Are bullying and reproduction of educational inequality the same thing? Towards a multifaceted understanding of school violence

Is violence always physically painful?

Violence is a wide-ranging and ambiguous concept that includes many aspects and expressions. It may be seen in anything from subtle neglect, a quick push, a derogatory comment, threats, self-injury, suicide, sexual assault or the act of being silent when witnessing ill treatment to a massive and long-lasting war that includes killing, terrorist attacks and genocide. Violence can be aggressive, vicious and extremely frightening, or, as in popular culture and sports, entertaining, thrilling and funny. It can be private or public, individual or collective, obvious or subtle and comprehended as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It can be a separate incident, such as a slap in the face or a recurrent pattern, such as bullying, harassment or domestic abuse. It can be legal or illegal and legitimate or illegitimate. In some contexts, violence may be perceived as enjoyable.

Violence is many things, but it is not everything, and forms of violence, such as physical violence, may not be as common as we imagine. In opposition to everyday depictions in popular culture and explanations by certain authorities of violence being easy and natural under specific circumstances, such as family dysfunction or poverty, American sociologist Randall Collins (2008) argued that actual violent confrontations are essentially quite rare and are avoided by humans, despite societal conflicts, inequalities and power relations. Collins claimed that violence is the exception, not the rule, regardless of the motivations and conditions. In section two of this article, ‘Violence as a situation and relation’, Collins’s arguments are elaborated further.

Generally, the most typical and everyday way to comprehend violence seems to be to situate it in a physical frame. Research on school violence has traditionally defined violence as physical violence against a person or property, thus excluding many other aspects of violence in school, such as bullying, threats or more subtle configurations (Knight et al., 2011). Physical violence has been conceptualised in various ways by different scholars and in different studies, decades and disciplines. It is often defined as a person intentionally physically attacking someone else, which may include hitting, kicking or other forms of assault (Felix et al., 2009). Some scholars include violence against material artefacts (material violence) (Mynard and Joseph, 2000) or threats in the concept of physical violence (Göransson et al., 2011), while others classify threats as so-called verbal violence. Threats can be expressed in ways other than verbal and are thus not always a form of verbal violence. For example, a threat could be written or expressed non-verbally through intimidating stares or gestures.

In contrast to physical violence, the concept of verbal violence relates to hurting someone with words (Dzuka and Dalbert, 2007). It may include degrading, teasing or insulting someone. As mentioned earlier, threats are occasionally included in this category, likewise rumours and racist and sexist insults (Olweus, 2010). Verbal violence hence overlaps with other categories, such as physical violence, relational/social violence and harassment (Knight et al., 2011). Different configurations of verbal violence, such as threats, are sometimes equated with psychological violence. However, all types of violence may have psychological implications, which might make this concept somewhat diffuse and superfluous.

Violence does not always involve hitting or insulting someone, for example. It can also target someone’s personal relations, sense of belonging or social status. This type of violence is often labelled as ‘relational or social violence’ (Little et al., 2003; Espelage and Swearer, 2003; Povedano et al., 2015) and typically involves various kinds of exclusion, name-calling, rumour spreading, ignoring others, etc. Girls are more often victims of relational violence than boys (Knight et al., 2011). The same is true for so-called sexual violence. Although this concept can refer to various kinds of violent acts, definitions of sexual violence often assert that the perpetrator should have superior power, the victim should experience the sexual behaviour as unwanted and the behaviour should have negative consequences for the victim (McKinney, 1990). However, as Knight et al. (2011) and Göransson et al. (2011) argued, some behaviours in school that have been defined as sexual violence are normalised to an extent that may prevent the victim from describing them as undesirable. Examples of these behaviours include using different forms of sexist jargon, name-calling and invective.

If sexual violence is expressed specifically regarding a person’s group affinity (e.g. gender or sexuality) and occurs over a period as a recurrent pattern, it is usually called ‘sexual harassment’ (Knight et al., 2011). Sexual harassment reproduces normative sexual and gender ideals and asymmetric power relations and thus maintains heterosexual masculine dominance over femininity (Robinson, 2005; Gillander Gadin, 2012; Messerschmidt, 2012; Conroy, 2013). Understanding the ways in which heteronormative masculinity is produced within aggression and hostility and plays out in school relationships is important for how school violence occurs (Saltmarsh et al., 2012). Sexual harassment may hence be described as a gendered and sexualised subset of the larger construct of violence.

