ABSTRACT
In the Oceanic archipelago of Vanuatu, physical abuse of children is frequent, including in schools. In responses to the 2008 child protection survey, 27% of students aged 16 to 17 years reported that they had been ‘physically hurt’ by a teacher over the last month. In 2018, I conducted ethnographic research for two months in a school located in an underprivileged neighbourhood of the Vanuatu capital. The goal was first to understand how representations of physical abuse of children are built, reproduced, and change at school, and second to evidence how these abusive practices and their acceptability are perpetuated and transformed. In this chapter, I show that interactions between a variety of actors (mainly school staff, the students, and their families) and interferences between several normative frameworks (educational, familial, and legal) play a key role in these processes.
