Over the past several years, American educational institutions have seen an increase in violence in general, but more specifically, gun violence by students. There have been many theories as to why American schools have become places of fear instead of institutions of learning. Moreover, the root causes of the increased violence that is occurring in our schools must be explored if our society is going to save our greatest resources, our children. Addressing Violence in the U.S. Public School System discusses how violence has played a significant role within the educational system. Covering key topics such as mental health, bullying, grief, and trauma, this premier reference source is ideal for industry professionals, policymakers, administrators, government officials, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Analyzing what is known about violence against women, this book centers on the contrast between the U.S.’s historic focus on a criminal legal framework and the human rights lens used globally by feminist activists. Distilling the existing evidence base and literature on violence against women in the United States, this book includes an overview of forms of violence, the prevalence of violence, contexts in which violence occurs, and debates about intervention and prevention. It engages with how human rights frameworks define violence against women as a cause and consequence of women’s inequality, and explores how race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, and sexual orientation shape experiences of victimization, perpetration, and institutional responses. Chapters synthesize prevalence methods and data, key feminist concepts, impacts and aftermath of violence, what is known about perpetrators, the history of anti-violence activism, violence against women on college campuses and in the media, and how the criminal legal systems respond. Contested issues, such as prostitution and pornography, and the extent to which commercial sex can be understood as a form of, and/or context for, violence against women, are also explored. The book closes with a final chapter offering directions for adopting a human rights approach to ending violence against women in the United States. By offering an analysis of how violence against women has come to be named in activist, policy, and academic arenas, Violence Against Women in the US is an essential resource for students, scholars, and practitioners.

“An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern—the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm—America isn’t a leader. We are disturbingly laggard. To confront this problem, we must first understand it. In this carefully researched and deeply emotional book, Senator Chris Murphy dissects our country’s violence-filled history and the role that our unique obsession with firearms plays in this national epidemic. Murphy tells the story of his profound personal transformation in the wake of the mass murder at Newtown, and his subsequent immersion in the complicated web of influences that drive American violence. Murphy comes to the conclusion that while America’s relationship to violence is indeed unique, America is not inescapably violent. Even as he details the reasons we’ve tolerated so much bloodshed for so long, he explains that we have the power to change. Murphy takes on the familiar arguments, obliterates the stale talking points, and charts the way to a fresh, less polarized conversation about violence and the weapons that enable it—a conversation we urgently need in order to transform the national dialogue and save lives.

In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the history of New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories, and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how Chicano/a works often celebrate an idealized colonial Spanish past as a way to counter stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous racial and ethnic inferiority. As they demonstrate, these texts often erase the participation of Spanish and Mexican settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Foregrounding the relationship between literature and settler colonialism, they consider how literary representations of land are manipulated and redefined in ways that point to the changing practices of dispossession. In so doing, Sánchez and Pita prompt critics to reconsider the role of settler colonialism in the deep history of the United States and how spatial and discursive violence are always correlated.

The U.S.ÐMexico border is frequently presented by contemporary media as a violent and dangerous place. But that is not a new perception. For decades the border has been constructed as a topographic metaphor for all forms of illegality, in which an ineffable link between space and violence is somehow assumed. The sociological and cultural implications of violence have recently emerged at the forefront of academic discussions about the border. And yet few studies have been devoted to one of its most disturbing manifestations: gender violence. This book analyzes this pervasive phenomenon, including the femicides in Ciudad Ju‡rez that have come to exemplify, at least for the media, its most extreme manifestation. Contributors to this volume propose that the study of gender-motivated violence requires interpretive and analytical strategies that draw on methods reaching across the divide between the social sciences and the humanities. Through such an interdisciplinary conversation, the book examines how such violence is (re)presented in oral narratives, newspaper reports, films and documentaries, novels, TV series, and legal discourse. It also examines the role that the media have played in this process, as well as the legal initiatives that might address this pressing social problem. Together these essays offer a new perspective on the implications of, and connections between, gendered forms of violence and topics such as mechanisms of social violence, the micro-social effects of economic models, the asymmetries of power in local, national, and transnational configurations, and the particular rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics of discourses that represent violence.

Within educational research, the over-disciplining of Black and Indigenous students is most often presented as a problem located within pathologized or misunderstood communities. That is, theories and proposed solutions tend toward those that ask how we can make students of color from particular backgrounds more suited to US educational standards rather than questioning the racist roots of those standards. Tender Violence in US Schools takes as a provocation this "discipline gap," in exploring a thus far unconsidered stance and asking how white women (the majority of US teachers) have historically understood their roles in the disciplining of Black and Indigenous students, and how and why their role has been constructed over time and space in service to institutions of the white settler colonial state.