BREAKING THE CODE OF SILENCE: A LESSON FROM COLUMBINE
Crisis Intervention News
November 2011
Dear Readers,
The stream of school shootings since Columbine has left both the public and crisis intervenors with a bitter question: Since circumstances all but rule out intervention, are there really any tools for prevention?
Retired FBI hostage negotiator Dwayne Fuselier and professor and author Dr. Jeffrey Daniels believe that there are. Here’s why.
The school shootings have one characteristic that separate them from other acts of school violence: the shooter does not suddenly snap; rather, the shooting is meticulously planned over a period of time. The Secret Service has found that in more than 80 percent of critical incidents, the shooters explicitly revealed their intentions to their peers. Far from being “invisible,” most shooters were already of concern to people in their lives.
And this is the critical second part: students know, but they do not talk.
Prevention, then, means taking the fight to the front lines: the students and their parents. It means getting teenagers to talk to parents, something that is difficult in the best of times, but perhaps more so in this situation, when there are significant reasons for their silence.
This is where Fuselier and Daniels come in. Breaking the Code of Silence takes us straight to the heart – and art – of getting people to talk.
As Fuselier puts it, “These communication strategies are the best that hostage negotiators have, and they have been field tested for 30 years. If they can be effective in a ‘worst case’ scenario that prevents homicide and suicides, they can help create open lines of communication, at a much earlier stage, with your teenager.”
From dealing with bullying to preventing school shootings, communication is the first and best prevention we have. If we can find a way to bring these strategies home, if funding and training now devoted to aftershock and trauma can be expanded to prevention, then perhaps we will have found the means to forestall these tragedies and save precious lives.
Please contact Lynne Kinnucan at kinnucan@patriot.net, or the authors at dfuselier@msn.com and jeffrey.daniels@mail.wvu.edu, to learn more about their upcoming trainings and how to put these strategies to work.
Sincerely,
Lynne Kinnucan
Editor, Crisis Intervention News
