INTRODUCTION

In this article we present a review of academic research on the relationship between school violence and the media, published since 2000, in order to understand the perspective adopted by the academia when dealing with the subject². We wanted to understand what theoretical and methodological treatments Brazilian academic research gave to the phenomenon of violence in Brazilian schools in order to investigate, in another moment, the scope of the media to construct and propagate a perspective of violence that discriminates public schools in relation to private schools.

In what concerns the theme “violence at school”, we found some research studies called state of the art, which were produced in Brazil and have different clippings and purposes from those that guide our study. Among them, we highlight the investigations by Sposito (2001), Szenczuk (2004), Nogueira (2005), Zechi (2007) and Sastre (2011). In the case of this work, the academic productions chosen were of the genre "dissertation" and "thesis", developed by researchers from Post-Graduation Programs from various areas of knowledge that have in common the theme "violence at school and media", present in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) and published since the year 2000. In analyzing the set of texts that make up our corpus, we considered the following guiding aspects: a) authors’profile; b) research focus; c) methods and techniques; and d) references.

The article is structured in five parts, besides the introduction and the final considerations. The first part is dedicated to the methodological procedures adopted in this literature review. In the second part, we analyze the authors’profile. The third part is dedicated to the focus of the research. In the fourth part, we examine the methods and techniques used by the researchers in their work. Finally, the fifth part is dedicated to an overview of the main references that support the academic productions.

We hope that this paper contributes to the discussion about the proposed theme, by presenting research data that help in the discussion about "violence at school and media".

METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

The research, conducted in October 2020, surveyed the academic productions (dissertations and theses) available in the online database Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD) (Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations). In the first search, we used the following descriptors: "violence at school" in the option "All fields", obtaining as a result 321 papers. Still in this phase, we chose the alternative "Title", resulting in 89 theses and dissertations. After a pre-analysis of the materials, we chose to follow only the data from the "Title" reference, because they seemed more appropriate to the dissertation objective (according to note 1), refining even more the data when we used the descriptor "media", which led us to the second phase.

In the second selection, we read the abstracts and the final considerations and refined the data set, considering only those that dealt specifically with violence in schools, reported by the media in its various forms of dissemination (print, online, television). Thus, we opted for academic productions that analyze violence at school from media narratives and that examine the influence of this media on the conception of what is "school violence".

After filtering the search results, we highlighted 11 academic productions that take as research object the "violence at school and media", visible in Chart 1.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 1 List of the dissertations and theses found in the survey. 

After collecting the texts that make up the corpus of the research, we proceeded to the full reading of the works, observing the following guidelines: a) title of the work; b) year of publication; c) place of research; d) type of research; e) methods of data analysis; and f) area of knowledge.

RESEARCHER'S PROFILE

In this section, we examine the profile of the authors of the 11 texts (dissertations and theses) that make up our research corpus. In the works analyzed, we observed a predominance of female authorship, about 91%, against 9% of male authorship.

In Chart 2, we list the authors of the 11 texts, as well as the year of publication and institutional affiliation.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 2 Authors of the papers that take violence at school and media as a source or object of research. 

In Table 2, we observe a certain regional distribution of researchers who are interested in the object investigated here, comprising all national regions, as well as a superiority of public institutions: of the 11, ten are public. As for temporality, there is a five-year gap between an initial work (2005) and the next one (2010); but, in the following years, the theme has been of frequent interest. This allows us to infer some thematic relevance in recent years.

In Table 1, we present the titles of the researchers.

We noticed that 73% of the authors were from master's researches, that is, the research on the theme in question were produced mostly by master's students, which can be justified by the larger number of master's programs than doctoral programs existing in Brazil. According to information from the Plataforma Sucupira, the country has a total of 4,611 stricto sensu post-graduation programs, of which 1,310 are academic master's programs only, 77 have only academic doctorates, and 2,361 have academic master's degrees and doctorates. And there are also professionalizing master's degrees (805), professionalizing doctorates (3), and professionalizing master's and doctorate degrees (55).

In relation to the stricto sensu post-graduation programs to which the authors were linked, we present Figure 1 below:

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Figure 1 Graduate stricto sensu programs 

The data in Figure 1 show that the research on the theme "violence at school and media" was produced in higher percentage by researchers from the field of Education (55%) and in second place by researchers from the field of Letters (18%). The hypothesis is that these fields of knowledge have, very often, the school institution as a locus of training and research; most of their professionals are linked to the school environment and work in education since undergraduate Scientific Initiation.

RESEARCH FOCUS

In all the papers, we checked which types of media (print, online or television) were used by the authors when analyzing the relationship between school violence and media. The data are presented in Table 2.

