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

Abstract

Educational institutions must create welcoming and secure environments to foster student learning and development. However, safety in schools has been compromised by a series of incidents involving school violence, ranging from peer victimization and bullying to armed attacks (Polanin et al., 2020, Silva et al., 2020). This study conducts a rapid review of systematic reviews on school violence conducted both in Brazil and internationally, aiming to comprehend the characteristics of school violence, its associated factors, armed attacks in schools, and potential prevention and intervention measures to address school violence. A rapid review approach was employed, following the PRISMA protocol (Page et al., 2020). The focus was on systematic reviews related to school violence, identified through title searches across eleven databases. A total of 1,738 publications were retrieved. After removing duplicates, screening references, and evaluating the quality of the full texts, 127 studies were included in the analysis. The resulting categories were as follows: characteristics of school violence (15% of studies), factors associated with school violence (45.7%), interventions to combat school violence (33.8%), and armed attacks on schools (5.5%). The findings underscore the complexity of school violence and the variability in prevalence rates, while also emphasizing the need for further research on school violence within the Brazilian context contributing to the development and evaluation of inclusive and culturally appropriate interventions.