‘I’m not scared of the teacher — I can hold him — I can hold him with my bare hands’: Schoolboys, Male Teachers and Physical Violence at a Durban Secondary School in South Africa

Abstract

Violence that occurs in schools is antithetical to the function of schools as places for educating children and young people in conditions of safety, tolerance and reverence for knowledge. Ever since the English public schooling system was described by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), the existence of robust, hierarchical and often violent relations between schoolboys has been acknowledged. In recent decades, violence between school students has become a central concern for studies of gender in schooling, with bullying, sexual harassment and physical violence linked in a number of studies to issues of masculinity and patriarchal privilege. However, an issue that has been less well-documented and that is still poorly understood is the phenomenon of violence between students and teachers. In this chapter, we draw on empirical research conducted in a secondary school in Durban, South Africa, to explore the ways in which masculinity is implicated in physical violence that occurs between schoolboys and their male teachers in the South African context.