Here are 100 books that Harm to Others fans have personally recommended if you like
Harm to Others.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
Dr. Dewey Cornell is the foremost research of threat assessment in K-12 schools.
This book provides step-by-step guidelines on creating and running threat assessment teams. Dr. Cornell provides multiple sample documents and allows them to be copied, making this a very user-friendly text.
He also explains his research demonstrating the effectiveness and benefits of utilizing threat assessment teams.
Presenting the only K-12 school threat assessment model supported by controlled studies, this new manual is a sequel to the author's original manual, Guidelines for Responding to Student Threats of Violence. The new manual retains the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (VSTAG), but adds new research, improved forms, and more comprehensive coverage of student and non-student threats. Used nationwide. Training available from the author at www.schoolta.com.
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
John Van Dreal is a school psychologist with decades of experience developing the Salem-Keizer model of violence prevention in schools.
In addition to providing comprehensive threat assessment guidelines, the book also discusses other safety issues including dating violence, workplace violence, domestic violence, and stalking. Whereas some works related to school safety focus solely on students as potential perpetrators, this book also discusses dangers posed by adults.
Assessing Student Threats: Implementing the Salem-Keizer System, 2nd Edition is a manual for the application of a threat assessment system that follows the recommendations of the Safe Schools Initiative and the prescriptive outline provided by the FBI. Written from an educator's perspective with contributing authors from Law Enforcement, Public Mental Health, and the District Attorney's office, it contains an introduction to the basic concepts of threat assessment, a review of the research, and an outlined process for the application of a comprehensive, yet expeditious multi-disciplinary system. The book also includes the forms and protocols needed to assess threats, document concerns…
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
This is another excellent guide to establishing and running threat assessment teams in K-12 schools.
A particular strength, however, is the focus on not only detecting threats, but managing them. The discussion of safety plans and how to work with students who are at risk for violence, as well as the case histories illustrating this process, add significantly to the value of this book.
In 15-Minute Focus: Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management for K-12 Schools, Dr. Melissa A. Louvar Reeves explains the interrelated factors that play a role in a person’s decision to plan and carry out an act of violence.
Every year, stories about violence in schools make headlines around the world. And every year, questions surface: How could this have been prevented? What were the warning signs? What changes do we need to make in our schools and communities to prevent this from happening yet again?
This book will help answer those questions, as you learn about the factors that affect decision-making,…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I never wanted to study mass murder or violence of any kind. I was doing my internship for my Ph.D. in counseling psychology at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents when the attack at Columbine High School occurred. Within ten days of that attack, a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital because he was viewed as a Columbine-type risk. I was assigned to conduct a psychological evaluation of him. Then another potential school shooter was admitted. And another. Seeking insight into this population and learning how to recognize the warning signs and prevent impending attacks has become my life’s work.
This book is the remarkable story of a remarkable woman whose compassion for her students preventing a school massacre.
Unlike the other texts I’m recommending, this book will not tell you how to conduct threat assessments. It is an inspirational story that demonstrates the power of love and interpersonal connections to make our schools safer.
The bottom line is that the more that our schools are places where children feel that at least one adult cares about them, the safer they will be. This book portrays the kind of compassion that can save lives.
On September 28, 2016, school counselor Molly Hudgens was in her office at Sycamore Middle School when a fourteen-year-old armed with a semiautomatic handgun and an additional magazine of ammunition came to her in the counseling department. His plan was to kill people on campus. He told Hudgens she was the only person who could talk him out of it. After ninety minutes of talking with the young man, and ultimately praying on her knees with him, he relinquished the gun with no shots fired and no lives lost.
I love psychological thrillers because I have firsthand dealt with OCD and gaslighting. Therefore, I find the human mind fascinating, and how the line between sanity and insanity is changeable. I think as humans we want to feel safe and hence, we box things into categories but all these thrillers I have recommended force you to look outside of the boxes and they can be chillingly thought-provoking. I am obsessed with writing that gives the reader such graphic insight into a character’s thoughts and actions. If you want unputdownable books, these are the ones for you!
This book personally resonates with me as I suffer with OCD.
The character must overcome countless mental challenges now that she thinks she has met the man of her dreams. It is a brilliant portrayal of gaslighting, so accurate and chillingly on point. If you like books that are emotionally immersive and you can almost touch and breathe the characters, this is superb.
Catherine Bailey has been enjoying the single life long enough to know a catch when she sees one. Gorgeous, charismatic and spontaneous, Lee seems almost too perfect to be true. And her friends clearly agree, as each in turn falls under his spell. But what begins as flattering attentiveness and passionate sex turns into raging jealousy, and Catherine soon learns there is a darker side to Lee. His increasingly erratic, controlling behaviour becomes frightening, but no one believes her when she shares her fears. Increasingly isolated and driven into the darkest corner of her world, a desperate Catherine plans a…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
How do citizens learn to accept violence perpetuated by their own governments? Answering this profoundly relevant and timely question lies at the heart of Linstrum’s book–and data lies at the crux of the answer. He shows how, despite massive amounts of data about colonial violence circulating in postwar Britain, British people found ways to accommodate and justify that violence.
