Campus Violence In The United States: Causes And Roots

American Campus was and is usually idealized to be a sanctum for academic study. However, beneath the semblance of peaceful ivory tower, American campus nowadays is on and off plagued by an alloy of miscellaneous violence which has increasingly become a serous social problem. On the one hand, violence is taking place on American campus on a more frequent basis, and on the other hand, the way the violence is committed tends to be crueler, more violent and traumatically hurtful. In view of the increasingly worsening situation, it would be of enormous significance to look into the nature and scope of current violence on American campus and reveal the root causes for campus violence.This thesis presents the vandalistic behavior, bullying, sexual violence, hate violence, and mass murder as the typical violence typology on campus. According to the social learning theory, violence is interpreted as an outcome of students appropriating from their environments and popular culture aggressive behavior. Drawing upon the social learning theory, this thesis looks into a complex set of social factors that give rise to campus violence in the U.S., including the violence cult, gun ownership, and social tension factors such as racism, sexism and religious conflicts. Despite decades-long efforts taken by American society to combat violence, the adverse trend has not yet been reversed, or is likely to be in the foreseeable future. The underlying reason in that respect lies in some cultural, political and social forces deep-rooted in the American culture, which make the campus violence disease determinedly intractable, or even ineradicable. In this sense, to understand campus violence is in fact to understand American culture and society.