Exploring the factors affecting violence among Iranian male adolescents

Increasing violence behaviors among high school adolescents affects different dimensions of the efficiency of educational institutions. The present qualitative research was conducted in 2021 to explain violence behaviors among male adolescents in Karaj, Iran. Twenty senior high school students were selected using purposive sampling with maximum variation. Individual semi-structured interviews conducted based on the participants' experiences were analyzed in MAXQDA 2020. According to the model proposed by Strauss and Corbin, causal conditions comprised "economic challenges facing the family", "academic apathy", "seeking pleasure", "self-other differentiation" and "family disorganization", contextual conditions included "school inefficiency", "environmental conditions" and "cultural diversity" and confounding conditions consisted of "peer pressure" and "puberty". The strategies of adolescents with violent behaviors such as ignoring school rules and bullying can cause their humiliation, loss of ideal opportunities in life, punishment and rejection. "Violence as the collapse of individual and socio-familial capital" was labeled the core category of the present study. According to the present findings, violence in adolescents is affected by a multilevel mechanism based on social relationships. As a major obstacle to educational objectives, the violence emerging at school as a reliable and safe environment can spread to other social domains in the long run.

Social harms and social class in Iranian youth and adolescents living in slums in the suburbs: a systematic review

BACKGROUND

Socioeconomic and environmental factors can affect the health of the people living in slums in the suburbs. In these areas, the youth and adolescents are the main age groups susceptible to a multitude of harms such as addiction, AIDS, delinquency, aggressive behavior, and prostitution. The present study was conducted to investigate the state of social harms and social class in Iranian youth and adolescents living in slums in the suburbs.

METHODS

In the present systematic review, the researchers searched for observational and qualitative papers published in Persian or English languages during 2010-2020 timespan in the following databases: Embase, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Irandoc databases, Google Scholar, SID, and Magiran. Based on MESH, the keywords of "social class", "social harm", "youth", "adolescent", and "slum" were chosen. Papers were assessed according to the inclusion criteria, and the quality of the papers was evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for quantitative articles and the COREQ scale for qualitative ones.

RESULTS

Of 491 articles assessed, 11 (eight cross-sectional and three qualitative papers) were deemed suitable. According to the results, social harms reported were: drug abuse (two studies), female sex workers (two studies), poverty (two studies), AIDS (two studies), social insecurity (two studies), psychedelic substances (one study), alcohol (one study), delinquency (one study), divorce (one study), physical problems (one study), prostitution because of poverty (one study), unemployment (one study), and adolescents' forced labor due to destitution (one study). Moreover, the assessed papers used education (three studies), economic status (three studies), occupation (two studies), income (two studies), place of residence (two studies), social status (two studies), and cultural status (one study) as indicators of the social class in the individual and their parents, and categorized them in three groups of high (one study), middle (three studies), and low classes (seven studies).

CONCLUSION

The present systematic review investigated, for the first time in Iran, social harms and social class in the youth and adolescents living in slums in the suburbs. The results showed that social harm is high among the youth and adolescents in outskirt slums of Iranian cities. Therefore, any attempt to empower the youth and adolescents living in these parts will have direct effects on the health of the residents of these areas.