Adolescents’ Viewpoints on Fair and Unfair Ways to Address Peer Harm in Schools

This study sought to explore what students thought were fair and unfair approaches to addressing peer harm in their school, and how they construct these understandings through their lived experiences. Participants were 33 adolescents (18 girls, 14 boys, 1 other not specified gender; M age = 14.79, SD = 0.90) attending ninth grade in a public urban school in Bogotá, Colombia. Most adolescents were born in Colombia (91%), followed by Venezuela (9%). In individual interviews, adolescents were asked to narrate two experiences of peer harm at school, one that in their view had been handled fairly by teachers or other school staff, and another that they thought had been handled unfairly. Then, each youth participated in one focus group dialog with other participants, where they discussed fair responses to address peer harm in school. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed four themes: responses were judged as fair depending on whether they (1) involved an intervention, (2) were thorough and nuanced, (3) were aligned with goals in the aftermath of harm, and (4) centered students’ needs. These themes showcased the different considerations that constitute youths’ understandings of fairness, which reflected varying concerns related to retributive, distributive, procedural, and restorative justice.