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A missing piece: study of secondary school teachers’ response to SRGBV in Burkina Faso

Wed, April 17, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Street (Level 0), Plaza

Proposal

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). 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 solidarity among teachers, the association of accountability with shame, thus to be avoided 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.
Teachers chose to focus on their experiences as victims and their powerlessness in the classroom, rather than express concern for students exposed to various forms of gender-based violence. Unexpected findings focused on the effects of recent history of social change and the realization of the youths’ collective power. This paper hopes to contribute to the literature by demonstrating how the phenomenon is understood by school actors in a local West African context.

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