School attacks: The perpetrator, society, and the law

A school is a place where a child should feel safe, build friendships, and prepare for the future. A student taking up arms in the same school fundamentally shatters this sense of security. Following such an attack, it is of course necessary to investigate who the perpetrator is, what they have experienced, and under what conditions they reached this point. However, it is not possible to understand the attack by reducing it to the story of a single child. What happened in that child's environment, at what stages violence could have been detected, and what responsibilities must be fulfilled to prevent similar incidents must also be discussed.

The Global Dimension of School Attacks

Deadly attacks carried out in schools are not a new phenomenon. However, school attacks carried out specifically with firearms have long been at the center of social and political debates in the United States.

In 1999, 12 students and one teacher lost their lives in an attack carried out by two students at Columbine High School in the state of Colorado. Columbine has become one of the internationally recognized symbols of school attacks. Following the attack, a broad debate began regarding youth culture, peer relationships, access to weapons, and the way the media presents attackers. However, school attacks in the US did not begin with Columbine. The historical significance of the event lies in its bringing the existing problem to the world agenda.

In a study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2024, 1,453 school shootings were recorded in the US between the 1997-1998 and 2021-2022 academic years. The definition used by the study also includes the brandishing or firing of a weapon on school grounds and a bullet hitting the school area. Therefore, this number does not consist solely of attacks in which more than one person was killed. The research reveals the course of gun-related incidents on school grounds over time.

When explaining this picture, emphasis is placed on access to firearms, the safe storage of weapons in homes, and the social impacts of armed violence. While the personal characteristics of the attackers are important, they do not provide a sufficient explanation on their own. Access to weapons, pre-attack behaviors, and the preventive capacity of institutions are evaluated together. Researchers working on school attacks point out that such acts cannot be reduced to a single cause. Peer relationships, social conflicts, and problems in the school environment are among the important topics for understanding the attacks. However, it cannot be said that every child experiencing similar conditions will turn to violence. Likewise, assuming that every attack occurs with the same dynamics does not offer a sound assessment. Different processes can lead to similar results.

School attacks in Turkey and the changing debate

The history of school violence in Turkey is much older than the armed attacks experienced in recent years. Knife attacks among students, violence against teachers, and conflicts around schools have been on the agenda for a long time. However, the armed attacks that took place at Ahmet Koyuncu Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in the Siverek district of Şanlıurfa on April 14, 2026, and at Ayser Çalık Secondary School in Kahramanmaraş the following day, made it necessary to address the issue again and in a more comprehensive manner.

These attacks also revealed the human dimension of the debate regarding school safety. Schools are institutions where children spend a significant part of the day, build peer relationships, and interact with adults. The violence experienced here does not only affect the people who are attacked. It also shakes the students' sense of security, the working conditions of teachers, and the trust families feel when sending their children to school.

The studies of the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) on youth violence indicate that the issue should be evaluated together with economic, social, and institutional conditions. Topics such as young people's expectations for the future, their social relationships, being dragged into crime, and access to weapons should be addressed within this framework. Explaining school attacks solely through the psychology of the attacker can lead to overlooking the environmental conditions in which the events emerge.

There is a point to be noted here. Not every act of violence that occurs at school falls into the same category as an armed attack in which more than one person is killed. A fight between students, a knife attack, and a pre-planned mass act have different characteristics. This distinction must be maintained for statistics and research to be evaluated soundly.

How does a child see violence as possible?

One of the most frequently raised explanations following school attacks is peer bullying. Being constantly humiliated, excluded, mocked, or unable to find a place for oneself in the school environment can affect a child's social and emotional development. Some children may have difficulty coping with these experiences and may turn their anger into thoughts of revenge over time.

Robert Agnew's General Strain Theory, developed in 1992, offers a useful framework for examining this relationship. Agnew explains that negative experiences, losses, and obstacles in front of the goals a person wants to achieve can create emotions such as anger, and that these emotions can facilitate turning to crime under certain conditions. The theory does not suggest that every child who is bullied will resort to violence. It emphasizes that the same experience can produce different results in different children and that individual and social conditions are decisive.

Albert Bandura's approach of moral disengagement is also important for understanding how violence can be legitimized. A person can justify their harmful behavior, blame the victim, or belittle the consequences of the act. Presenting an attack as revenge or a show of strength can be part of this intellectual process. The praise of violence in digital environments and the heroization of attackers should also be examined separately.

However, it is not correct to establish an inevitable cause-and-effect relationship between bullying and school attacks. The vast majority of children who are exposed to bullying do not resort to violence. It cannot be said that every attacker has a history of bullying. The child's family relationships, circle of friends, experiences of being exposed to violence, relationship with digital environments, and access to weapons should be evaluated together.

An important dimension of this debate is the signs before the attack. The concept referred to as leakage in the criminology literature refers to a person revealing their intention to harm or preparation for an attack to others. This can manifest in the form of written messages, social media posts, or plans told to others. Such signs are important in terms of threat assessment. However, viewing every angry word or disciplinary problem as preparation for an attack can also lead to the stigmatization of children. What is important is that serious and concrete signs are evaluated on the basis of expertise.