The definition of harassment generally parallels that of bullying, although bullying is not necessarily expressed regarding a person’s affiliation with a group. Often-stated criteria of harassment include recurrent and deliberately aggressive activities to hurt someone and the existence of an unequal power relation between the victim and the perpetrator. These criteria link the two expressions of violence, referred to as ‘harassment and bullying’ (Olweus, 1994; Craig and Pepler, 2007). However, scholars debate the issue of how to define terms, such as recurrent activities or unequal power relations, which makes these concepts difficult to clearly define (Knight et al., 2011).

Configurations of violence, such as harassment, bullying or sexual violence, can be expressed in various ways, such as verbally, relationally/socially, physically and non-verbally. These expressions of violence can also manifest themselves electronically through social media, for example. These configurations and expressions are seldom isolated phenomena, underlining the intersectional nature of experiences of different forms of violence. Where there is one form of violence there are often others, making different expressions of violence largely overlapping. Hence, one expression of violence can be a precursor or a correlate of another one. For example, research shows that among students being victimised on social media, most report also being bullied in several other ways (Cross et al., 2009; Pearce et al., 2011).

Many young people now spend a substantial part of their time online interacting with other people and developing social relations. This development has generated new forms of violence. As society changes, especially regarding technological development, the conditions for how violence is expressed also changes. ‘Electronic aggression’ may comprise many forms, such as organised criminals inciting violence, terrorists projecting force or recruiting into violent extremism, hate group activists encouraging interracial violence or sexual predators gaining access to potential victims (David-Ferdon and Hertz, 2007; Peterson and Densley, 2017).

Other forms of aggression and so-called ‘virtual criminality’ occur exclusively online (Grabosky, 2001). Some scholars have described how social media has become a vector for youth violence during the last decade and has changed the landscape of aggressive behaviour, resulting in so-called cyber bullying, harassment or violence (Patton et al., 2014; Diamond and Bachmann, 2015). This form of violence is communicated through modern information and communication technology and comprises, for example, threatening, sexual, insulting or offensive videos, text messages or photos delivered via social media. It may also include abusing someone’s social media account to send messages from the victim’s account (e.g. so-called ‘facerape’), thus endangering the victim or damaging his/her reputation or relationships. What specifically characterises cyber violence and differentiates it from other types of violence is that offensive material posted online can harm the victim for a long time.

After this review of potential methods of violence in school, the next section of this article describes violence regarding situation and relation. These two perspectives seem to be connected in their approach, as both claim to grasp what violence is really a case of, how it is generally triggered and how it can be comprehended. In their explorations of physical and interpersonal configurations of violence, both emphasise rather explicit, contextual, social and micro-oriented types of violence.

Violence as a situation and relation

Amongst the most influential scholars problematising the concept of violence is the American sociologist Randall Collins (2008, also see Wästerfors 2016), who argued that the concept of symbolic violence (later discussed in the article) does not help ‘at all to explain real violence but muddies the analytical task’ (Collins 2008: p. 24). Unlike symbolic violence, Collins claimed that physical violence has a true core referent that can be studied using micro-situational observations. At the start of his comprehensive micro-sociological study, where he explored the concept of physical violence, Collins explained the importance of analysing violent situations:

First, put the interaction in the centre of the analysis, not the individual, the social background, the culture, or even the motivation: that is to say, look for the characteristics of violent situations. That means looking for data that gets us as close as possible into the dynamics of situations. Second, compare across different kinds of violence. We need to break down the usual categories – homicides in one research specialty, war in another, child abuse in another, police violence yet elsewhere – and look for the situations that occur within them. Not that all situations are the same; we want to compare the range of variation in situations, which affects the kind and amount of violence that emerges (Collins, 2008: p. 1).

