ABSTRACT
There is now a relatively large body of research on violence in schools. Although much of it originates in the global North, there is sufficient evidence to assert that schools across the world are not always the sites of safety and security that parents and educators expect them to be. However, little of this research has engaged in a gender analysis of school violence. Much of it has been framed as either corporal punishment (teachers as perpetrators) or bullying (students as perpetrators), with gender-neutral data collected through large-scale surveys (e.g. Akiba et al. 2002; Smith 2003), which are unable to illuminate the links between violence, institutional structures and gender inequality. A small number of in-depth ethnographic studies, most of them from Sub-Saharan Africa, have produced rich case study descriptions but they are too small-scale to provide reliable data about the prevalence and patterns of gender violence across societies. Research studies which combine large-scale gender-disaggregated quantitative data on school violence with in-depth qualitative insights into the underlying gender-based causes and consequences are lacking.
