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

Abstract

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.

“It’s not fair!” is a rebuke from young people following adult responses to their transgressions that caregivers and educators are likely to be familiar with. This type of response raises several questions, such as: what do young people mean when they evaluate some approaches as more versus less fair? In this study, we aimed to answer this question by exploring adolescents’ understandings of fairness as grounded in their experiences with school authorities addressing peer harm. Across their years of formal schooling, young people have numerous opportunities to reflect on notions of justice and fairness. Research with Colombian adolescents highlights that experiences both inside and outside of school are likely to shape youths’ thinking about the range of responses available in the aftermath of peer harm, as well as their prescriptive evaluations of different approaches (Posada & Wainryb, 2008). Schools often respond to students’ misbehaviors with punitive practices that rely on authority figures assigning blame, enforcing rules, and administering consequences (Recchia et al., 2024). This trend toward punitive discipline is present in both the Global South (e.g., Díaz Adarme & Leguizamón Rincón, 2019; Galván Niño et al., 2024) and Global North (e.g., American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Skiba, 2000). Yet, scholars are starting to question these practices for their unfairness and ineffectiveness (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; López Loya, 2024; Mallett, 2017; Warnick & Scribner, 2020). For instance, researchers challenge the pervasiveness of punitive sanctions that exclude students from academic spaces based on moral concerns about students’ rights and welfare (Tillson & Oxley, 2020). Beyond scholars’ concerns, it is important to explore the perspective of key stakeholders in schools, such as students.

With this study, we sought to unpack what adolescents mean when they judge responses to peer harm as fair or unfair. We aimed to construct a rich, nuanced, and complex picture of adolescents’ fairness judgments by asking open-ended questions about their experiences at school and following an inductive approach to analyze their meaning-making. These issues are underexplored across varied contexts, but particularly so in the Global South, given the underrepresentation of samples from these regions in developmental scholarship (Nielsen et al., 2017). Thus, we recruited adolescents attending a low-SES urban school in Bogotá, Colombia—a context characterized by extreme contrasts, in which socioeconomic segregation obscures high levels of inequality (Duque et al., 2023). The sample was diverse in migratory status and racial/ethnic identity. Research in the Global South finds that adolescents attending low-income public schools believe that their lives are more unfair than the world in general, with other dimensions of oppression—such as racism and sexism—further impacting their perceptions of justice and fairness (K. J. Thomas et al., 2024). Consequently, we expected youths’ first-hand experiences with varying forms of social injustices to inform their constructions of fairness, inasmuch as moral judgments reflect youths’ own sensemaking of the tensions and contradictions in their lived experiences and multifaceted social environments (Wainryb, 2006). Ultimately, we aim to enrich scholarship on youths’ judgments of fairness in their schools by capturing the complexities in their reasoning.

Contextualizing Youths’ Experiences and Judgments of Peer Harm in Schools

In their everyday exchanges at school, students sometimes act in ways that hurt or upset their peers. When this happens, authority figures may often intervene by virtue of their prescribed roles in school. In their responses, school authorities commonly play the role of judge and jury by asserting blame and imposing consequences (Recchia et al., 2024). This role does not necessarily conflict with youths’ perspectives on how adults should intervene. Indeed, young people in varied cultural contexts have been found to judge moral transgressions as more deserving of punishments than other socio-conventional transgressions, given concerns with harm, fairness, and justice that are universal and independent of context (Yoo & Smetana, 2022). Children and adolescents judge punishments as fair for deontological and consequentialist reasons; for example, Argentinian youth noted that punishments are warranted when these are proportional to the magnitude of the transgression (e.g., retribution, just desserts) and can also serve to prevent further harm (e.g., rehabilitation, deterrence), respectively (Barreiro, 2012). Scholarship in the US has also highlighted that considerations of deservingness or just desserts influence young people’s retributive and distributive justice considerations about fairness in allocating punishments and benefits (Smith & Warneken, 2016).

As they age, children’s judgments of punitive responses grow increasingly sophisticated. For instance, in a US study, older children evaluated it as fairer to punish actors rather than the group for the misbehaviors of one individual, based on concerns with deservingness, whereas younger children did not make this distinction in their fairness evaluations (S. Thomas et al., 2024). There is also evidence for a developmental shift in children’s understandings of fairness in going beyond considerations of equality (everyone gets the same punishments) to include principles of merit and equity (everyone gets what they deserve or need; e.g., Smith & Warneken, 2016; S. Thomas et al., 2024). Nevertheless, these distinctions may not be as straightforward in students’ narrative accounts of peer harm, which can involve antagonistic actions from numerous individuals at different times (Recchia et al., 2024). Thus, a punitive stance that assumes clear distinctions between “perpetrators,” “victims,” and “bystanders” may be deemed unfair by students who may disagree with how these labels were imposed.

Alongside concerns about allocation of blame and assumptions of deservingness, youth also criticize punishments for not being fair: for example, Colombian youth underscored the academic costs of exclusionary punishments (Pareja Conto et al., 2023). Adolescents’ criticisms of punishments are sometimes grounded in systemic concerns that challenge the unfairness of disproportionately targeting students from marginalized groups (Bell, 2020; Winn, 2018). Marginalized students may be particularly sensitive to these inequities; for instance, Black youth in the US report experiences of unfairness that include (but are not limited to) partiality to their detriment but to the benefit of other students, such as receiving unwarranted or more severe disciplinary consequences (Griffith et al., 2022). In their criticisms, youth also highlight concerns with autonomy when punitive processes do not provide them with the space to actively participate as moral agents with unique feelings and perspectives (Edwards, 2023). These findings suggest that students may not evaluate punitive practices as procedurally fair. The latter criticisms have also been made by scholars who argue that, when authority figures take charge of the resolution of others’ conflicts—for example, by imposing consequences—they rob stakeholders of the opportunity to express their perspectives and take accountability for their own behavior, thereby constraining their moral agency (Christie, 1977; Drewery, 2016; Wainryb et al., 2005).

