A missing piece:: A vertical comparative case study examining teachers' responses to gender-based violence in schools in Burkina Faso

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  In Special Session: Gender & Race Studies - Group B

Proposal

The author of this paper is scheduled to complete a PhD in International Education Policy in May 2019.
This paper presents empirical research conducted in the summer of 2018 on how secondary schoolteachers’ respond to gender-based violence in an educational context by using a vertical comparative case study in Burkina Faso, West Africa (see Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). This paper is part of a more in-depth dissertation study on how teachers understand gendered violence in schools, chose to respond to the occurrence of such violence and the impact of existing national policies at the school level in combatting the violence in one West African country. This qualitative research contributes to the on-going discussion of how teachers can be change agents to combat gender-based violence in schools. Despite the complex roles of teachers as potential change agents, there is limited research examining teachers’ relationships with gendered violence; much of the research focuses on the prevalence rate among school children and the consequences they suffer from the existing violence (Leach, Dunne, & Salvi, 2014). Acknowledging the missing scholarly research on teachers’ perceptions of gender-based violence in schools, this study hopes to help inform policies and programming by examining how teacher participants in the study define the phenomenon and their role in combatting the violence.
This research comes at a time of heighten attention of the concerning global prevalence of gender-based violence in schools. Recent international reports (Blight et al., 2018; GMR, UNESCO, & UNGEI, 2015; Parkes, Heslop, Johnson Ross, Westerveld, & Unterhalter, 2016; UNICEF, 2014, 2017) have documented concerning rates of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse taking place in and around school communities. The international development community has defined the phenomenon as school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) to encapsulate the various forms of violence, standardize documentation and responses from the development community.
The research is framed by feminist poststructuralism, which allows space for critiquing the influences on the construction of knowledge, meaning, and identity around the phenomenon of gendered violence in schools (Baxter, 2003; Butler, 2006; Davies, 2000; Davies & Davies, 2007; Weedon, 1987). This theory reinforces the importance of acknowledging that a person, experience, and/or language is constructed by varying influences and is not fixed in one meaning or category by drawing on several elements: experience, language, and agency. Further, the poststructuralist frame disables categories as a means to disrupting socially constructed, often oppressive, meaning and discourse (Butler, 2006).
This paper draws on one-hour individual semi-structured interviews with a total of twenty-six participants (eleven men teachers, eight women teachers, three counselors (one woman and two men), and four male administrators) and four teachers focus groups from two secondary schools. A purposive sample of nineteen teachers allowed for saturation. The following criteria were used to select teachers for individual interviews: 1) the teacher is a full-time classroom teacher at a public secondary school, and 2) the teacher is willing to participate in the interview. During the interview, the author explored teachers’ beliefs and interpretation of concepts of gender and violence in schools, their understandings of gendered violence, and how they act to address the violence, if at all. An inductive analytical approach from a feminist poststructuralist methodology was used to identity themes from the data.
The results from this study demonstrates the complexities of how teachers define gender-based violence in schools and how they perceive their (in)ability to stop the violence. Teachers’ understanding of violence does not align with the straightforward international definition, but mirrors intricate cultural and social contexts as well as unacknowledged but expressed privileged systems of hierarchy and masculinity. Sexual relations were not always classified by participants as violence, demonstrating complicated distinctions that could be contributing to the difficulties in addressing sexual violence, particularly between teachers and students. Some themes that emerged was the social solidary among teachers, the association of accountability with shame, thus to be avoid due to the high social cost leading to the impossibility of denouncing perpetrators, and the lack of responsibility teachers’ felt for combatting gendered violence occurring in the school. Unexpected findings focused on the effects of recent history of social change and the realization of the youths’ collective power. Teachers chose to focus on their experiences as victims and lack of powerlessness in the classroom, rather than express concern for students exposed to various forms of gender-based violence. This paper hopes to contribute to the literature by demonstrating how the phenomenon is understood by school actors in a local West African context.

Author

• Anne Spear, University of Maryland