Escola, juventude e violência: um estudo no ensino médio

Abstract

The main theme of this study is the school environment, youth and violence. Its purpose was to investigate violence in, to and from school, by examining the interpersonal relationships which there occur, trying to capture the student s perception about the issue, as one who practices it, is subjected to it or simply observes it; which forms of violence are repeatedly practiced and suffered by young-adolescent at school and what motivates them to practice such acts, as well as which representations they have about the school as an institution, and particularly high school. A quantitative-qualitative approach was used in this investigation in an interpretative perspective. The research was done in three different phases. As data collection tools, questionnaires, focal group and interviews were used. The subject of the research were adolescent students who went to state funded high schools. The data were collected in 2011 when there were 9678 adolescents from 23 different schools. During the first phase of the research, a representative sample was surveyed and 428 questionnaires were applied to adolescents from nine schools from different regions of the city. During the second phase, two focal groups were assembled. Each group had two meetings, in which twelve subjects took part. In the third and last phase, nine young-adolescents were throroughly interviewed who had already been involved (suffered or practiced) in any violence situation in the school context. Parallelly, a theoretical reference was developed to delimit the analysis of the results found. The investigation revealed that the most recurring violence forms suffered by the subjects were: lack of respect, verbal aggression and dirty tricks. They practiced: verbal aggression, lack of respect and physical aggression. They witnessed: physical aggression among students, threats/intimidation and vandalism. The classroom is the main scenery where these incidents take place with or without the presence of the teacher, being the teacher the last person the usually students resort to when they either suffer or witness violent situations, which suggests that the dynamics in these sceneries can be the origin of great part of the violence manifested at schools. Most assaults have frivolous trivial causes: gossip, jealousy of boyfriend/girlfriend, insult, bumping into each other, incompatibility, dirty tricks, dirty looks and mutual offense. The pedagogical school staff faces violence in a bureaucratic way, through warnings and registration in proceeding books, or by calling the school police patrol. However, there are not any violence preventive programs. Students suggest dialogue as a way to manage conflicts, however, institutional channels to deal with the issue do not exist. Violence at school has a direct impact on the teaching-learning process and can be interpreted as an attempt to restore or conquer what the lack of dialogue and reasoning were not able to solve and it becomes the first resource to be used by the aggressor or as a last paradigm. The disrespect towards the teacher as an authority is intimately related to not fulfilling the implicit agreement to the pedagogic relation. We concluded that the school has to worry about supplying the young-adolescents proper standards of interaction and sociability and trod the path of reinstitutionalization.