Consequently, although children endorse punishments over non-responses to peer harm (Killen et al., 1994), they also support alternative interventions informed by various justice aims and considerations. In particular, youth in both the Global South and North endorse restorative justice values and practices that seek to repair harm and foster respectful relationships among community members (Pareja Conto et al., 2023; Riedl et al., 2015; Winn, 2018). As such, methodologies forcing young people to choose between punishment, restoration, or no intervention may not allow enough space to fully capture nuances in their reasoning and how they weigh the relative merits of different approaches (Gromet & Darley, 2006). For example, in one US study, adolescents evaluated punishments as more effective but less fair than inductive discipline (in line with a restorative orientation for its emphasis on encouraging empathy and perspective-taking; Rote et al., 2021). Thus, we aimed to go beyond examining whether youth evaluated some responses as fair or unfair to qualitatively explore how they understand fair approaches to addressing peer harm.

Given the overreliance on questionnaire-based assessments, little is known about how students in different contexts conceptualize fair approaches to address peer harm in schools and how they construct these understandings through their lived experiences. These explorations are crucial given that students’ judgments of fair and equitable disciplinary practices are a key aspect of their positive perceptions of school climate (Molinari et al., 2013; Payne & Wilson, 2021; Peter & Dalbert, 2010; Vieno et al., 2005). Furthermore, across varied cultural contexts including Brazil, Germany, and the US, students perceiving school authorities as fair can potentially impact their engagement with educational (and other) institutions (Brugman et al., 2016; Flanagan et al., 2007; K. J. Thomas et al., 2019; Weiss & Parth, 2023). This study centered on adolescents’ perspectives due to their capacity to reflect on institutional and societal practices critically and in nuanced ways (e.g., Bell, 2020; K. J. Thomas et al., 2024).

The Current Study

This study sought to explore what youth thought were fair versus unfair responses to addressing peer harm in schools, as grounded in their narrative accounts of peer harm and group conversations with peers. As students navigate situations of peer harm, they make judgments and construct understandings of what happened and how it should be addressed, informed by their social knowledge, schemas, and scripts (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Wainryb et al., 2005). The construction of narrative accounts of their experiences of peer harm at school provides a rich context for youth to consider what happened and what should have happened (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010). Thus, we expected adolescents’ meaning-making to reflect a juxtaposition of moral concerns and other considerations that may complexify their construction of fairness judgments—thereby bringing to light competing concerns around issues of equity, justice, needs, social norms, and individual as well as collective responsibilities, among others. Similarly, when discussing these issues with peers, adolescents may co-construct meanings grounded in their first-hand experiences at school and their critical reflections about authority-sanctioned responses. As such, we decided to also include focus groups in our study to give participants the space to discuss fair and unfair practices with peers, in ways that allowed for disagreements and consideration of different school experiences. To sum up, this study aimed to document the multiple considerations adolescents bring to bear in their evaluation of fair versus unfair approaches to address peer harm in schools.

Method

Participants

A total of 33 adolescents (18 girls, 14 boys, 1 other not specified gender; M_age = 14.79, SD = 0.90) were recruited from grade nine in a small public inner-city school in Bogotá, Colombia. The school served approximately 500 students from kindergarten to high school. Following Colombia’s socioeconomic stratification system, ranging from 1 (low) to 6 (high) based on neighborhoods’ infrastructure and housing characteristics, the participating school served communities in strata 2. Most adolescents were born in Colombia (91%), followed by Venezuela (9%). Regarding race and ethnicity, 58% of youth identified as White, 12% as Mestizo/a/e, 6% as Afro-Colombian, 6% as Indigenous, 3% as Moreno/a/e, and 15% as other (e.g., “Venezolana,” “Colombiana”) or none (i.e., “Ninguna”). Regarding family demographics, 52% of students reported living in single-parent households (from this percentage, 43% lived with mothers, 9% with fathers), 46% reported living in two-parent households, and 3% reported living with other family members. Of those participants who knew their mother’s level of education (97%), youth reported that their mothers had attended postsecondary education (9%), completed a technical degree (12%), high school (55%), or elementary school (18%), or had attended some years of elementary school (3%). Parents provided written informed consent, and the youth provided written assent to participate. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee at Concordia University and by relevant school administrators.

Procedures

In a private location at school, each youth participated in one individual semi-structured interview of approximately 60 min and one 90-min focus group discussion. The first author conducted all the interviews and facilitated the focus groups in Spanish. Interviews and focus groups were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim by native Spanish speakers.

Individual Interviews

To examine youths’ judgments of fair responses, we elicited two narrative accounts of peer harm in school in a counterbalanced order. Specifically, each participant recounted a situation of peer harm that they judged was handled fairly by teachers or other school staff (“Tell me about a time when a student in your school did or said something that hurt another peer from school, and the situation was managed fairly by your teachers or by the school. It can be either a time you saw another student hurt a peer or a time that you were directly involved in somehow”), and one situation that they judged was handled unfairly (“[. . .] a time when a student in your school did or said something that hurt another peer from school and the situation was managed unfairly by your teachers or by the school [. . .]” ). Participants were prompted to share a situation they remembered well and to describe everything they remembered about it.

