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AbstractAulas en Paz (Classrooms in Peace) seeks to prevent aggression and promote peaceful relationships by means of a classroom curriculum for the development of socioemotional competencies; peer group sessions with two initially aggressive and four prosocial children; and workshops, home visits, and phone calls to parents. Preliminary evaluations in Colombian elementary schools have shown drastic reductions in aggression and substantial improvements in prosocial behavior, classroom climate, and friendship networks. The combination of universal components reaching all students and targeted components reaching more intensively those who need it the most appears to be responsible for such large effects.

AbstractConflicts between informal groups are common in adolescence, and can lead to much aggression, but have been much less studied than conflicts between stable groups such as gangs. Seeking to understand better their conflict dynamics, informal groups were identified with a peer‐nomination method applied to 121 adolescents from Bogotá, Colombia (12–16 years), and 23 semi‐structured interviews were conducted. Most conflicts escalated to verbal or physical aggression. Whether conflicts escalated or de‐escalated seemed to depend on beliefs legitimizing aggression, social identities, online (vs. face‐to‐face only) interactions, and on third parties interventions. Results provide insights for prevention of school violence.

Children exposed to higher levels of violence tend to be more aggressive. Specific mechanisms explaining this relationship are still being uncovered. This study sought to identify the relationship between exposure to community violence and reactive and proactive aggression, as well as cognitive and emotional variables mediating this relationship. Participants were 1,235 students (from fifth to ninth grade) from localities of Bogotá, Colombia, with varying levels of community violence. Analyses of self-reported measures confirmed significant associations between exposure to community violence and both reactive and proactive aggression. Normative beliefs supporting aggression, hostile attribution of intent, positive expectations for aggression, and lack of guilt after aggression, partially mediated these relationships, suggesting strategies for prevention.