Melanie Mauthner

School Violence, School Differences and School Discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violence-resilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of well-connected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. The authors suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept.

Children’s sibling relationships and gendered practices: talk, activity and dealing with change

This article addresses children’s sibling relationships as a site of social learning involving the (re)production of femininity and masculinity, drawing on in‐depth qualitative interviews with children aged 8–12. We begin by noting the lack of focus on gender in the majority of previous work on siblings. After introducing our own study, we look at the ways in which children understood their siblings in relation to themselves, highlighting points of closeness and division, and pointing to class distinctions around individuality and collectivity. We then explore how ‘talk’ and ‘activity’ are key gendered features of children’s relationships with their sisters and brothers, revealing versions of femininity and masculinity, and interplays of power. Finally, we consider how these gendered features of sibling practices have implications for children’s ability to deal with change in relationships with their sisters and brothers, especially living apart from each other, and we return to class as a feature of their understandings.

Brothers and sisters: a source of support for children in school?

Whilst UK schools move towards U.S ‘big brother’ style mentoring systems for children, are actual brothers and sisters becoming an invisible source of support to deal with bullying in everyday life? This paper reports on research with children aged 7–13 about their experiences and understandings of their relationships with their brothers and sisters, both at home and at school. Some children talked about the importance of having older and younger siblings in school as a source of support in times of bullying, particularly those children from minority ethnic backgrounds. However, some children welcomed the space school gave them to be separate from their siblings. Others talked of the difficulties that association with their siblings at school caused them.

Joint Review: Sibling Relationships: Theory and Issues for Practice; Siblings: Sex and Violence

How do we survive our sibling relationships? Can you be too attached to a sibling? What are the norms and expectations regarding sibling ties in family relations? Juliet Mitchell and Robert Sanders offer tremendous resources for exploring siblinghood and seek to encourage us as researchers, theorists and practitioners to investigate how siblings influence each other as they grow up. Siblings spend more time with each other than anyone else and eighty percent of children belong to a sibling group; these ties are likely to be the longest standing ties we have. Both authors want research rather than theory to inform practice and aim to redress the balance by shifting the focus of family research, therapy and social work away from parent–child bonds, towards a broader analysis of lateral and affinal ties. Indeed, their work challenges our narrow and ethnocentric definition of ‘sibling’ as primarily biological, nuclear and familial, and paves the way for more sophisticated sociological thinking about interdependence, seriality, sameness and difference in family practices. Sanders aims to give practitioners working with families a better understanding of children’s sibling relationships for few decisions about care placements are based on research. He reviews recent studies and theory in psychology and considers salient issues for practitioners. Siblings, he argues, constitute an untapped source of support and resilience for young people living in difficult circumstances. Chapter 1 outlines two questions that concern psychologists: how do different factors affect the quality of sibling relationships? What impact does variations in how siblings