Then, the interviewer asked participants follow-up questions concerning the perspectives, goals, and emotions of all the involved parties (“What do you think each person was thinking?,” “What do you think each person was feeling?,” “What do you think each person was trying to do?”). We also asked the youth about the involvement of other peers and teachers (“Did any peers get involved somehow in this situation?,” “How did your teachers intervene?”). To further explore their fairness judgments, we also asked participants: “Why do you think the situation was managed [fairly/unfairly]?” When participants shared narratives of situations that had been unfairly addressed, we also asked them: “What do you think would have been a fair way to handle this situation? Why?”

Focus Groups

When all individual interviews were completed, each youth participated in one focus group dialogue with seven to eight other participants. The purpose of the focus groups was not to reach consensus, but to foster discussion among participants. We aimed to offer youth a space to engage with diverse perspectives on fairness in school and to refine their judgments through collective reflection.

Before we began the group dialogue, we offered a snack to participants, and they took part in ice-breaker activities. We had two guiding questions for these group conversations: first, “What’s the fairest way to respond when peers get into conflicts and someone gets hurt?” and then, “What would this look like in your school?” Students were encouraged to share their perspectives but also to participate in facilitating the conversation by summarizing the discussion, asking peers to elaborate further or clarify their points, and posing further questions to the group that were thematically aligned with the main guiding questions. The interviewer intervened as a facilitator by asking the overall guiding questions, pushing the conversation forward, and making sure all the students had space to share their perspectives. In the end, adolescents summarized key takeaways from their discussion in a visual display to be shared with their classmates and other school staff.

Analytic Procedure

Reflexive thematic analysis was used to explore youths’ fairness judgments (Braun & Clarke, 2021). This analysis was done across questions to consider and examine commonalities throughout the data. We triangulated participants’ data across individual interviews and focus groups to better understand their judgments of fair responses to peer harm in schools. Two native Spanish speakers coded all the data. Specifically, both the first and fourth authors contributed significantly to the analysis, which was primarily led by the first author. The second author contributed to the analysis as a consultant, particularly during theme development, and regularly participated in coding meetings.

To begin the formal coding process, the first and fourth authors jointly coded 13 individual interviews using NVivo. In this initial coding process, they first read each transcript individually and then met to code it simultaneously. To analyze the remaining interviews, they individually coded the same transcripts and then met to discuss the codes and overall patterns. During their discussions, the authors would identify further codes and patterns. Throughout this process, the authors regularly met and exchanged online notes to discuss the interviews on an ongoing basis (often consulting with the second author). When the authors finished coding the individual interviews, they simultaneously coded the four focus group discussions (following the same process described for the initial coding of the individual interviews). Data from interviews and focus groups were combined for analysis to gain a fuller picture of youths’ reasoning.

The authors developed 405 first-level codes to capture all aspects of the data relevant to understanding how adolescents constructed meanings of fairness. Some of these first-level codes included: “only talking is unfair,” “listen to all sides,” “same consequence is not always fair,” and “acknowledge everyone’s role in the situation.” To engage in second-level coding, the researchers contrasted and clustered first-level codes—a process that entailed returning to the data. An example of a second-level code is “students condemn differential or biased responses,” which included first-level codes such as “harsher consequences for one side,” “teachers respond differently in light of students’ gender,” and “teachers siding with the students they are closer with.” Following second-level coding, the researchers collapsed, compared, and collated codes to identify distinct and coherent patterns in the data. The researchers reviewed and refined themes by checking them against each other and back to the original data set. During regular meetings, the research team engaged in constant comparisons to generate themes that captured adolescents’ constructions of fairness in the aftermath of peer harm. In this process, the first author returned to the raw data to ensure the themes were grounded in youths’ voices.

Positionality Statement

All authors have both professional and personal connections to Latin America to varying degrees and share a commitment to centering youths’ voices to inform more equitable practices and policies in schools. The first author, in particular, studies punitive and restorative justice orientations in schools and other contexts under the supervision of the second author. She was born and raised in a Caribbean city in Colombia, but has lived abroad for the past few years. At every stage of the research process, she collaborated closely with the third author, a Bogotá-born scholar with a longstanding professional relationship with the participating school. During data collection, several adolescents expressed having assumed that the first author was originally from Venezuela. It is possible that participants from Venezuela felt more comfortable sharing their experiences with xenophobia due to misconceptions about the first author’s nationality. When one student inquired about this, the first author clarified that she is Colombian but currently resides outside the country and thus encounters diverse Spanish speakers from different countries (possibly influencing her accent).

Results

We generated four themes by exploring adolescents’ responses to our open-ended questions. 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. Theme one (fair responses involved an intervention) had two subthemes: (a) the need for intervention, and (b) limitations in the ability to intervene. Theme two (fair responses were thorough and nuanced) had two subthemes: (a) understand what happened and why it happened, and (b) consider and address power dynamics. Themes three and four had no subthemes. The names reported below are pseudonyms; while data were coded in Spanish, excerpts are translated into English below for the purpose of the present report.

Fair Responses Involved an Intervention

The Need for Intervention

Fair responses involved immediately condemning and addressing harm. For instance, when we asked Dulce to explain what she considered to be unfair approaches, she answered: “To not solve the problem right away.” Similarly, Ariel explained that fair responses entailed: “Doing something positive and helping the student.” Adolescents judged that it was the responsibility of school staff to stop harm and prevent situations from escalating. In their narratives about unfair approaches, adolescents condemned when staff overlooked harm or minimized the impact it could have. Participants also specified that when peer harm was left unaddressed, peers were more likely to hurt others, targets felt unsupported, and students would take justice into their own hands. Take, for instance, this narrative by Adriana about an unfair response during class time:

A girl and a boy didn’t get along very well, and sometimes the boy would tease the girl mostly because of her physical appearance, and he would say hurtful things to her [. . .] One time, we were doing classwork, and I think he went to ask her something, and she didn’t know the answer yet. And he started to tell her that she pretended to be the smart one, but she was not, and he started to tell her other things like that, and she felt bad and started crying. [. . .] [After that] she started to feel bad about herself, and she started to think that she was not that smart [. . .] The teacher asked the boy why he did that, but the boy didn’t respond, and that was it [. . .] [The teacher] was doing other things, I mean, taking care of other things, other students, and so on, and he didn’t give so much importance to what was happening at that moment.

