Victims of peer violence

This paper presents facts on peer violence victims, committed by minor perpetrators against other minors. The author analyses four main characteristics of peer violence: imbalance of power between perpetrators and victims, identified intention to cause injuries, permanent treats of repeated violence and afraidness of the victims. Otherness and weakness (physical and social) of the victims are identified as the main motives of the perpetrators who decide to attack, and these characteristics form the basis of the victim typology. Due to the fact that the research is phenomenologically based mostly on media report on peer violence cases in the period between September 2011 and the end of 2012, the author illustrates all main statements with the real cases which took place in the focused period. Measures to combat peer violence are presented, like the already established such as the school without violence program, and those recently proposed, such as the so called Aleksa’s class. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije: Društvene transformacije u procesu evropskih integracija - multidisciplinarni pristup