MODELS OF SCHOOL-BASED PREVENTION POLICIES FOR REDUCING SCHOOL VIOLENCE
Keywords:
models, school violence, prevention, childrenAbstract
We experience the presence of violence as a reality, and we feel it even more by showing violence on television as a "normal" part of our daily lives. Garbarino argues that millions of children and adolescents around the world grow up surrounded by violence (Dogutas, 2011, p. 2), and even more frightening is the fact that it occurs in places that are perceived as safe, such as family and school.
School violence as a subject of public discussion has become dominant in the last few decades in the world (Show, 2004, p. 94) although this does not mean that it is a new problem in the societies. In fact, it is believed that since there are schoolyards, there are bullies in the school, there are fights between children, there are cases related to extortion of money or the children are experiencing harassment from other children. But dilemmas over whether any form of school violence is a normal part of every student's childhood are slowly disappearing, and research is focusing on exploring the many different aspects of school violence. In addition to the analysis of the phenomenological and etiological characteristics of school violence, an even more important aspect of the analysis is which prevention policies, programs and measures are most effective in preventing or reducing it.
Therefore, the subject of this paper are the models of school-based preventive policies and programs which have aim to prevent the school violence, with purpose to determine their effectiveness or their impact in terms of developing a positive child behavior and reducing the violence in schools. Through the analysis of the literature, it can be noticed that in different countries and in different social contexts, different types of school-based prevention policies and programs that are applied show different results. Hence, the solutions to how to deal with school violence are very diverse, ranging from classroom conflict management to the development of national programs, from the creation of experimental schools to school-police-legal partnership teams. Certain preventive policies have aim to enact more rules, to tighten the sanctions (zero tolerance policy) (Carra, 2009, p. 105), to strengthen school safety through the involvement of the police and other security measures and some of the policies are focused on learning socio-emotional skills or they are based on principles of the restorative discipline. Therefore, from a scientific and applicative point of view, it is necessary to be identified the positive aspects of different policies and programs and to apply them appropriately to prevent or reduce certain types of violence in a certain social context.
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