Although physical violence – at least interpersonal and not governmentally sanctioned violence – related to certain categories and, for example, is more common among young men in school than among young women or people in any other category, not all young men are violent (Wästerfors, 2016). Alternatively, not all configurations of masculinity are (re)produced through violence (Messerschmidt, 1993, 2004), although certain (hetero) masculinities (and occasionally femininities) are performatively produced and, if spoiled, reclaimed within the terms of physical aggression (Messerschmidt, 2012; Saltmarsh et al., 2012). Even if a young man exercises violence, doing so does not mean that he is violent most times. Conversely, it is not only young men who can be violent; women, children and older people are also sometimes violent. The fact that violence is statistically associated with certain categories is therefore insufficient to explain it and its prevalence (Collins, 2008; Wästerfors, 2016).

Furthermore, physical violence is expressed in myriad ways, making it difficult to use certain categories as general explanations for all physically violent courses of action. According to Collins, it is insufficient to explain violence via social stratification and different categorisations. Instead, the characteristics of violent situations should be the object of analysis to identify patterns in the interactions that may problematise simplistic and essential categories concerning those involved. The cause of violence is neither found ‘inside’ the perpetrators (i.e. in their sorrow, machismo or anger) nor in structures ‘outside’ them (i.e. their poverty, lack of education or exclusion). Rather, Collins (2008) argued that individuals are not violent; it is situations that are violent. The actual causes of violence are to be found in specific situations within the micro-dynamics of communicative interaction. Individuals using violence are thus violent during specific circumstances and situations that enable violent acts.

Collins (2008) claimed that violence is the exception rather than the rule, regardless of motivations and conditions, and despite societal inequalities and injustice. He confronted theories that explain violence as something that is easy and straightforward to perform and situated violence as a concept opposing the human physiological ‘nature’. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically, in Collins’ view. Antagonists are afraid and reluctant, and their confrontational anxieties establish a powerful emotional barrier of fear and tension against violence. When violence actually occurs – often in ‘incompetent’ and ‘clumsy’ ways, as most people fear violence and are not ‘good’ at it – pathways around these emotional barriers must be found. Violence is thus equivalent to the different pathways or patterns that circumvent human barriers of fear and reluctance. One example of a pattern that triggers violence is a confrontation with a ‘weak’ victim who is in some kind of subordinate position, such as in domestic abuse or bullying in school. Another pattern is violence that is staged in front of an audience. The cheers of an audience can ‘help’ the aggressor circumvent the emotional barrier and provide him/her with emotional dominance about the victim.

Instead of focusing on violence regarding the situation or the specific circumstances that make an individual violent, Edling (2016) highlighted violence as a ‘relation’. Notably, this perspective differs from relational/social violence, which was previously described as encompassing exclusionary practices, name-calling, etc. Violence as a relation seems to be more general and refers to violence as a social course of action; violence appears in interpersonal relationships and interactions between people. Similar to Collins’s view, this perspective emphasises the social dimension of violence; however, it accentuates the relation rather than the situation. A social relation always comprises at least two subjects, and viewing violence as a relation specifically highlights what is occurring between individuals. This perspective explores the significance of violence as a relationship and examines how violence, as among many relations, interacts with other relations (Fiske and Rai, 2015; Edling, 2016).

Imagine Individual A bullying Individual B at school because A wants to confirm his/her friendship with Individual C, who is an antagonist of B (Edling, 2016). This example provides a snapshot of a social and relational phenomenon in which violence is present among several relationships that interlink the subjects (Fiske and Rai, 2015; Edling, 2016). This relational model assumes that humans’ social life is coordinated by four fundamental motives – solidarity, hierarchy, equality and proportionality – which condition our values and actions (Rai and Fiske, 2011). Using this model to analyse the example above, the action from Individual A is motivated by A’s need to express solidarity with C. Violent courses of action may thus be considered ‘morally right’ if they are motivated by conceptions of violence that justify its use in balancing social relations. However, this justification is of course highly subjective and related to how concepts such as violence, justice, moral and the ‘nature’ of social relations are interpreted. It is certainly debatable whether violence can ever be morally right, regardless if it is comprehended as individual, situational or relational. Yet, this model can be used to theorise expressions of violence that are conducted to undermine social inequalities or other forms of injustice, such as the organised and violent resistance exercised by social, independent and liberation movements (Lilja and Vinthagen, 2009). Like Collins’ model, this model shifts attention away from individuals and their characteristics; however, it also shifts attention away from the actual violent situation.

