Following the recent school shooting in Santee, California, students, parents, and school personnel agonized over what might have happened had those who heard the perpetrator talk about his intention to take a gun to school and shoot people intervened. In a number of earlier school shootings peers reported such conversations and violence was averted. But students, and adults, have other important responsibilities as witnesses or bystanders as well. The perpetrators of many school shootings have been described as victims of bullies, with others passively witnessing their suffering.

Many students who are victims are themselves not aggressive. Many suffer quietly. Others are both victims and bullies themselves. A very few – perhaps those who have had hurtful, painful experiences outside the school as well or at least have no support and loving connection to parents, relatives or peers – strike out with the level of violence manifested in the school shootings we have seen in the past few years.

Until recently, much of the world, both students and adults, has seen kids in school picking on each other as simply the way things are. The teen arrested for the Santee, California shootings was picked on, but not more than other kids, according to his peers. They saw his experience as “normal.”

My collaborators and I at UMass have conducted, at the invitation of the Belchertown schools, a very detailed study of students' experience of their lives in school, including aggression and bullying. We studied students from second grade through high school.