NCJ Number
241866
Date Published
April 2010
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This report provides an overview of incidents of targeted violence that have occurred at institutions of higher education (IHE), based on a cooperative open-source descriptive review by the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) following the Virginia Tech shootings on June 13, 2007, which killed 27 students and five faculty members and wounded 17 others.
Abstract
The criteria used in selecting and categorizing the incidents included in this study pertain to the victims ("targets") in the incidents, primarily regarding their connection to an IHE; timing of the perpetrator's target selection, the lethality of the assaults; and the time frame (between January 1, 1900 and December 31, 2008) and geographic location. Based on these criteria, 272 incidents of targeted violence were examined. Findings pertain to the location of the incident within the United States, when the incidents occurred (the decade), where the incidents occurred in relation to the IHE, characteristics of the perpetrators, the perpetrators' association with the IHE, the method of attack, and the victim characteristics. Qualitative observations pertain to the motivations and/or triggers of the attack, how the target selection compared with the actual victims, pre-incident behavior toward the targets, verbal/written threats, stalking/harassment, and whether others observed perpetrators' disturbing behavior prior to the incidents. The authors caution that the observations and recommendations of this report are limited, and users of the report should be cautious about drawing broad-based conclusions. This is a preliminary examination of the scope of this issue. 7 tables; 4 figures; and appended IHE definitions, additional examples of incidents, and definitions of incident categories