Peer violence in schools is not a recent phenomenon. It manifests in various forms, with one of them being peer sexual harassment. Due to developmental changes, it mostly features in final years of elementary education but certain manifestations may also appear at earlier stages. For this Master’s dissertation we aimed to research the frequency of peer sexual harassment, with special focus on peer sexual harassment resulting from structural gender inequalities. Individuals, who do not exhibit their gender identity in accordance with socially acceptable »proper« hegemonic masculinity and femininity, are often targets of discrimination. These structural inequalities are also rooted in the school system, which influences how the students act in schools. Influenced by social norms, educational insitutions implement traditional views on masculinity and femininity into their procedures and consequently ensure the propagation of structural sexual harassment among students.
In the empirical research, we researched how frequent is peer sexual harassment among students in the 7th, 8th and 9th grades of elementary school, the perception of such violence as unacceptable and the degree to which teachers interfere with cases of peer sexual harassment. We investigated which peer violence prevention programs are being utilized by the surveyed schools and to what extent do these programs include activities considering structural peer sexual harassment. We wanted to establish, whether schools have special rules regarding their course of action, in cases of peer sexual harassment and to what extent do these rules help teachers with their educational activities. Special focus of the research was dedicated to training teachers for interfering with peer sexual harassment and their opinion about the need for additional expert courses on how to deal with the problem.
The research featured 206 teachers and other professional school staff and 193 students from the 7th, 8th and 9th grades of random Slovenian elementary schools. The data was gathered with a survey questionnaire which was conducted online. According to the results, the respondents feel, that peer sexual harassment among student of 7th, 8th and 9th grades appears rarely or occasionally, with most common forms being verbal and symbolic peer sexual harassment, whereas physical forms appear to be the least common. Our research concluded that teachers almost never, or only rarely, interfere with peer sexual harassment where, the results considering peer sexual harassment prevention programs show that these programs only rarely include activities concerning structural peer sexual harassment. We established that the teachers, regarding educational activities, do have assistance in special rule-sets that specify how they should act in cases of peer sexual harassment; however, they do not feel sufficiently qualified to respond in such situations. That being said, the teachers expressed a need for special expert courses on how to deal with the problem of peer sexual harassment. Based on results of our survey, we conclude our dissertation by presenting the most important aspects of dealing with peer sexual harassment which, according to the results of our survey, should be addressed in special expert courses for teachers.
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