Examining the Role of (Gender in) Schools in Preventing Youth Violence

Abstract

This chapter addresses the significant issue of school-based violence prevention from the perspective of young people. The chapter reveals that a detailed understanding of how young people conceptualise violence is crucial to developing prevention. Young people’s understandings of the causes of violence and their views on what constitutes violence are intimately bound up with their views on preventing it. The findings reveal that, on the one hand, young people hold strong views about the naturalness of violence among men and the pervasiveness of violence in ‘humanity’, but they also associate violence with individual psychological problems. These varying perspectives shape their thinking about the preventability of violence and the role of schools in this endeavour. A key discourse (linked to the naturalised link between men and violence) was that violence is simply unpreventable.