The next and final section changes focus and highlights different sociologically informed configurations of violence playing out on more structural and symbolic levels regarding schools.

Violence as a silent ‘dark matter’ in school

The old ironic saying that ‘the law is impartial: both the rich and the poor are forbidden from sleeping under the bridge’ is an implicit recognition of structural violence and the ability of society to both create and ignore it (Metta Centre for Nonviolence, 2019).

Violence is understood as more or less explicit and as actions that occur on dissimilar levels. School violence and the different configurations of violence exemplified above are often interpreted and manifested explicitly and situated within rather individualised and situational conflicts and relations at the expense of a structural and macro-oriented understanding of the social issues underpinning school violence. However, violence is not only comprehended and manifested on an individual level but can also be expressed as relating to groups, institutions or societies. Institutions, such as schools and other workplaces, may (re)produce oppression and hierarchical structures based on, for example, gender, race or sexuality, thus exercising violence on an institutional level. This is so-called systemic violence:

Systemic violence operating in schools contributes to the construction of educational contexts as dangerous places. Systemic violence can be defined as any institutionalized policy, practise or procedure that negatively impacts or discriminates against disadvantaged individuals or groups (Saltmarsh et al., 2012: p. 4).

The manifestations of violence, whether explicit or implicit, often correspond to different levels of violence. The more structurally anchored violence is, the more implicit its manifestations seem to be. Consequently, violence on societal and cultural levels, which is connected to whole societies, nations or regimes, often manifests in subtle, indirect and normalised and hence not easily recognisable ways. This kind of violence includes societal norms and discourses, such as the normalisation of masculine hegemony or a contempt for ‘weakness’ (Henry, 2010).

To conceptualise societal and indirect aspects of violence, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined and developed the concept of structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Gilligan, 1996; Winter and Leighton, 2001). This refers to a form of hidden and collective violence that is typically embedded in the structure of social and cultural institutions. Structural violence prevents people from accessing important rights, living out their potential as humans or satisfying their basic needs. It comprises prejudices and discrimination against people based on intersecting power relations and manifests in institutionalised racism, class discrimination, sexism, etc. It produces, among other things, social and political inequalities, inadequate education and unemployment. According to Galtung (1990), structural violence is legitimised and justified through cultural violence – aspects of a culture, such as religion or science, which makes structural violence socially acceptable. Under systems of structural violence, ‘good’ people may participate in actions that harm other humans without intending to do so, simply by performing their routine obligations, perhaps reproducing what Hanna Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1963). Although structural violence is constructed differently than direct and physical violence, as it works slowly and erodes human values, these forms of violence are inextricably related to each other. Accordingly, aggressiveness and violence that occur in local institutions, such as schools, are inseparably intertwined with overall societal and structural expressions of violence.

Significant to the discussion on hidden and indirect forms of violence, especially regarding schools, is the subtle and unrecognised violence that falls within the concept of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu, 1989, 1991; Kupfer, 2015; Oxford Reference, 2019). In the Bordieuan sense, symbolic violence is a legitimised process referring to the imposition on dominated classes/groups by the dominant group/class of an ideology. Through this process, which is legitimatised by concealing the power relations that are its basis, the dominant group legitimises its own interests and cultural capital, giving them the presence of the natural way of being in the world (regarding correct class, ethnicity/race, moral, style, etc.). Symbolic violence thus refers to ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: p. 167). Alternatively, people contribute to reproducing their own subordination by internalising naturalised structures that tend to subordinate them.