As evident in Adriana’s narrative, participants showed concern about the psychological impact of peer harm and how targets may feel unsupported when situations are left unaddressed.

Concerns about targets of harm were also evident in participants’ broad perceptions of who was responsible for intervening and providing support in the aftermath of peer harm. For example, in cases where students were evidently emotionally impacted, participants judged it as fair when the situations were referred to psychological staff, as Valentina explained: “In that situation, a person was being attacked, perhaps not physically, but verbally and with their emotions affected [. . .] I thought it was good that the teacher referred all this to psychology and not just leave it in the classroom.” In addition to school staff, participants also judged it unfair when peers and parents did not intervene. For instance, Ariel shared an experience of victimization in elementary school that was ignored by the school and their parents, and only stopped once their sister intervened:

I was being bullied by boys from an upper grade [. . .] It got to the point that they would hit me or take my belongings simply because I had different tastes. Because girls my age would like more feminine things, in my case, I liked more masculine things. [. . .] The school didn’t even care. [. . .] They didn’t give it any importance. [. . .] They never intervened. The only one who intervened was my sister. [. . .] I had also told [my parents] that they were hitting me, and they were like, ‘Oh, well. . .’ I don’t remember well. . . I only know they didn’t get involved. I think they told me just to tell them not to do that, and that was it. [. . .] Neither my parents, nor the teachers, nor anyone at the school stood up for me. [. . .] There were a couple of teachers who looked but didn’t do anything. [. . .] One time, they were kicking me, a teacher saw this and just said, ‘No, don’t do that,’ and left. [. . .] Well, they kept hitting me.

In this narrative, different layers of injustice accumulated to the point that the student felt abandoned by the school community and authority figures across settings (school, home). The indifference and inefficacy of authority figures also resulted in the continued victimization of a gender-nonconforming student who was being policed, harassed, and aggressed by peers. Furthermore, we also see the injustice of the sister being the sole person to intervene against a group of students (possibly jeopardizing her own safety).

Limitations in the Ability to Intervene

Although youth emphasized the unfairness of caregivers and peers failing to intervene on the target’s behalf, their fairness judgments also accounted for the limits of how and where different parties could intervene. For example, participants explained that interventions by peers, siblings, and even caregivers were limited within school settings, thereby further stressing the unique moral obligations of school staff to address peer harm, as explained by Flor:

It was unfair because the teacher never intervened [. . .] It is not like he should be in charge of the entire situation, but he should help, see what is going on, and if he can help resolve it. [. . .] Because the teacher is like the only one who can do certain things, he can call the nurse, things like that. . . I mean, a student cannot see a person crying and just take them out of the classroom, like the teacher is the only one who can authorize that.

Yet, students also acknowledged there were limits on staff’s capacity to intervene and address peer harm, such as when students did not inform them about harmful situations or when youth decided to fight off school grounds. In these cases, participants perceived it was the bystanders’ responsibility to reach out to adults so that students could get the support they needed. For instance, Santiago proposed: “I think [other] students should tell teachers [. . .] Well, because teachers sometimes cannot find out what is happening, and neither can administrative staff because they cannot be aware of everything that happens.” Given the risks that unresolved fights could continue outside of school, students also proposed that fair responses should be thorough rather than superficial, as discussed in the following theme.

Fair Responses were Thorough and Nuanced

Understand what Happened and why It Happened

Although youth judged that actively intervening was a necessary first step for fair responses, they also reflected critically on how authorities should respond, in that school involvement did not consistently result in fair processes and outcomes. Namely, students advocated for staff to take the time to fully understand and carefully address the situation to ensure the response was fair. For instance, Sebastián observed that a fair approach would entail “a slower process rather than a rushed decision.”

In taking the time to fully understand what happened, youth were particularly sensitive to various levels of responsibility, and so they judged that fair responses involved clarifying the situation with all involved parties and acknowledging everyone’s role. Fair responses entailed recognizing that there are often multiple perspectives that should be acknowledged, as explained by Leticia: “The idea isn’t to say that it is your fault or mine. The idea is to find a solution, that is, not to blame each other, because if we start placing blame, we can do that forever.” In line with this, youth thought it was fair to also acknowledge the role of bystanders who had witnessed or contributed to the harm, thereby expanding the circle of responsibility. In this way, students seemed to criticize responses with the sole focus on assigning blame and imposing consequences, and proposed ways to humanize the school’s responses to students’ transgression by recognizing and validating the perspectives of all involved.

To fully understand what happened, the youth also endorsed exploring and addressing causes from the perspectives of different actors involved. In the words of Sebastián: “To seek something fair for both sides, you need to think about what caused the problem.” In this sense, youth seemed to be centering considerations of why peer harm occurs in informing fair responses. To explore these whys, students wanted adults to go beyond the situation to consider the root causes of harm, such as what led students to behave the way they did and the interpersonal history of conflict between the involved students. For example, Daniela proposed: “Talking to them and finding out why they made those comments and what is leading them to act that way.” Similarly, Mateo added: “Seek to understand why he treated them badly and to get to the bottom of the situation, let’s say, what’s happening in the house and all that [. . .] and also help him to solve the problems in the house.”

