CRISIS of School Violence in KOREA: Understanding Bystanders in School Violence Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior

This study focused on the role of the bystander in the school violence situation and tried to understand the choices of the bystander by applying “Theory of Planned Behavior”. In school violence situations, there are bystanders in addition to bullies and victims, and bystanders play significant roles in the situation. Sometimes their choices can determine the outcome of the school violence. According to TPB(behavior, intention, attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control), the reasons why they choose to be an outsider rather than a defender can be interpreted as follows. They perceive the indifferent behaviors of a bystander and its results as positive and believe that others around will remain outsiders. Also, there is no difficulty in being a bystander, as it does not require an active action. On the other hand, they do not show the behavior of defenders because they perceive the defender s behavior and its result as negative, believe that the students in a classroom have the norm against the defender s behavior. Even if they want to take an action, they do not know what to do. And they may not be confident in taking an action even when they know what to do. In order to resolve school violence, the bystanders should respond effectively to the situation as defenders of victims. To this end, it is necessary to actively utilize the result of verifying bystander selection in school violence applying TPB. In particular, we must improve students’ attitudes toward the outsiders’ and defenders’ behaviors and the behavioral outcomes. And Concrete and explicit norms for helping behaviors should be built in their classroom. Finally, we need to inform students how to help victims and improve their confidence in those behaviors. So, we will be able to solve school violence problems by reducing outsiders and increasing defenders when designing and operating an anti-bullying program based on the TPB in the school environment