UNDERSTANDING SCHOOL VIOLENCE: A RAPID REVIEW ON CHARACTERISTICS, ASSOCIATED FACTORS, AND INTERVENTIONS

Abstract

Educational institutions should be welcoming and safe environments to promote student learning and development. However, safety in schools has been compromised by a series of incidents of school violence, ranging from peer victimization and bullying to armed attacks. This study carries out a rapid review of systematic reviews on school violence conducted in Brazil and abroad, aiming to understand the characteristics of school violence, its associated factors, armed attacks in schools, and possible prevention and intervention measures. A rapid review approach was adopted, following the PRISMA protocol (Page et al., 2020), with an emphasis on systematic reviews on school violence, which were screened by searching titles in eleven databases. A total of 1,738 publications were retrieved, and after excluding duplicates, screening references, and assessing the quality of the full texts, 127 studies were included in the analysis. The categories resulting from the analysis were: characteristics of school violence (15% of the studies), factors associated with school violence (45.7%), interventions in response to school violence (33.8%), and armed attacks on schools (5.5%). The results highlighted the complexity of school violence, the heterogeneity of school violence prevalence rates, and the need for more research into school violence in the Brazilian context to develop and evaluate inclusive and culturally appropriate interventions.