Factors Affecting Violent Behavior Of Children In School

One of the most relevant problems nowadays is violence against and between children in families, schools and communities. It is no secret that many children in modern schools experience abuse, harassment or bullying. Special attention should be paid to the above phenomena due to the fact that abuse directly affects student academic progress, complicates the relationship between teachers and students, disturbs the alliances of school communities, hurts children physically or otherwise. It also bears serious repercussions on the society at large. The research was conducted with three hundred students 14 to 18 years of age who attended two gymnasiums in the city of Siauliai. The purpose of the study was to explore student opinion about the kind of factors that affect violent behavior at school. It was established that between the most important attributes that students singled out were “family problems.” “School problems” were rated as important, whereas individual attributes/characteristics were perceived to be of “less importance”. Media related issues were at the bottom of the rating list. The participants of the study were also asked to rate school violence by “initiators.” As was expected, the majority of respondents reported that incidents of violence were most often initiated between students. There were some instances in which teachers were reported to be the targets of abuse by students, and the opposite. A correlation was established between the age of the participants of the study and their perception of the seriousness of the violence problem in their school: older children perceived violence of as being of greater “grater magnitude,” whereas younger ones tended to deal with it by more often report abuse to teachers.