Parental violence against children is a universal social problem. The privacy of families is
protected, so state interference in the family is very limited. However, because of the role
that the school plays in the life of every family, it is its duty to take part in preventing and
addressing domestic violence. To successfully deal with this problem, the educational
institutions must provide a clear system of assistance to a child experiencing domestic
violence, and appropriate knowledge in this area must be provided to the teachers. This
will create a sense of security for the child, the victim of violence, as well as for the
educational staff.
In this master's thesis, we investigated how primary school teachers deal with parental
violence against children, what their knowledge in this area is, what factors encourage or
discourage them from reporting suspected domestic violence against a child, and what
tolerance they have towards the use of physical and psychological violence as a means
of raising children. Finally, we also investigated the incidence of parental violence against
children within educational institutions in the 2019/20 school year. The study involved 150
primary school teachers who taught in the 2019/20 school year. Data were collected for
3 months using an online questionnaire.
The results of the research showed that primary school teachers are familiar with the
process of reporting and dealing with suspected parental domestic violence against
children, while their knowledge of the content of the Rules on the treatment of domestic
violence for educational institutions (2010) and the Manual for employees in educational
institutions: dealing with domestic violence (Filipčič and Klemenčič, 2011) is mostly very
deficient. Although the treatment of domestic violence within the educational system is a
team effort, we believe that primary school teachers would need further training in this
field. Primary school teachers are most encouraged to report perceived suspicions of
violence by the desire to help the pupil, the school’s principles, and previous positive
experiences with reporting, but are discouraged by the belief that reporting suspected
domestic violence will do more harm than good, by the doubt of the reality of violence,
and by concern for their own safety and the safety of their family. Primary school teachers
assess the permissibility of using physical violence (slapping, hitting with an object, wrist
slap) as an educational method according to the intensity of the act and not on the form.
However, they assess the permissibility of using psychological violence (threats, locking
the child in the room, banning extracurricular activities) as educational methods as nonviolent
or less violent educational methods, in contrast to verbal humiliation, which they
describe as a frequent or always violent method. Based on the obtained data, we can
conclude that primary school teachers either do not know how to recognize psychological
violence in specific cases or assess it as a milder form of parental violence against
children. The data obtained show that recognizing the psychological violence of parents
against children is less effective for primary school teachers than recognizing physical
vi
violence. As suspected domestic violence against children, primary school teachers in
the 2019/2020 school year most often perceived neglect as a form of parental violence
against children, followed by psychological violence, physical violence, economic
violence, and sexual violence. In the 2019/20 school year, primary school teachers most
often reported neglect as a form of parental violence against children, followed by physical
violence, psychological violence, economic violence, and last but not least, sexual
violence.
The results of the research cannot be applied to the entire population, but we believe that
the findings adequately reflect the situation in this research area and represent good
starting points for further research.
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