Participants judged that it was unfair for school authorities to label students as guilty without giving them a chance to explain their side. In this case, unfair responses were those in which teachers did not take the time to understand that constant interpersonal clashes sometimes pushed students to their limits. Take, for instance, Valentina’s experience after physically hurting a peer who was hitting her and teasing her repeatedly:

I hit him on the head because I was fed up. He was hitting me and hitting me. He was taking things from me. He would not let me work, and I was asking him to stop. So, I hit him, and he went to report it to the teacher, and she scolded me in front of the whole class. I was, like, are you serious? [. . .] Like, I have my own things, my own problems, sometimes you don’t wake up happy every day [. . .] There are situations at home, there are also situations with friends [. . .] There are situations unrelated to academics [impacting me], and then I also have to put up with being hit. [. . .] It’s too upsetting. And I was trying to avoid this, but I reached my limit.

Valentina’s narrative illustrated an unfair response in which the teacher focused solely on the specific action brought to her attention without considering the interpersonal history of harm between the two students. She was thus bringing to light the complexity of addressing harm in ongoing relationships between peers who are not only bringing their own baggage from home but also being forced to share spaces with others with whom they may have some animosity. To mitigate this, youth expressed the need for adults to listen and give a voice to all involved. Sebastián observed, “If you follow up with one side more than the other, you will understand one side but not the other. The idea is that in any problem, both sides are equally understood.”

Importantly, however, youth recognized that understanding what happened and why it happened was not always a straightforward process. In a focus group dialogue, youth juxtaposed the value of considering diverse perspectives to arrive at a fair outcome with the challenges of navigating students’ personal and competing interests to avoid punishments and blame:

Leticia:

A fair approach would be for both sides to feel good about the outcome.

Sebastián:

[. . .] There will always be one side who agrees and one who doesn’t. [. . .] They are going to look only for their own benefit and not something equitable. [. . .] Let’s say that you are the one who was hurt, you will always look for the other person who started it to face greater justice than you, and obviously, that is going to be fair. Why? Because you didn’t start the problem.

Leticia:

Yes, you are right, because sometimes we don’t recognize our faults. [. . .] It will always be someone else’s fault. The idea is that you take the blame: “Yes, it should be like that. I started the problem, I pushed my peer, I was rude. . .” Both sides should recognize their faults.

Sebastián:

You’ll say that you were not the one who provoked it, but rather that they provoked you [. . .] If you were the one who caused the problem, you are going to seek your personal interest [. . .] like saying “look at how they hurt me.” And the other will start looking for his own benefit: “She provoked me.” Both are going to seek their own benefit, but they are not going to think about why the problem started or was caused.

Daniela:

[. . .] Every side should answer. Every side should be punished because, as others explained, everyone is going to look for their own benefit, so to avoid any dilemmas, both sides should be punished. That would be fair [. . .]

Leticia:

[. . .] Both sides getting the same [consequence]. It’s not about this one is guilty and the other isn’t. No, they are both guilty because to start a conflict, you need two.

Mateo:

[. . .] A fair way would be to examine the situation and find a solution in which, not that both sides are benefited, but that both are [. . .] yeah, like held accountable [for what they did].

As is evident in their conversation, youth wrestled with concepts of equality, equity, and deservingness in their construction of fair responses. Some participants seemed to consider equity as a naive approach to fairness because it depended on each side recognizing their own responsibility, whereas they judged equality in treatment as a more realistic way to ensure a fair outcome. In this way, youths’ desire to acknowledge multiple perspectives and levels of responsibility was in tension with their belief that students tend to prioritize their own interests in the resolution of peer harm. Ought judgments were thus constrained by students’ perceptions of others and themselves.

Consider and Address Power Dynamics

In their construction of harms, youth were sensitive to how harmful events were rooted in oppressive views. For example, adolescents highlighted peer harms involving sexism (e.g., “She was like those extroverted girls who express themselves freely [. . .] so [the boys] liked to make her look bad [. . .] they were accusing her of being pregnant”), fatphobia (e.g., “She would make fun of her for being fat”), and xenophobia (e.g., “The Colombian girl told the Venezuelan girl that she was better than her”). For youth, fair processes and outcomes in response to harms rooted in oppressive ideologies were those that recognized and redressed power imbalances among peers. When narrating a situation that was managed fairly, Stella recounted a group conflict in which boys were excluding girls from using the only soccer field available at school:

Many times, boys would make teams to play soccer without including the girls [. . .] We would ask if we could join them or make a team, and they wouldn’t let us [. . .] One time, there was a big verbal fight [. . .] [The teacher] asked us what was happening. So, [the girls] said: “They don’t let us play and they’ve already played.” [That teacher] sometimes supervises our recesses, so he had realized that [the boys] play most of the time [. . .] He said he was going to give [the girls] one day to control the soccer field, even if we chose to use this time to sit on the field. It was a moment in which [. . .] we wouldn’t have to be on the sides or leave because the boys were playing. [. . .] It was fair because the teacher had been noticing that it was just the boys [. . .] He told them that if they continued to exclude girls from playing soccer [. . .] he was going to ban them from the field. [. . .] [Now, boys] have realized like “It’s fun to play with [girls]” because many times they tell us. [. . .] They include us now, and sometimes they even ask us, “You’re not playing?”

Stella judged the teacher’s response as fair in that he acknowledged and addressed the power dynamic between the genders. His recurrent interventions were seen as having a notable impact; the first time the teacher gave control of the soccer field to the girls, the boys still tried to take over, but with time, they recognized that girls also had a right to the space.