Research on the prevention of school attacks points to the limitations of methods based solely on profiling attackers or automatic punishment. Approaches that evaluate students' behaviors, the conditions they are in, and their needs together offer a more functional ground. This approach requires that, in addition to schools increasing security measures, they establish a system that can evaluate students' requests for help.

The child's crime, the family's responsibility

One of the most debated topics in public opinion following school attacks is the responsibility of the attacker's family. Especially since the perpetrator is a child, the parents' upbringing style, whether they knew about the child's behavior, and how the weapon used in the attack was accessed are brought to the agenda.

The principle of the personality of criminal responsibility, regulated in Article 20 of the Turkish Penal Code, forms the basis of this debate. When a child commits a crime, their parents cannot be held responsible for the same crime simply because they are their parents. Criminal responsibility is based on the person's own act. The existence of a deficiency in the child's upbringing does not mean that the parent has criminal responsibility for a specific crime.

However, the parent's own behavior can be examined separately. Knowingly helping while aware of the preparation for an attack, making a concrete contribution to the commission of the crime, or keeping the weapon in a way that the child can access it may require different legal evaluations depending on the circumstances of the event. In such cases, the source of responsibility is not the status of being a parent, but the person's own behavior and the relevant legal conditions.

Article 369 of the Turkish Civil Code regulates the legal responsibility arising from the damage caused by a minor under the supervision of the head of the household. The head of the household may face compensation liability unless they can prove that they exercised the necessary care or that the damage would have occurred even if they had exercised the necessary care. This regulation belongs to a different field than criminal responsibility. A person being held liable to pay compensation and being punished for a crime are not based on the same legal criteria.

This distinction is also important in comparative law. In the US, following the 2021 attack at Oxford High School in Michigan, where four students lost their lives, the attacker's mother and father were convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In the Crumbley case, the parents' behavior before the attack, the procurement and storage of the weapon, and what they did in the face of known risks were at the center of the debate. The case is a striking example showing that parents' own behavior can lead to criminal responsibility under certain conditions.

This decision does not mean that parents can be punished in every school attack in the US. The rules regarding parental responsibility vary by state. While criminal responsibility is evaluated based on the person's own behavior and fault, legal compensation liability can be based on different conditions.

In Germany, Article 19 of the Penal Code regulates that children who have not completed the age of 14 at the time of the act do not have criminal responsibility. Article 832 of the German Civil Code addresses the legal responsibility of those responsible for fulfilling the duty of supervision for the damage caused by the minor under their supervision to third parties. These examples show that the status of being a parent and responsibility based on personal fault should be separated from each other.

For Turkey as well, the responsibility of parents should be evaluated based on the concrete event. To whom the weapon accessed by the child belongs, how the weapon was stored, whether the preparation for the attack was known, and whether there were preventable risks can be investigated. However, the severity of the crime committed by the child cannot be considered sufficient on its own for the punishment of the mother and father.

Responsibility and prevention

While the responsibility of families is discussed following school attacks, the duties of school administrations and public institutions should also be evaluated. If bullying has continued for a long time in a school, if serious threats have been reported but not evaluated, or if there are preventable deficiencies in terms of security, these should be investigated. It cannot be said that school administrations or public officials are legally responsible for every attack. For this, concrete obligations, violations, and the necessary legal connection must be demonstrated.

There is a need for permanent and holistic policies to prevent school attacks. First of all, guidance and psychological counseling services in schools should be strengthened; these units should be transformed from structures that only intervene when certain problems arise into a system that regularly monitors students, identifies their needs at an early stage, and establishes cooperation with relevant experts when necessary. The number, professional equipment, and time that guidance teachers and psychological counselors can devote to students should be increased, and conditions should be created under which they can perform their duties effectively. Complaints of peer bullying should be followed carefully, and application mechanisms should be established where students can convey their problems without fear and in confidence. In addition, security policies aimed at preventing school attacks should be reviewed; a cooperation system should be established between the school, family, health services, and relevant public institutions that respects children's rights and the protection of personal data, aims to identify risks at an early stage, and provides the necessary support in a timely manner.

These measures cannot be left to investigations conducted after an attack. Following up on students' requests for help, evaluating serious threats by experts, and directing children at risk to appropriate support services should be integrated into the ordinary functioning of educational life. In a school attack, criminal responsibility should be determined by considering the age and fault of the person who committed the act. The responsibility of the family, the school, and public institutions should also be investigated within the framework of their own obligations. Putting everyone's responsibility in the same basket makes the legal evaluation ambiguous. Loading the responsibility solely onto the child can lead to overlooking the conditions that contributed to the emergence of the attack.

Children being able to receive education in safety at schools depends on protection mechanisms that function within daily life. A school environment should be created where bullying is taken seriously, access to weapons is limited, threats are evaluated carefully, and children can ask for help. Criminal law determines responsibility after a crime is committed. Education and social policies, on the other hand, should focus on reducing the conditions that facilitate children turning to violence. The functioning of these two areas together forms the basis of a permanent approach in the fight against school attacks.

Attorney Deniz Ali İlkem Demir