School Violence in Brazil: A Multidisciplinary Approach for Understanding and Prevention.

ABSTRACT This study examines the structural roots of school violence through a multidisciplinary analysis based on empirical research conducted in Brazilian public schools between 2002 and 2024. Drawing on large-scale statistical data and in-depth case studies carried out in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil), it demonstrates that the recent intensification of school violence does not constitute an episodic or individual pathology, but rather the result of accumulated institutional, cultural, and symbolic failures. Drawing on the psychoanalytic perspective to understand the subject, on critical pedagogy, and on pragmatic communication theory, the study conceptualizes subjectivity and social development as processes mediated by symbolic and socio-institutional structures. From this framework, it proposes an explanatory model linking failures in symbolic mediation and abstraction capacity to violent conduct, understanding school violence as the consequence of institutionalized forms of violence, fragile family bonds, insufficient educational mediation, and public policies centered on control rather than development. The findings reveal a strong correlation between violent behavior, functional illiteracy, psychosocial deprivation, the erosion of school authority, and the normalization of violence within media and political discourse. On this basis, the study grounds intervention strategies, framed within a Multidisciplinary Violence Prevention System, aimed at restructuring institutional management, educational authority, psychosocial containment, and conditions for human development. While this study is based on Brazilian cases and contexts its conclusions may prove relevant for other educational systems facing similar structural conditions.