As part of the TARGET project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, researchers at Freie UniversitÄt Berlin conducted a systematic literature search of all the available studies dealing with school shootings. The aim of the analysis was to clarify which social dynamics in the social network of perpetrators can be observed in advance as playing an important role in school shootings. Up to now, researchers had assumed that bullying between peers and the social exclusion of the perpetrators were the most prominent factors in school shootings. This study shows, however, that in many cases conflicts with teachers seemed to be a decisive factor in the school shooting cases investigated.
Researchers within the subproject of the TARGET research network analyzed 37 studies referring to a total of 126 attacks in 13 countries (USA, Canada, Germany, Finland, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Bosnia, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Thailand). Detailed information about social dynamics was found in 67 different case reports. The results of the study along with comments by national and international experts were now published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Developmental Science.
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