A LOOK AT THE WEEK AHEADApril 13 - April 20, 2001OFFICE OF NEWS AND MEDIA RELATIONS(215) 204-7476 Fax: (215) 204-4403
MCVEIGH'S EXECUTION: WILL IT BRING CLOSURE TO SURVIVORS? -- Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision this week to show Timothy McVeigh's execution on closed-circuit TV will accommodate the wishes of families who lost loved ones in the Oklahoma City bombing. But Temple behavioral psychologist Frank Farley says that not all the survivors, despite their best hopes, will find solace and vindication in watching McVeigh die. "Some people will feel a finality to it, a closure. But for others it will open up and bring back the horror. It could bring back a flood of unhappy and painful emotions." To really move on from the horror of that day, says Farley, survivors, even years later, must find a way to get beyond their contempt for McVeigh and try to focus on the loved ones they lost. "To move on, you can't keep focused on a perpetrator. You have to focus on the beauty and the memory of the loved ones who are gone." Reach Dr. Farley at his office, 215-204-6024, or at home, 215-881-7776.
POST-COLUMBINE I: TESTING SCHOOL CLIMATES -- While the Colorado school shootings two years ago brought the issue of addressing trauma in kids to light, school and government officials are still pursuing "police tactics," rather than addressing mental health issues, in an effort to make schools safer, says Temple school psychologist Irwin Hyman, author of the book Dangerous Schools. "The Columbine tragedy did make schools aware of the problem of trauma in kids. They've learned that people who experience trauma need to be able to talk about what they've seen and process it." But the shootings also made people think that school violence is an epidemic, despite statistics to the contrary. "People are so fearful that they've over-reacted and they think that having police in the schools is the answer. There's still relatively little examination of the climate in schools, where teachers, administrators and peers contribute to the alienation that a lot of kids feel," says Hyman, who has developed a scale to help measure the climate of alienation in schools. Reach Dr. Hyman at his home office, 215-579-4865, or through the Office of News & Media Relations, 215-204-7476.
POST-COLUMBINE II: IT'S STILL ABOUT GUNS -- Health studies professor Alice Hausman, whose research interests include youth violence prevention, agrees that turning schools into fortresses isn't the answer. "Schools need to back off of zero tolerance and let common sense be the rule," says Hausman. "The root problem common to all the school shootings remains easy access to guns. It's one thing to make a threat, but it's only the kids with access to guns that can carry the threats out." Reach Dr. Hausman through the Office of News and Media Relations.
Cheryl AfonsoTemple UniversityOffice of News andMedia [email protected]
RSS