Unsafe places in schools: Children´s perspective

When children describe unsafe places in school, some places feature more prominently than others, but there is a dearth of research on the subject from a child´s perspective.

Unsafe places in school can, especially in already vulnerable or bullied children, engender a feeling of unsafety that leads to grave consequences.

Previous research shows that children who feel unsafe in school have higher levels of absence, lower grades and more symptoms of psychic ill health.The project´s overarching goal is to study the problem of children’s feelings of unsafety in school spaces from a child´s perspective based on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in the form of interviews and surveys conducted in schools with varying socioeconomic status.

The surveys will be constructed based on the themes discovered during interviews, with the aim of generalizing collected qualitative data, and based on grounded theory.The current 10-year compulsory school regime requires children´s presence in school spaces for a large part of their childhood. As knowledge is limited, so, too, is the ability to prevent unsafety.

By increasing the knowledge surrounding children’s experiences of unsafety in specific school settings, this project will contribute to ways to understand, alleviate, and prevent unsafety.

This could, in the long term, lead to a more positive attitude toward school among children feeling a lack of safety while being in certain places in school.