Kids - How Safe Are Our Schools?, School Safety: Metal Detectors In Every School?, The Bad Seed

Our children are our future. Can we keep them safe? Are we safe from them?

This chapter explores the topics of children as victims, as aggressors, and as consumers of pop culture in the form of violent video games. We begin with a look at school safety to determine how realistic are our fears for our children. Back in the 1950s we built bomb shelters to protect them against alien attacks. Somewhere between then and now, the ranks of the enemies of our children grew. Today it seems we must protect our children against threats from abroad and against enemies much closer to home — other children, family members, so-called friends. To keep our children safe at school, we have installed police officers. When surveyed in 2002, 95% of school-based police officers reported that their schools are vulnerable to a terrorist attack and 79% reported that their schools were not adequately prepared to respond to a terrorism attack.¹ If these threats are real, are we endangering our children if we fail to install metal detectors in every school in the land?

We've heard it again and again: Ours is a violent society. Our children are not immune. Our second group of panels looks at trends in the number of children who have been arrested for violent crimes. We then look at the issues of abused and missing children to try and answer these questions: Are abuse rates up? Are there more missing children? Does media coverage help to find missing children?

We close the chapter with a look at violent video games. Technological advances have made the experience of video games a lot like real life. Does playing violent video games make children more prone to acts of violence?