South Africa is recognised as one of the most violent countries across the globe. School violence against teachers is a common phenomenon at most schools. This ongoing crisis has had a negative impact on the quality of teaching and learning. Schools are no longer a safe environment for teachers. Teachers are exposed to passive and active violence,…

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is a major obstacle to universal schooling and the right to education for girls. Inequitable gender norms and stereotypes, based on hierarchies and forms of subordination, amplify and contribute to the SRGBV. Extensive literature on gender-based violence in South African schools exists, and much of it…

Violence, crime, and abuse against learners present a grave picture of problems in South African schools and are on the increase, as substantiated in articles. daily newspapers and news bulletins. The problem of violence is a complex one, and has been elevated to a national concern. The study was based on the perceptions and experiences of school…

Students' challenging behaviour is a persisting problem in some primary schools. In South African primary schools, however, students' challenging behaviour is mainly understood as disruptive classroom behaviour. To establish how primary schools experience this phenomenon, interviews were held with twenty-one participants, purposively selected from…

This article focuses on the behaviour of students during protest action at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). The objectives of the study on which the article is based were to assess factors that contribute to student hooliganism and to evaluate the effects of violent student protests on the university community. The data were collected using…

Violence occurring in South African schools takes various forms and is a concern for all stakeholders. All forms of violence have negative effects, i.e. physical and psychological, educational damage and societal breakdown. The overall aim of the study reported on here was to explore the nature, causes and consequences of school violence, and then…

In May 2017, yet another South African university became a site of hate speech. Three students chose to display Nazi-inspired posters, which advertised an 'Anglo-Afrikaner student' event, under the motto 'Fight for Stellenbosch'. That the posters provoked the response which it so obviously sought, was evident in the student outrage, and the swift…

Boys are commonly associated with disruptive behaviour and physical fighting at school. Explanations for this behaviour range from naturalistic "boys will be boys" approaches to analyses which focus on the social construction of masculinity and emphasise the gendered nature of boys' behaviour. Whichever view holds sway, it is often…

Drawing on empirical data from two recent research studies in post-Apartheid South Africa, this paper asks what it means to be poor, young and black, and belong in a society that has suffered debilitating and dehumanising racial subjugation, actively excluding people from citizenship, and how poverty serves to perpetuate this exclusion. It…

This paper explores how sexually marginalised black high-school students from conservative schooling contexts in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, experience schooling. It draws on queer theories through life narratives in presenting findings from a small-scale interventionist project designed by the author. The project involved 14 participants…

I report on findings emanating from in-depth personal interviews with victims of educator-targeted bullying (ETB). Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the narratives. The findings indicate that the victims of ETB were exposed repeatedly over time to verbal, non-verbal, psychological, and physical abuse during and after school hours.…

Objectives: To examine the prevalence of bullying behavior in adolescents from Cape Town and Durban, South Africa, and the association of these behaviors with levels of violence and risk behavior. Method: Five thousand and seventy-four adolescent schoolchildren in grade 8 (mean age 14.2 years) and grade 11 (mean age 17.4 years) at 72 Government…