School Violence in Context: Culture, Neighborhood, Family, School, and Gender

The book explores and differentiates the many manifestations of school violence, such as verbal, social, threats, bullying, physical, sexual harassment, and weapons possession, as well as staff-initiated violence against students. It presents a socio-ecological model of school violence in context, and explores the role of culture, religion, neighborhood, family, school characteristics (such as size), age, and gender. The model outlines how aspects of school climate, including anti-violence policies, teacher-student relationships and student participation mediate the effects of the outside context and influence levels of victimization, feelings of safety and fear. The book presents a large scale nationally representative study of school violence conducted among Jewish and Arab students in Israel. A nested design (students within schools) was used to gather data from the multiple perspectives of students, teachers, and principals. Hierarchical regressions, multi-level analyses (HLM), and structural equation models (EQS) are used to assess the relative impact of culture, religion, poverty, school characteristics, and student gender and age. Finally, the book outlines a series of detailed recommendations to advance theory, research, monitoring of schools, and violence prevention policies and interventions.