Violence in School

Abstract

The subject seems to be clear enough. The meaning of school is self-explanatory: a public institution which all young people between the ages of approximately five and sixteen are required by law to attend in any civilized society, and where teachers endeavor to train and educate the next generation of that society. In this article, we consider that institution from the angle of the violence to be found there. The first point to make here is that schools, historically and today, have a special, institutional relationship with violence: they prac-tice it more or less continuously against the young people entrusted to them. Even in civilized countries, the manifestations of that violence have included, and still include, the directly physical form: in West German schools the teaching staff were still permitted to strike children until around 1970, and in many American states the practice is still permitted today (see Hyman 1996). In most schools, however, violence against pupils today is practiced in much less blatant forms, such as humiliation, discrimination, and abusive language (see Krumm & Weiss, 2000). Even today, though, there is still a significant “gray area,” in which pupils are regularly the target of physical assault by teaching staff (see Wieviorka et al. 1999:148). The fact that this article does not pursue this aspect the violence that emanates from the institution and its representatives is in line with the current trend of current debate and research, because in many countries the focus has for some years been almost exclusively on violence by pupils. This covers primarily offenses such as damage to property, abusive language, threats, extortion, sexual harassment, fighting, and in some cases even murder.