Youth also described unfair resolutions as those where there was bias or favoritism based on nationality, gender, students’ reputations, and/or relationships with teachers. Students were highly aware of these unfair dynamics; for instance, Mateo observed: “If a teacher sees a student who misbehaves in class fighting with the most obedient one [. . .] it could be that the obedient one started it, but they’ll blame it on the one who misbehaves due to his reputation.” Power imbalances were thus further perpetuated when teachers were inattentive to these dynamics. Take, for instance, Dulce’s narrative:

I came out of the bathroom, and a classmate who studies with me was out there. And I told her, “Excuse me,” but since I am Venezuelan, I sometimes speak loudly. [. . .] According to her, she said that I told her to “move,” but I didn’t say that. I asked her normally. She gave me a bad look, so I told her, “Why are you giving me bad looks?” She told me, “Oh, because you are pushing me.” I told her, “But that’s why I said excuse me.” Then, she told me, “No, you did not say it that way. . .” So, I ignored her. About 2 days later, I think she told the teacher, and the teacher called us. [. . .] She asked us what was happening since we had already had several conflicts, because in sixth grade, I had a fight with her, and the same thing happened, and they gave me schoolwork, and she had to help the preschoolers. [. . .] I told her, “No, teacher, she heard wrong, or she thought that I yelled at her. . .” And [the teacher] told me, “Yes, you yelled at her. . .” So, I got upset because they did not believe me. [. . .] I thought they preferred her because I am Venezuelan. [. . .] I thought: “The teacher surely believed her because she is Colombian.” [. . .] They suspended us for a few days from classes [. . .] It seemed unfair to me because they put me back to doing schoolwork and something easy for her. So, I spoke to the teacher. I told her that the same thing had already happened, and she told me that it was not her decision and that my classmate had chosen [her own consequence as part of the in-school suspension]. But why does my classmate get to decide? Why didn’t she ask both of us?

Dulce judged the teacher’s response as unfair because her own consequence seemed undeservedly more severe than that of the other student, and her perspective was not considered (both for the interpretation of the situation and the decision of the consequence). Unlike her classmate, Dulce was not aware of the possibility of being able to choose her own consequence or participate in the decision-making. As such, not only did Dulce lose the opportunity to voice her preference, but she was also at an overall disadvantage because she did not know how to skillfully navigate the school system. In her narration, Dulce underlined that bias may have influenced others’ responses (e.g., “The teacher surely believed her because she is Colombian”), and she seemed to be left with unanswered questions (e.g., “Why does my classmate get to decide?”). There also seemed to be cultural barriers that were left unaddressed, such as the perception of “loudness” or “rudeness” in Dulce’s request.

Fair Responses were Aligned with Goals in the Aftermath of Harm

This theme centered on judgments that were grounded in the narrator’s immediate goals achieved (or not) with a particular intervention. Specifically, youth judged punishments as fair when aligned with their goals in the aftermath of harm, such as to protect students from further harm and promote learning from one’s mistakes. For example, Adriana explained that punishments were fair because “these were a good way to help students understand that you shouldn’t do that.” Similarly, students discussed how it was fair when threats of punishment were used to deter future similar harms, as Mauricio observed: “[Fair would be] to prevent a conflict like that from happening again. They should give them a warning to explain that if they do it again, they will be punished.” Also, in David’s words: “Don’t leave it in a simple scolding and think that nobody is going to do anything again because that is not how it works [. . .] If we don’t have consequences, we don’t learn.” In addition, adolescents also endorsed punishments to achieve retributive goals, such that fair consequences were those that addressed concerns with deservingness. As Mariana explained: “They were both temporarily expelled [. . .] [it was fair] because they both deserved it for hitting and hurting each other.”

Importantly, however, punishments were not always aligned with youths’ goals. In particular, when youth described goals centered on repairing harm, they tended to judge that restorative responses were fair. Restorative responses could entail dialogues, either solely among the students involved or as mediated by a teacher, school psychologist, or even another peer. Participants underlined that these dialogues could accomplish their restorative goals by providing space for symbolic restoration where students express their feelings and understand the impact of their actions. For instance, Paola explained the value of dialogues in repairing the harm:

The teacher only called us and talked to us. He told us not to do it again, but it didn’t seem fair because our classmate was still feeling bad. The teacher talking to us doesn’t change how she feels. They should have at least gotten us together with her to apologize [. . .] The conversation would be fair because you are giving the space for her [the target] to share her side and for us [the actors] to apologize. An apology won’t fix everything, but will help her feel better.

Fair Responses Centered Students’ Needs

As students discussed fair and unfair responses to harm, they emphasized the importance of interventions to be sensitive to their fundamental needs and lived experiences. In particular, youth judged that responses were fair when adults were empathetic toward students’ interpersonal and intrapersonal challenges. Although youth recognized that hurting others was unacceptable, they also thought conflicts between peers were to be expected, and they judged responses as unfair when these simply sought to minimize conflict without considering their needs for interpersonal connection. In the words of Leticia: “Punishments became something like, ‘You shouldn’t fight, like it is forbidden to fight because, if you do, then this will happen to you.’ And, well, it’s impossible not to argue with others because we are all so different.” Thus, youth judged interventions as superficial when they centered on prohibitions and solely emphasized behavioral change. In contrast, youth reasoned that fair responses were those that met their needs for connectedness. Take, for instance, a narrative shared by Amelia about a student who was initially socially isolated but was able to make a friend following a teacher’s response to a peer harm situation:

The teacher, instead of punishing, tried to get the two people to get along [. . .] He told them they should respect each other, be more empathetic and tolerant, and try to get to know each other [. . .] He gave them an assignment or something like that to do together, and then later they became, more or less, friends [. . .] [It was fair] because I liked that [student’s name] was now getting along with someone else.

