School Violence

The Interactionist Perspective on School Violence

Introduction

As the name implies , school violence occurred in a school setting . It involves a broad range of antisocial behaviors , emotions and attitudes exhibited by students . These behaviors are expressed mostly in aggressive acts of physical and verbal violence with the main intention to demean , intimidate or inflict harm . Specific behaviors may include but not limited to physical assaults , bullying and taunting , angry verbal outburst , stealing and vandalizing property as well as threatening with the use of weapons and in some rare cases committing

murder (Andersen and Collins , 1995 , 289 . School violence may be an attack against a student or a teacher . The existence of school violence had continued to create fear and grave concern among many teachers students and parents about safety in school today

Relevance of Interactionist Perspective on School Violence

In a school setting are found a large number of students , teachers and school staff . These different sets of individuals had the opportunity to be in a continual interaction with each other in places like the classrooms and school grounds through classroom activities and various extracurricular programs such as in sports and school clubs . Newcomb defines interaction as the process by which the individual notices and responds to others who in turn notices and responds to him or it a process by which an individual perceives others and is perceived by them (Newcomb , 1950 , 21 . In other words , to interact is to exchange gestures , actions or words with the intention to convey some purpose or meaning from one individual to another

The Interactionist perspectives is a sociological perspective that focuses mainly on small-scale levels of social interaction (between individuals , small social groups and so forth ) and , for this reason they are sometimes referred-to as a micro level of sociological analysis (Berger , 2007 . In the school context , this refers to an analysis of the interaction between individual students or group of students and between teachers and students and how this interaction affected or influenced the people concerned . As stated earlier , these different school characters are constantly engaged in a meaningful and purposeful interaction with each other . However , a problem may arise when the meaning and purpose ' of the interaction may not be the same for everyone or is not agreeable for some or certain individual resulting to conflict and confusion that ultimately leads to school violence

For example , although it is generally known that the purpose of getting into school is to be educated , some students may have other purpose in mind . For some , going to school is only an alibi for getting into a desired gang . In other words , some students may not be serious with school works so that their actions and gestures in school may be in conflict with those who were serious with their studies . When such conflict occurs , school violence usually results

Causes or Reasons of School Violence

There are many reasons for school violence that affects both personal and group interaction among students , teachers and other...