Prevention of school violence: a literature review

Abstract

This is a literature review on school violence prevention, carried out in national and international periodicals without temporal delimitation, using articles indexed in multidisciplinary and health bases. The bases investigated were: BVS, PubMed, Eric, SciELO, Web of Science and Sociological Abstracts. The review focused on articles that addressed strategies for prevention and tackling school violence. Among the studies found, 33 were selected. These articles were categorized according to their main purpose in three major themes. In the first theme (1), there are studies on actions to prevent and combat violence developed by the government or by the school itself. In the second theme (2), there are studies on programs for prevention and tackling school violence. And in the third theme (3), there are articles that review the literature on the quality and effectiveness of school violence prevention programs. Results point to the predominance of quantitative studies on violence prevention programs that consider the definition of school violence as interpersonal among students. There is a remarkable need for further studies that discuss violence in schools and evaluate actions of prevention and tackling this phenomenon.