Participants also judged that it was fair when teachers took into account the broader circumstances that made peer harm more painful or that could have encouraged students to respond aggressively. Cristina offered the following explanation for why she thought it was fair for staff to take the time to explore the reasons underlying a peer’s hurtful actions: “Maybe he was going through a difficult time, and he wanted to get into a fight to blow off some steam. Many students blow off steam by fighting.” This approach was also considered in a focus group conversation:

Gabriel:

There are many times when we already have a lot of problems at home, and then they come out at school, and we do not even know what to do anymore.

Sebastián:

[. . .] I think I'm not the only one that has experienced this. . . you have problems at home, and you come here and. . .

Leticia:

And more problems.

Sebastián:

And you find more problems here, and you end up with this mess in your head. You do not know what to do, do not know what to think, and that is when you often end up in a conflict that you do not even know how it started.

Leticia:

Same. . . You end up exploding. Any little thing, boom, affects you.

Sebastián:

[. . .] Sometimes you explode at the smallest thing because you already have a lot on your mind. [. . .] Sometimes the biggest problems are caused by the smallest things.

Leticia:

And sometimes, for example, when the teachers intervene, they don’t listen to you.

Sebastián:

They tend to only want to solve the problem at hand without listening to both parties.

This discussion outlined how students sometimes felt they had difficulty constructively navigating everyday conflicts, given other personal problems. However, students recognized that addressing broader circumstances could sometimes go beyond the bandwidth and training of teachers, and thus suggested that seeking support from the school psychologist in certain instances of peer harm could make responses more fair. For example, Alana proposed psychological support for both sides: “They should have helped me psychologically or something like that and helped her too because she did it for a reason [. . .] Because she must have a reason [. . .] They should be aware of what is happening.” In this sense, adolescents’ responses underscored how justice and welfare are intertwined; responses are deemed fair to the extent that they support the welfare of the involved students.

As students reasoned about their perception of fair approaches to addressing peer harm in schools, they also underlined that school authorities ought to respond in ways that respect and support their fundamental needs for privacy and autonomy. When discussing their right to privacy, students focused mostly on their desire for school authorities not to intervene publicly to avoid scrutiny and gossip from peers, as well as requested that staff consider youths’ perspectives before reaching out to caregivers. For instance, Paola observed the following about a student who had been hurt by her own behavior: “I don’t know if she wanted her parents to know that she felt bad and all that. Sometimes they don’t want parents to know how they feel, so I don’t think it would be fair.” Similarly, students also judged that it was fair for adults to consider whether targets of harm saw value in participating in a dialogue with those who hurt them. In this way, students judged it as fair for their perspectives to be considered before adults made any unilateral decisions.

Relatedly, students underlined a need for agency, and thus, they judged it was fair for adults to support them in becoming more autonomous in addressing peer harm. One pathway aligned with this could be providing students with the space and training to be mediators in situations of peer harm. Indeed, in a focus group conversation, students discussed several reasons why they considered peer mediation to be fair:

Isabela:

Well, to not go through the teachers and administrative staff and make the problem bigger.

Stella:

[. . .] Because we don’t always listen to teachers. Because many times we feel like ‘no, they’re snitches who are going to tell our parents. . .’ [. . .] Instead, with a peer, since he is already closer to those having the problem, he could give them some advice that they could follow because it is a person who is at their level, so to speak.

Esteban:

Yeah, because we get scared, so we may tell lies and all that. We don’t express ourselves the way we want. [. . .] Because I don’t want, let’s say, to be punished or something like that.

As evident in their responses, youth thought fair responses should go beyond top-down approaches led by school authorities to have more autonomy, feel more comfortable expressing their perspectives, and receive advice from peers who may be more familiar with their struggles. Indeed, students shared unfair moments wherein school authorities did not support their agency in the aftermath of peer harm. For instance, Amelia narrated a time when she had a fight with a student, and the two of them talked and apologized after school, but the next day they were called into the office to get scolded and punished:

The coordinator started to lecture us, saying that that was really bad and things like that [. . .] I try to reflect on my own, so that day, I did not pay too much attention. [. . .] [Her words] didn’t land well with me, and like she never really listened to our point of view. [. . .] She simply focused on the fight and having us understand why it was wrong, why it shouldn’t be that way, and that we were a bad example. [. . .] They never understood what we did. They just called it wrong. [. . .] I have already been taught what's wrong, for example, fighting, hitting, and violence.

In this case, the adult missed an opportunity to build on the reflections the students had had on their own in a conversation following the fight, and thus, as explained by Amelia, the students felt unheard and disconnected from the intervention. By talking at students rather than with them, the intervention focused solely on labeling the students’ behavior as wrong, minimizing their agency as moral actors who can autonomously judge what is harmful (or not) and have insights into how to repair their own transgressions. Students’ need for agency was not limited to educational settings, as explained by Francisca during a focus group discussion about youth mediation in their neighborhoods: “Students haven’t yet learned [how] to be conflict mediators [. . .] We have talked about how to change mindsets at school, and that we could be mediators at school. But why can't we be mediators outside of the institution?”

Overall, youths’ responses suggested that their fairness judgments extended beyond concerns about equality to include considerations of equity and deservingness. Their reasoning was not limited to explorations about reactive responses to harm, but instead they discussed the role of staff in supporting student wellbeing, questioned oppressive dynamics, and challenged top-down relationships between adults and youth across various contexts.

Discussion

With this study, we aimed to explore what adolescents thought were fair versus unfair responses to addressing peer harm in schools, as grounded in their narratives and group conversations with other students. In line with the diversity of ways scholars have defined and approached notions of fairness, adolescents’ judgments reflected varying concerns related to retributive, distributive, procedural, and restorative justice (see Brugman et al., 2016). We discuss how these varying justice considerations contribute to adolescents’ fairness judgments.

