Psychological violence: A study with adolescents in a Brazilian Public Educational Institution

Abstract

Introduction The healthy development of adolescents is favored by interactions involving reciprocity and balance of power, however, neglectful or abusive relationships can be found in educational practices in family or school psychological violence being the most recurrent and often associated with other types of abuse. Objectives The goal of this study was to investigate the exposure of adolescents to psychological violence, as well as identify its association with other types of abuse, the perpetrator and the context of occurrence. Aims Knowing the circumstances of adolescents' exposure to violence in school environment. Method Therefore, we performed a cross-sectional study with 218 adolescents (aged 14–18years) of a Brazilian public educational institution. These students completed a questionnaire and Psychological Violence Scale (EVP), whose data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results The study showed that 96.3% of students suffered psychological violence, followed by physical violence (34.9%), sexual (7.3%) and neglect (2.8%). Over 90% of adolescents who suffered physical, sexual and psychological violence suffered neglect in mild and moderate form, which shows the co-occurrence of victimization. We observed that 94.5% of students were exposed to such violence in its mild and moderate and 1.8% severe form, and only 3.7% of adolescents never responded to the 18 items asked of psychological research. Conclusion These data show that psychological violence, even if experienced with mild to moderate behavior is present in the relationship with significant people in the lives of most adolescents in this study.