School violence prevention: silent mentoring

Abstract

As a result of the media’s attention to recent school shooting tragedies, school violence is now a major concern of educators across the United States. There are many theories of causes of school violence and many different attempts to prevent or reduce the likelihood of violence occurring at schools. This paper will review and analyze the literature related to one of these attempts, school-based mentoring programs. School-based mentoring programs many times are aimed at increasing students’ self-esteem by gaining one-on-one attention from an adult as well as by providing them with a positive role model who can serve as an emotional outlet. The main objective of these programs is to allow students to develop trusting relationships with staff members so that the mentees themselves are less likely to act out violently and also so that they will be more likely to report any suspicions of other students planning to act out violently. One mentoring program that has been developed is designed to provide a significant relationship with an adult to a child with low self-esteem who is at-risk for acting out violently. This program is unique in that the students being mentored do not know that they are in the program. The purpose of this paper is to review and critically analyze the literature related to school violence prevention and mentoring programs.