what leads to violence, the incidence and intensity of that conflict will diminish.

Systemic Change

A conflict resolution program provides an effective alternative to a traditional discipline program. Youth who grow up in circumstances in which they are socialized to violence, physical abuse, or even death will not be brought readily into submission by such punishments as lowered grades, time out, detention, suspension, or even expulsion. Alternatives that lead to long-term changes in attitudes and behavior are needed. Conflict resolution programs are an important part of those alternatives because they invite participation and expect those who choose to participate to plan more effective behavior and then to behave accordingly.

To realize maximum results from conflict resolution education programs, schools need to examine their systems and, if necessary, reform them to create a context that facilitates the development and support of the program. Systemic change calls for cooperation to be the normative expectation, both behaviorally and academically, and for adults to interact noncoercively with youth. The goal of making school a safe haven in which youth can gain respite from violence in order to think and learn is a good one. However, it cannot be realized apart from creating an antiviolent vision shared by everyone in the building.

Conflict resolution, when implemented not only as a curriculum to be taught but as a lifestyle to be lived by both adults and youth, fosters continuous academic and social growth. Implementation of a conflict resolution program can help schools create their governance structures, develop policies, identify goals, make curriculum decisions, and plan for assessment of learning. Faculty and students work and learn together while supporting one another. When conflict resolution is practiced by all, respect, caring, tolerance, and community building become "the way we do things around here."

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