In some sense, the concept of ‘symbolic violence’ seems to theorise an attained hegemony – a ‘soft’ power that maintains its authority without the need for violent coercion, which produces complicity (the effect of power beyond dichotomies, such as coercion and consent) on the part of the population (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985/2001; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 2000; Connolly and Healy, 2004). Symbolic violence is produced through language, and its effect is the naturalisation of discourses that legitimate power relations and the domination system (Bourdieu, 1991; Recuero, 2015). Violence, violent expressions or, according to Butler (2013), injurious speech can thus be a product of discourse and categorisations; that is, violence can stem not only from what is said or from the meaning of what is said, but also from a system of knowledge produced by what can and cannot be said and can be controlled through certain socially accepted rules (Foucault, 1972). When sexism or racism is expressed through cyber violence or sexual harassment, for example, stereotypical discourses on gender, sexuality and race are reproduced and naturalised, thus creating a ‘knowledge’ of how things are (Foucault, 1972; Recuero, 2015). Hence, any time sexism or racism is expressed in school, symbolic violence is reinforced. However, symbolic violence situated in school is not necessarily included in research, policies and discussions regarding the concept of school violence or how school violence is constructed, situated and comprehended (Herr and Anderson, 2003). Accordingly, school violence is constructed as a somewhat descriptive, limited and individualising concept, grasping only visible, easily identified and concrete forms of violence between individuals in school, while symbolic violence is merely an abstract construction not materialised in the everyday life of children attending school.

Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), however, showed how symbolic violence emphasises the central role of education in maintaining power relations of domination and social inequality. Teaching occurs in a society embedded in power relations and is used by the powerful to secure their privileges. For example, symbolic violence occurs when children are labelled as, for example, failures in schools or when their cultural capital is unvalued and unrecognised because it might differ from the teacher’s. Hence, curricula and teaching content are not neutral – all knowledge is socially created and thus related to power hierarchies – creating ‘valuable’ and ‘non-valuable’ knowledge (depending on class and culture). Accordingly, students are produced within unequal power relations in school, which strengthens inequitable environments and, hence, violence in school.

While Bourdieu emphasises the process of naturalising power relations, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2008) interpreted symbolic violence as a representation of a subtle and objective type of violence that sustains the status quo. Zizek was interested in the ways in which certain types of violence are represented and perceived in society. He argued that objective violence refers to the invisible violence inherent in the ‘normal’ state of things. This violence is embedded in the structures of society, including fundamental political and economic institutions, and generates inequality, poverty and outbursts of subjective violence. ‘Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent’ (Zizek, 2008: p. 2). The invisibility of objective violence thus enables us to recognise subjective violence, which is a visible and physically constituted dimension of violence that can relate to a recognisable activity, such as terrorism, beating or rioting.

Since it is visible and seems to occur against the backdrop of nonviolence, subjective violence is perceived as abnormal and problematic; it draws popular attention and removes our focus from objective violence, which Zizek considered to be the main problem. However, subjective violence not only distracts us from paying attention to objective violence but is also generated from objective violence. Objective violence has no clear perpetrator, so we do not recognise it. People may consider objective violence to be a peaceful and non-ideological normality attacked by subjective violence, which is performed by ‘evil individuals’ and ‘fanatical crowds’. When subjective violence erupts as a reaction to a brutal system (i.e. objective violence), we blame the perpetrators of the subjective violence rather than the system. This process hinders us from recognising how objective violence actually explains and causes subjective violence. Objective violence thus needs to be acknowledged as commonly accepted in society to be challenged (Zizek, 2008).

Systemic violence [objective violence comprises symbolic and systemic violence] is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence (Zizek, 2008: p. 2).

Subjective violence, such as sexual and gender violence in schools or young people rioting in the suburbs, expressing frustration and claiming recognition, can thus only make sense regarding subtle and ‘unmarked’ (Haavind, 1998) objective violence, which invisibly exercise its impact via social, cultural and economic inequalities in society. However, research has shown that the normalisation of subjective violence (according to Zizek’s definition) in young people’s lives and the ‘everydayness’ of school violence have made seemingly visible forms of violence more or less invisible or unremarkable in many young people’s lives and among school staff and educational researchers (Saltmarsh et al., 2012).