Youth Violence Prevention

Dear Colleagues,

Efforts to improve school discipline, safety, and child and youth mental health have been expressed in a series of programmatic and policy campaigns over the past two decades, each of which continues to shape and define the critical issues for researchers and practitioners. These campaigns, which now overlap and blend together, include (a) prevention of, and response to mass school shootings, (b) efforts to address child and youth mental health issues, with schools as the center of intervention, (c) implementation of universal prevention initiatives in schools (e.g., school climate, bullying prevention, social and emotional learning), and (d) calls to reduce or eliminate the use of exclusionary discipline. 

This Special Issue seeks empirical and theoretical papers related to any of these themes, and is not intended to be exclusive of other topics that may impact school safety such as enhancing youth voice in prevention, the role of architectural design in school safety, police in schools, and threat assessment.

Prof. Dr. Jeffrey R. Sprague
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• School safety
• Youth violence prevention
• Threat assessment
• Crime prevention through environmental design
• Assessment
• Bullying prevention
• School climate
• Domestic terrorism