Association News

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine conducted a three-day virtual workshop July 21 – 23: Managing, Reducing, and Preventing Fear of Violence. The workshop is now available online at no charge. It includes a presentation by IACLEA Special Adviser Jeff Allison on lessons learned from the national Averted School Violence (ASV) Database. A key takeaway from Allison’s presentation is that more research is needed on whether the measures put in place by school officials and law enforcement that are effective in preventing targeted school violence also succeed in reducing fear among students, teachers, and parents.

The workshop is valuable, because as the understanding of global violence advances, so has awareness of the deleterious effects of exposure to fear on human development and on exacerbating collective violence. Fear can also motivate positive and individual and collective changes. Prevention efforts can benefit from a better understanding of the many ways fear can influence violence.

Recordings of all six workshop sessions are available at:

https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/07-21-2020/managing-reducing-and-preventing-fear-of-violence-a-workshop.

The National Averted School Violence (ASV) Database is administered by the National Police Foundation with funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office). The COPS Office made a grant award to IACLEA to expand the ASV Database to include cases from colleges and universities, in addition to K–12 schools. The ASV Database contains 236 cases of which 51 are from institutions of higher education. While the database includes completed attacks, the vast majority of cases involve targeted violence that was prevented.

IACLEA members are encouraged to contribute to the body of knowledge: if you are aware of an averted attack at a college or university you can enter the case anonymously in the ASV Database at www.avertedschoolviolence.org.

 If you would like assistance entering the case, please contact jallison@iaclea.org.

Campus public safety officials are also encouraged to register as ASV Database users on the same website. This will provide full access to the cases in the database, which may be useful as you prepare presentations on targeted violence prevention for your community or design tabletop exercises. Lessons learned from averted attacks also may help inform your policy, training, and procurement decisions.