Although juvenile homicide rates in the United States have fallen considerably since 1994, American youth still engage in considerable violent behavior. As a result, there remains a compelling need to identify children and adolescents who may be prone to committing violence.

One warning sign of the potential for violent acts has now been underscored by two Ohio researchers: When a young person threatens to hurt someone, take it seriously. The reason? Those who threaten to use brute force are markedly more likely to deliver it than are those who do not make overt threats.

Mark Singer, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Daniel Flannery, Ph.D., of Kent State University in Ohio sought to examine the relationship between students’ threats of interpersonal violence and violent behaviors by scrutinizing data from three different surveys that had been conducted of 9,487 students between 1992 and 1997. Singer and Flannery’s report is published in the August Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The students had filled out questionnaires about how often they had threatened to hurt others and how often they had committed specific kinds of violence. For elementary and middle-school children, the questions addressed four types of violence: (1) hitting someone first, (2) hitting someone after he or she hits you, (3) beating someone up, (4) and attacking someone with a knife.

High school students confronted the same four questions and also were asked if they had ever shot at someone with a gun.

Of the 9,487 students surveyed, 3,724 were in six public high schools in Cleveland, a Cleveland suburb, a small Ohio town, and Denver, Colo. Their socioeconomic status ranged from low income to upper-middle class. Of the students surveyed, 2,245 were elementary and middle-school children in 11 public schools in Cleveland, a small Ohio city, and a rural district of Ohio. They were primarily lower to lower-middle class socioeconomically.

The remaining 3,518 students were third to sixth graders in 16 Tucson, Ariz., public schools. They were from lower to lower-middle class urban and suburban neighborhoods.

Across the three samples, the percentage of African Americans ranged from 6 percent to 35 percent, Caucasians from 31 percent to 57 percent, and Hispanics from 5 percent to 51 percent. About half of all students surveyed were male. The investigators believe that this large and diverse sample enhanced the validity of their study.

Threatening others either infrequently or frequently, as compared with not threatening others at all, was significantly associated with violent behaviors.

Students who reported that they infrequently threatened others were about three to four times more likely to report exhibiting violent behaviors than were students who stated that they had made threats against others.

The relationship between often making threats against others and violent behaviors was especially strong, and highest for the most severe forms of violence—knife attacks and shootings. For example, those who reported that they often threatened others were 14 to 23 times more likely to report having attacked someone with a knife and 17 times more likely also to report having shot someone than were those students who reported they did not threaten others.

The strong relationship the researchers discovered between self-reported threats of violence and self-reported interpersonal violence has important implications for violence.

Singer noted, for example, that "teachers, guidance counselors, and principals need to take these threats seriously and to evaluate youngsters who threaten frequently for their potential for violence." Similarly, children should be taught to tell a responsible adult if they hear a youngster saying he is going to hurt another, Singer asserted, since "it parallels what we are already doing with children and suicide prevention. We teach them that if they know someone is threatening to hurt himself, that is a secret they cannot keep."

Carl Bell, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago and an authority on violence, told Psychiatric News that he is not at all surprised by Singer and Flannery’s findings. "One of the biggest predictors of violence is a past history," he said. "You should ordinarily take people at their word if they say they’re going to shoot you."