ABSTRACT
Introduction Violence is one of the major social problems of our times and so should be one of the major issues in current debates about education. As people have become more aware of the extent and consequences of domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, sexual harassment, homophobia and racial vilification, our understanding of violence has become more nuanced and the definition of violence has widened. It is increasingly understood that violence occurs along a continuum and involves physical, sexual, verbal and emotional abuses of power at individual, group and social structural levels. Kelly (1987) argues that violence involves ‘a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be readily distinguished’ but that, nonetheless, these different events ‘have a basic common character’ (1987, p. 48). Our particular focus in this chapter is on physical violence (sexual and other assault and homicide). However, the backdrop to our understanding is the Kelly continuum. In this context of understanding many social institutions and cultural forms have become implicated in discussions about both the causes of violence and its prevention. One such institution is the school.
