NCJ Number
185569
Date Published
1998
Length
33 pages
Annotation
This analysis of children’s aggression at home and at school focuses on the stability of such aggressive or violent behaviors across different settings and across time, the early behaviors that predict later ones, the risk factors for the most dysfunctional developmental pathways, and the specific adverse developmental pathways.
Abstract
Aggressive behaviors in school settings vary in seriousness from hostile teasing, pushing, bullying, and ostracism to physical fighting, the use of weapons, robbery, homicide, and sex offenses. Youth most often direct aggression in school at peers; they sometimes target teachers. Children’s aggressive behavior in school is moderately stable. The research on developmental pathways reveals incremental stages of involvement in aggressive behavior, with markers that predict the likelihood of progression from mild aggression to serious behavior and sometimes to eventual criminal violence. Aggression in the home relates to aggression in the school setting; certain risk factors in the home predict aggression at school. These risk factors include child abuse, parents’ inadequate child-rearing practices, disruptions in family functioning, antisocial parents, and aggressive interactions between siblings. However, the way in which family risk factors relate to the onset of aggression at school is less clear. Important issues related to aggression in schools relate to aggressive peers, victims becoming aggressors, males’ aggression toward females, males’ assaults on teachers, aggression following school transitions, and aggression and dropping out of school. Further research should focus on several high-priority areas, including the prevalence of different types of aggression across the full range of grade levels and the complex linkages and interactions between aggression in the home, the school, and the community. Figures and 101 references