A brief survey of the research on school violence in Brazil

Abstract

The article surveys the research on the relationships between violence and school in Brazil after 1980. It examines the rare quantitative diagnostics about the issue, and the theses and dissertations produced in graduate programs in Education in the same period. Although still incipient those studies already draw an important picture of the phenomenon in Brazil, displaying the leading modes of violence: acts against property - vandalism, graffiti - and interpersonal aggression, mainly among the pupils. During this period, violence at school has been examined both as a consequence of a significant set of inadequate school practices, and as one of the aspects that characterizes the violence of contemporary society. Under the latter viewpoint, some of the works have investigated the dynamics of the workings of schools located in areas influenced by drug traffic or organized crime, and a small subset tried to understand the behavior of pupils as a socialization marked by aggressions and petty crime, characterized as incivility originated in the crisis of civilizatory process of contemporary society.