By Isabella Corradini and Assunta Marano

InPACT 2019 - International Psychological Application Conference and Trends

Violence in school against teachers is a current problem characterized by complex dynamics (Espelage et al., 2013; Mc Mahon et al., 2014), and can take many forms, from verbal assaults to psychological and physical attacks.
Our study has explored the teachers’ perception and their experiences with respect to this phenomenon. The tool used for the study is composed by a questionnaire (QUIVAT, Questionnaire investigating Violence Against Teacher, Corradini and Marano, 2018) supplemented by focus group discussions to better analyze teachers’ safety in the school environment, the characteristics of their specific workplace, their proposals about prevention measures.
Four primary and four upper secondary schools in a major European city (included 54 teachers: 24 of them from primary and 30 from secondary schools) were involved in the study.
We conducted data collection and integrated analysis (ATLAS.ti; IBM SPSS) by reducing the data into themes through a process of coding and condensing the codes in seven categories. The outcomes of this exploratory study show that 63.4% of teachers, at all school levels, has experienced some forms of school-related violence, and the verbal type is the one they are most exposed to. Regression analysis indicates that the causes of the problem are mainly attributed to situational and social/environmental factors.
We discuss these results considering also the self-reported health implications by those teachers exposed to the violence and the importance of prevention measures.

Keywords: violence, school, stress, victimization, prevention