Aspectos psicossociais do bullying e do trote entre universitários: identificando representações sociais

Abstract

Bullying is a subset of repetitive aggressive behaviors based on an imbalance of power. Bullying is not a sporadic event or child's play, but a violent phenomenon of “peer abuse”, causing a great deal of harm not only to learning, but also to the social and emotional life of children and adolescents. University bullying is no different from bullying at other levels of education and other settings. Violence in higher education tends to occur before, during and after student hazing (or simply hazing) which is a set of activities for the consecration of newcomers in educational institutions. The hazing is performed by the older students, called veterans, in the new students, known as freshmen or "bixos (or bixete, if female)." The same is not considered as bullying because it is an isolated practice, but contains actions to embarrass violent acts, which when repeated can be characterized with bullying, which usually occur in universities, but silently. The main objective of this research was to identify social representations of bullying and hazing in a public university located in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The studied population were students of the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHS) courses as main group and for comparative purposes students from the exact areas of the total of 200 students in the presential modality of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), located in the municipality, of Seropédica, in Rio de Janeiro. The data were obtained in the free evocation and ordination task and processed in the software EVOC® (Ensemble de Programmes Permettant l’Analyse des Evocations). These data were analyzed using the technique proposed by Laurence Bardin (2002) of content analysis and the analysis categories were raised from the material. In this perspective it is noted that school violence is not an easy problem to solve, it is a highly complex situation, so school institutions must provide and encourage continuing training for teachers and staff in order to develop respect and tolerance.