We found that there is a predominance of the print media (newspapers and magazines). In all, there were five papers that analyzed the discourses of the print media regarding violence at school: ^{Rocha (2005}), ^{Reis (2010}), ^{Oliveira (2012}), ^{Silva (2012}) and ^{Nascimento (2014}). The works that took as object of analysis the print media verify how this type of media produces, disseminates, and disseminates information about the phenomenon of violence at school; in addition, these texts analyze the influence exercised by the print media about this theme in the education scenario. The data allow us to infer that, at the same speed that printed newspapers and magazines decrease, the importance of digital media increases as a source of information for research involving our theme.

As we can see in Table 2, 27% of the texts are about general media. We adopted this nomenclature for didactic reasons, since the research proposal does not specify the nature of the media, that is, the authors did not define a specific type of media and worked in their research with different media and, sometimes, jointly with more than one: online (newspapers and social networks), television (entertainment programs and movies) and print.

Regarding the works that have the television media as the main target, we found that the authors addressed in their research different TV programs: movies, telenovelas, news, sitcoms, cartoons, etc. The authors aimed to analyze how the violence broadcast on television can influence acts of violence that happen inside schools.

Only one text presents as object of analysis the media exclusively online: ^{Silva (2010}). In her research, the author analyzed news about school violence in the following Brazilian journalistic websites: Folha de S.Paulo, Rede Globo (G1), Estado de S.Paulo; as well as in news portals: Terra Portal and Rede Record (R7). The author's main objective was to discuss how the school is represented and (re)signified in the current journalistic discourse.

Table 3 shows the focus of analysis of the articles.

Observing the 11 papers, we found that 37% of the texts presented, as the focus of their analysis, news from printed or online newspapers. The authors analyze the news that were broadcast in the Brazilian journalistic media about violence at school, having as objectives: a) to understand how the institution school is discursively presented in the news; b) to analyze the influence that the media exerts in the diffusion of violence at school; and c) to verify the role of the media when approaching this theme.

Regarding the works that focus on magazines, we observed that the authors analyzed how the magazines (re)produced discourses about violence at school. ^{Rocha (2005}) investigated, for example, reports that were published about violence in schools from 1998 to 2002 in the magazines Veja and IstoÉ. ^{Nascimento (2014}) dealt in her research with a specific type of violence: school bullying. This author problematized the reports that were published in the magazine Nova Escola between the years 2008 and 2011.

Regarding the texts that focus on television programs, the authors analyzed, in summary, the relationship between the violence presented on TV and the acts of violence that happen at school. The topic entitled Other, in Table 3, deals with different types of resources (movies, music, social networks, etc.) used by these authors, investigating how these forms of entertainment influence the practice of violent acts in the school environment.

In the set of texts analyzed, we also examined which educational institution, public or private, the researchers adopted as the object of study in their work, and the information is reproduced in Table 4:

As we can see, 73% of the authors adopted the public school as the object of study, that is, they analyzed only the cases of violence that happened in public educational settings. The other 27% of the authors took both public and private institutions as the object of study in relation to violent acts arising in these educational establishments. Furthermore, in the set of 11 papers analyzed, we did not locate research that had exclusively dedicated itself to private schools as a source and/or object of study. This last information, if true, as it needs a more vertical investigation to confirm it or not, causes some surprise, as it is well known that violence happens in private schools. The hypothesis that we worked with in our dissertation (according to note 1) is that the media treats the public and the private differently. When it comes to violence, a subject of negative connotation, the media tend to minimize the seriousness of the deeds, preserving the private school.

The predominance of studies on school violence focusing mainly on public education was highlighted by Szenczuk (2004). In her work, the author analyzed a set of 134 abstracts of dissertations and theses produced by students in the post-Graduate programs in Education in Brazil, covering the period from 1981 to 2001, which had school indiscipline as their theme. Szenczuk concluded that, in the set of academic productions examined, the public school was the privileged locus for the researchers: "this may indicate the existence of a concern regarding the attendance of the majority of Brazilian children/youth, since it is the public school that is responsible for the education of the majority of the population. (SZENCZUK, 2004, p. 103).

Still in relation to the focus of the research, we observed that some themes were recurrent in the papers, as shown in Table 5.

Due to the frequency with which the theme bullying appeared in the data, we sought to better understand how this form of violence can be defined. The word bullying originates from the English language. The term bully means oppressor, tyrant, or intimidator. In the Houaiss dictionary (2015), in turn, the term bullying is described as an insistent behavior of someone who seeks to intimidate, through physical or psychological violence, someone who is unable to defend himself, and usually occurs in a school environment. The term bullying appears, as we can read in Table 5, in 6 of the 11 papers under review; we stress that this theme is recurrent and appears in the texts directly.

