Mona Khoury-Kassabri

Biography

Dr. Mona Khoury-Kassabri completed her Ph.D. at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University, and received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago and a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship.
Her research focuses on the impact of economic, social and political factors on children and youths’ involvement in delinquent and violent behaviors, both as victims and perpetrators. The goal of her work is to understand school violence by integrating various factors at the individual level, in addition to identifying the effects of the larger social and school contexts. As part of this theoretical approach, school violence is viewed as a whole-school phenomenon that includes students’ victimization of teachers as well as teachers’ victimization of students.
Furthermore, Mona has been conducting several studies exploring factors that contribute to youth involvement in delinquency. In these studies it was examined whether previous theoretical models that have mainly been tested on Western, Christian youth are generalizable to non-Western cultures such as Arab and Ethiopian youth. The studies have both theoretical and applied implications regarding youth violence and delinquency.  In addition to projects that focus on more traditional conceptualizations of violence, Mona has been collaborating with Prof. Faye Mishna from the University of Toronto in research projects addressing the issue of cyber bullying among Canadian and Israeli students.
Overall, her studies aim to expand the theoretical literature in the field by showing how children’s behavior is a result of the interplay among individual and socio- contextual (economic, social and political) factors. Her work has important implications for training, policy and interventions to prevent children and youth violence and delinquency.