Justification and students’ attitudes towards violence in colombian universities

Abstract

Empiric evidence of the violence in the universities has focused commonly in identify aggressive behaviors or bullying between students and analyze it depending on genre and psychosocial variables. This correlational-exploratory investigation delivers from Colom­bia, an innovative perspective identifying manners against violence in university environments and the reasons given by the surveyed students to justify it based on religious, academic, economic, political, ethnic and sexual-physical aspects. To accomplish this goal, they were conducted two reliable scales filled out voluntarily by 710 Colombian university students with an average age of 20 years old. Findings indicate that the excuse of violence in the universities for sexual-physical, economic, religious, academical and ideological reasons is significantly as­sociated with gender and aggressive behaviors suffered by the offender. Likewise, witnesses that justified the violence in the university had higher probability of becoming accomplices of the aggressor. These results reveal the need of implement educational strategies with a cogni­tive approach that allow to intervene multidimensionally in victims, aggressors and witnesses to achieve more effective results when it comes to prevent and decrease violent behaviors between young university students.