Bullying, in general, is conceptualized as abuse of physical or psychological power, which involves domination, submission, and humiliation, thus generating feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear. As in ^{Fante (2005}), the researches under analysis that address bullying among students present some characteristics in common, namely: 1) actions against the same victim, which happen for a prolonged period and in a repetitive way; 2) a relationship of power imbalance and difficulty in the victim's defense; 3) it occurs without evident reasons; and 4) deliberate and harmful behavior. Furthermore, bullying can be classified as: a) direct, when the victims are directly attacked, in the forms of physical aggression (hitting, kicking, grabbing, or breaking the victim's belongings) and verbal aggression (derogatory and discriminatory nicknames, insults, embarrassment); b) indirect, when aggression is marked by attitudes of indifference and defamation, aiming at discrimination and exclusion of the victim from a social group.

For ^{Fante (2005}), bullying is not something new, it is a phenomenon as old as school itself, being a manifestation of violence that has always existed in this environment and that, in recent decades, has become the object of interest of many researchers. Similar to bullying, cyberbullying is also present in the analyzed works, in general, as an extension/delimitation of the former, because it develops in a very similar way, changing only the mode of manifestation. Cyberbullying is thus characterized as an extension of the practice of bullying from the physical to the virtual environment: it can occur on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.), on gaming or messaging platforms (WhatsApp, for example), among others.

In Table 5, we chose to use the nomenclature "violence" following the choice of the research authors themselves. In this case, the term is used to refer to different forms and manifestations of violent acts that occur in educational institutions that we found in our research corpus, namely: physical violence (any type of conduct that offends the integrity or bodily health of individuals); property violence (understood as any conduct that causes retention, subtraction, total or partial destruction of objects, documents, work instruments and financial damage to the establishment); and psychological violence (any conduct that causes emotional damage, intimidation, blackmail, humiliation and harassment). Although bullying and cyberbullying are also forms of violence, these two terms are used specifically in the seven surveys in Table 5, while four other papers do not make this specification.

In Table 6, we examine the research regarding the procedures that were developed by the authors of the set of 11 texts.

We observed that 37% of the authors developed qualitative research, characterized by the researchers, in short, as an investigation method that aims to examine data to understand in depth a certain phenomenon (linguistic, literary, educational, etc.). Therefore, its results arise from empirical data, collected in a systematic way. For ^{Godoy (1995}), researchers, when relying on qualitative procedures, seek to understand the phenomena from the perspective of the subjects; moreover, they are concerned with the entire process involving the research and not just the results or products. In the sequence, "case study", "field study" and "documentary" are tied with 18%. Finally, there was only one research that used the bibliographic type of procedure.

METHODS AND TECHNIQUES

In this item we present the main methods and techniques used by the authors in their research on school violence and the media. It is important to stress that we followed, in structuring this article, the organization given by the authors of the papers under analysis. The division "method and techniques" is shown in Table 7.

Examining the methods adopted in the set of 11 texts that make up the corpus, the authors adopted, primarily, the Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis, making up 37% and 27% respectively.

According to these researches, in summary, Content Analysis (CA) is described as a method used in the analysis of qualitative data and understood as a set of research techniques whose main objective is to understand the "content" (meanings) of the text. Three papers adopted CA as a study method, which allowed researchers to analyze different types of text, besides being able to use several methodological tools: interviews, written or oral records, field diary, observation, among others.

Discourse Analysis (DA), in turn, is characterized as a field of knowledge that has "discourse" as its object of study. Discourse analysts seek to understand how a discourse/text is constructed, what effects this discourse produces on the subjects, and how this discourse is articulated with history and society. Thus, to analyze discourse is not only to analyze the content of the text; it is to understand how voices speak in a given text about a specific subject at a certain time, and thus understand its meaning(s).

Based on these observations, we proceeded to examine, in the set of texts, the works in CA and AD, methodologies indicated by the authors as a theoretical-methodological reference to subsidize the analyses. Thus, we verified a small volume, as shown in Charts 3 and 4.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 3 References on Content Analysis present in the references of the works that take as a source or research object the violence in school and media. 

In Chart 3, we observe some works in CA indicated by the authors, highlighting, among them, Laurence Bardin. For Bardin (1977, p. 42), the Content Analysis is configured as a set of techniques for analyzing communications that aims to obtain, through "systematic and objective procedures to describe the content of messages, indicators that allow the inference of knowledge about the conditions of production/reception" of these messages. In the case of theses and dissertations, Bardin appears directly, in two occurrences, or indirectly, in one occurrence, in the three works that elected AC as the basis for analysis.