This book is a sobering challenge to the belief that better information produces better and more empathetic societies, showing that the connection between knowledge and enlightened behavior is not nearly as straightforward as we may want to believe.
An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain.
When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments…
I’ve been studying dehumanization, and its relationship to racism, genocide, slavery, and other atrocities, for more than a decade. I am the author of three books on dehumanization, one of which was awarded the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for non-fiction, an award that is reserved for books that make an outstanding contribution to understanding racism and human diversity. My work on dehumanization is widely covered in the national and international media, and I often give presentations at academic and non-academic venues, including one at the 2012 G20 economic summit where I spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.
Most people’s idea of lynching is the sanitized version that they have picked up from movies and TV. However, the practice of lynching, as it was carried out in the United States from the late 19th to well into the 20th century, was far more hideous than a few people hanging a man from a tree. This classic contribution concentrates on spectacle lynchings. These were public lynchings attended by hundreds or even thousands of spectators. They involved hours of torture and bodily mutilation, often culminating in the victim being burned alive. Lynching and Spectacleis a vital read for anyone wishing to understand the full horror of American Racism.
This title presents public reinforcement of white supremacy. Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America often exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In ""Lynching and Spectacle"", Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and what they derived from them. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a wide range of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema. The connections between lynching and these practices encouraged the horrific violence committed and gave it social acceptability.Wood expounds on the critical role…
As an equipment operator for the Army Corps of Engineers, I didn’t serve in a “combat” role, per se, but the engineers go wherever the military needs things built, so we were often repairing IED damage, hauling supplies outside the wire, or fortifying bases so the infantry, cavalry, etc. could do their job effectively. Coming home, I owe a lot of my successful reintegration to my writing and the many people who encouraged me to share it with the world. Now with my Master of Arts in English, I’ve taught college courses on military culture, and I present for veteran art groups, writing workshops, and high schools and colleges around the country.
Grossman is a former Army Ranger who digs deep into the psychological impact of taking human life through countless interviews with fellow soldiers of all kinds. Combining these accounts with thorough psychological research, Grossman comments on society's collective aversion to killing while helping us understand its complicated acceptance—and even encouragement—of wartime killing. What was most surprising to me was that historically, only about 4% of soldiers even fire their weapon during war, and how obviously that skews from the “norm” of combat portrayed in popular media. It’s an honest, eye-opening, and important piece of work that should be required reading for every service member, police officer, or anyone tasked with carrying society’s heaviest burden.
The good news is that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to kill in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The psychological cost for the rest of us is even more so: contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army's conditioning techniques and, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's thesis, is responsible for our rising rate of murder among the young. Upon its first publication, ON KILLING was hailed as a…
Like everyone else, I have life-long experience of caring and not caring for things; being sometimes careful and other times careless. Communication has been my central interest as a historical sociologist, and I’ve been considering its relationship to care (attachment, affection, worry, and burden) and security. I have always liked the word care, employing it often in the sense of warm attachment, but I have been looking at how care can at times enact control, violence, or abandonment.
Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.
Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.
In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as "indifferent" to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference makes a startling counter-argument: that what we see as societal unresponsiveness doesn't come from an absence of feeling but from an affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Kara Granzow demonstrates that mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space have been used to entrench violence against Indigenous people in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.
Traumatization and Its Aftermath
by
Antonieta Contreras,
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
When my late wife Margo Wilson suggested, over 40 years ago, that we should study homicides for what they might reveal about human motives and emotions, her idea seemed zany. But when we plunged into police investigative files and homicide databases, we quickly realized that we had struck gold, and homicide research became our passion. Our innovation was to approach the topic like epidemiologists, asking who is likely to kill whom and identifying the risk factors that are peculiar to particular victim-killer relationships. What do people reallycare about? Surveys and interviews elicit cheap talk; killing someone is drastic action.
Florida-based historian David Courtwright is best known for his analyses of the history of drug addiction and the drug business in the United States, but this volume is a fact-filled page-turner on America's lethal violence problem. Courtwright describes a frontier culture in which a reputation for violent capability was an essential social asset and persuasively explicates its similarities with the situation that faces single young men in America's underserved inner cities to this day. The interdisciplinary scope of Courtwright's scholarship guarantees that any reader will learn a great deal from his book. I found it unputdownable.
This book offers a look at violence in America - why it is so prevalent, and what and who are responsible. David Cartwright takes the long view of his subject, developing the historical patterns of violence and disorder in this country. Where there is violent and disorderly behaviour, he shows, there are plenty of men, largely young and single. What began in the mining camp and bunkhouse has simply continued in the urban world of today, where many young, armed, intoxicated, honour-conscious bachelors have reverted to frontier conditions. "Violent Land" combines social science with a narrative that spans and reinterprets…