Firstly, fair responses entailed condemning and addressing peer harm. This finding is in line with scholarship suggesting that students are less willing to report victimization when educators do not take these situations seriously or intervene to stop them (e.g., Williams & Cornell, 2006). Our findings also converge with research indicating that young people judge punishments as fair when these address concerns with retribution and deterrence (Barreiro, 2012). Yet, these concerns, which are overly emphasized within punitive frameworks (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Recchia et al., 2024), did not fully capture the many considerations informing youths’ fairness judgments. Indeed, adolescents seemed to wrestle with the limitations of these approaches. For instance, in line with previous research with Colombian youth (Pareja Conto et al., 2023), participants agreed that fair responses involved immediate intervention by authority figures, but the ways they envisioned adults’ involvement challenged the hierarchical approach typical of punitive systems (Recchia et al., 2024). Specifically, youth judged as fair interventions that respected their agency and were sensitive to their lived experiences.

Adolescents’ fairness judgments also emphasized other limits of relying exclusively on punitive approaches to address peer harm. In particular, youth underlined the need to go beyond labeling one student as the perpetrator and another as the victim (in line with criticisms by restorative scholars; Lyubansky & Shpungin, 2015). This approach seemed particularly unfair to them when adults failed to consider that harm stemming from conflicts typically involves actions and inactions from different parties. As such, youth endorsed a more nuanced approach that went beyond categorizing individuals and placing blame to examine the individual and collective responsibilities of different parties. Relatedly, students highlighted the responsibility of bystanders of harm to seek help and intervene to prevent harm escalation, as well as the responsibility of different adults (e.g., caregivers, teachers) not to enable, minimize, or justify harm. These positions align with restorative frameworks that promote dialogues to explore the responsibility of not only those directly involved but also the larger community (Zehr, 2002).

For youth, fair interventions also involved a thorough process that was congruent with what had happened and why it happened. Adolescents made judgments reflecting distributive and retributive concerns about the outcome of the intervention, where notions of equality, deservingness, and equity surfaced. These varied justice considerations were in line with developmental scholarship that underscores how young people’s judgments grow increasingly sophisticated with age (Smith & Warneken, 2016; S. Thomas et al., 2024). Youths’ focus on appropriate consequences sometimes resulted in contrasting views, with some adolescents endorsing the same consequence for all and others preferring to account for the role each party played. Despite these diverse views, adolescents’ reflections on procedural justice provided insights into how to navigate opposing views. Specifically, for the process to be considered fair, adolescents judged that the response ought to entail a careful and thorough examination of the situation in which different parties had the space to voice their perspectives. In this way, adolescents’ fairness judgments about addressing peer harm in schools directly challenged one-size-fits-all policies by proposing a more humane approach that was situation-specific and gave students an agentic role.

As they age, young people can increasingly grasp the oppressive beliefs underlying harm and unfairness (Wray-Lake et al., 2024). Indeed, adolescents in our study were sensitive to the need to address power imbalances and oppressive beliefs for processes and outcomes to be fair. Adolescents made sophisticated links between peer harm, school responses, and systems of oppression. Thus, youths’ judgments were also in line with research conducted in the Global South (K. J. Thomas et al., 2024), which documents that perceptions of justice are embedded in a larger sociocultural system and thus vary across gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. That is, inasmuch as justice is conceptualized as a form of capital unequally distributed (K. J. Thomas, 2022), fair responses from teachers should involve concrete steps to democratize access to justice and dismantle oppressive norms and practices by all community members.

Beliefs about fairness are formed in complex social contexts plagued by injustices. Recognizing these realities, our study was designed to allow youth to incorporate their understandings and reflections of their rich lived experiences into their constructions of fairness. This approach brought to light several nuances, such as tensions among adolescents over how to balance notions of equity and equality in the resolution of peer harm. Caution should be exercised in the interpretation of these findings, given the nature of cross-sectional data. More specific to the one-time focus group conversations, it is possible that youth may have reached even more nuanced stances if they had ongoing opportunities to participate in dialogues with peers. For instance, ensuing focus groups may have given youth the space to explore how equity could actually be realized in the aftermath of peer harm at school. We also did not conduct member checking with teens due to time constraints during data collection. Future research should explore how youths’ viewpoints on fairness diverge across different experiences, given the situation-specificity of their judgments (e.g., type of transgression; varying roles in harm).

Summary and Conclusions

This research examined what students thought were fair versus unfair approaches to addressing peer harm in schools. Thematic analysis of qualitative responses suggested that fair responses involve immediately condemning and addressing harm by following a thorough approach that carefully considers students’ behaviors and needs. In this vein, our findings underscore how welfare and justice are intertwined, such that responses are deemed fair to the extent that they support students’ welfare while still holding them accountable for their transgressions. This study also suggested that youth were less ambivalent about school authorities’ involvement in peer harm than previous research has indicated (e.g., Newman et al., 2001). Importantly, however, this does not mean that youth credulously endorsed adult involvement, as they did express critical and nuanced views on how school authorities should respond.

Altogether, this work highlights that fairness for youth is a multi-faceted concept that involves concerns about equality, equity, deservingness, restoration, and agency. In this way, our findings challenge the overemphasis on retribution and rehabilitation promoted by punitive models for not addressing the various considerations informing youths’ fairness judgments. Incorporating youths’ perspectives is crucial given that their perception of school authorities as fair can motivate them to abide by the rules and norms of their institutions, as well as to trust authority figures (Brugman et al., 2016; Flanagan et al., 2007; K. J. Thomas et al., 2019). Scholars, educators, and policymakers should work collaboratively with youth to design and implement interventions that fairly address peer harm in schools.