It is also worth mentioning that the works of Bardin (1977) are one of the main references in Content Analysis. The author wrote a manual of CA, in which she presents the techniques and methods to perform the analyses, structured in three phases: 1) pre-analysis: floating reading, choice of documents, (re)formulation of objectives, hypotheses and the formulation of indicators; 2) material exploration, categorization or codification: creation of the corpus analysis categories; and 3) treatment of results, inferences and interpretations: data analysis.

Next, in Chart 4, we present the reference works on Discourse Analysis that were cited in the set of texts under analysis.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 4 References on Discourse Analysis present in the references of the works that take as source or object of research the violence at school and media. 

In Table 4, we observe works in Discourse Analysis that were found in the set of texts under examination. The book The Order of Discourse, by Michel Foucault, was referenced in the four works that use AD as a research method. The authors state, in summary, that Foucault presents certain functionalities of discourse, investigating its function of control, limitation, and validation of power rules in different historical periods and social groups. Moreover, they say that the French author exposes the importance of discourse in the communication process and how subjects position themselves before discourses. Thus, AD seeks to understand how discourses are constructed, how they circulate in communities, and what effects a given discourse produces on the subjects. For this reason, Foucault's works are of utmost importance when it comes to AD, because, besides dealing with relevant themes (discourse, knowledge, power, discipline, sexuality, madness, punishment, etc.), he also discusses methodological procedures.

Observing Chart 4, we can see that several authors were influenced by and/or are scholars of Foucault, for example: Cleudemar Alves Fernandes; Dominique Maingueneau; Maria do Rosário Gregolin; Patrick Charaudeau; Rosa Maria Fischer. All these authors are recognized, in their milieu, as scholars of AD, advancing the theories developed by Foucault.

MAIN REFERENCES

We will now observe the main references of the 11 texts under review, trying to identify which works and authors were referenced in three or more works; thus, we present the data we collected through Chart 5.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 5 Texts that were referenced in three or more works. 

The works of the philosopher Michel Foucault are among the works under examination, with the largest number of references. In all, the 11 texts bring 1,309 references (dissertations, theses, books, articles, book chapters, and researches from public and private organs). Among these references, few texts were cited by more than three works, which allows us to infer little articulation between the researches. For this reason, we examined the most cited authors in the references, presenting the results in Chart 6.

Source: Prepared by the author based on a survey conducted in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on October 10, 2020.

Chart 6 Authors who had four or more works referenced in the set of texts that take as source or object of research the violence at school and media. 

Observing Chart 6, we notice that among the authors with the largest number of referenced works are, in order of greatest volume: Michel Foucault, Alfredo Veiga-Neto and Miriam Abramovay. The author Michel Foucault was cited 37 times and had 20 referenced works. The philosopher is known for criticizing the system of functioning of social institutions, especially prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories, and has an extensive presence in the Human Sciences in general, being studied and used by researchers from various fields of knowledge.

The second most mentioned author in the references was Alfredo Veiga-Neto. The author is a researcher and scholar of the works and theories of Michel Foucault and has published several works in the field of Foucauldian studies and education. In third place is Miriam Abramovay, cited 15 times with nine referenced works. Abramovay is a sociologist and researcher, dedicated to the topic of violence at school, youth, and education. Besides Veiga-Neto and Abramovay, Gilles Deleuze, Maria do Rosário Gregolin, Marilena Chauí, Michel Pêcheux, Pierre Bourdieu, Rosa Maria Fischer, and Zygmunt Bauman were also mentioned, all of whom had, to a greater or lesser extent, dialogues with Michel Foucault. Besides these authors who work in a perspective of greater theoretical approximation with Foucault, from a more thematic viewpoint, that is, who have dedicated themselves to the theme "violence", the most cited were: Alba Zaluar, Éric Debarbieux, Marília Sposito and Maria Minayo, in addition, of course, to Abramovay.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

This article presents a panorama of research produced in Brazil that takes violence at school and the media as a source or object of study. From the analysis of academic productions, dissertations, and theses, we observed that violence at school is a theme studied by several areas of knowledge. In our sample, we verified that researchers linked to Graduate Programs in Education were responsible for the largest number of papers produced.

As for the focus of the research, the authors present in their texts different approaches when analyzing violence at school and the media. In all the papers examined we found that the type of media most used as a tool for analysis was the print media. Regarding the educational institutions adopted as a source or object of analysis by the researchers, the public school was the main focus of the discussions and analyses. As for the theoretical and methodological foundations used, we highlight Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis.

In summary, the works that take as source or object of study the theme "violence at school and media" form a set of texts that present different conceptions of the phenomenon of violence in educational spaces, becoming important reflections and analysis on the influence that the media exert on the perception that society has of the theme "violence at school".

Preprint

DOI: https://preprints.scielo.org/index.php/scielo/preprint/view/3888