Interrupting school violence with deliberative encounters

Abstract

ABSTRACTViolence is an enveloping experience in South African schools. The article seeks to focus attention and extend the understanding of this crucial contemporary problem. This article reviews, from published statistics, the experience of school violence in South Africa. Levels of violence in South African schools, according to statistics gathered in a National School Violence Study (NSVS) by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP), are high. An inquiry is thus made as to how school violence may be interrupted. The article asserts that authoritarianism characterised by giving and taking orders, is a major contributor to violence at school. Deliberative democracy, where reason giving is an imperative is argued to be a potential antithesis to authoritarianism. As such the article proposes that increasing deliberative encounters – interactions that promote the process of reason-giving – in the classroom would contribute to interrupting violence in schools.