Recently, the mass media have reported an increase in school violence following the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, in December, The New York Times (2024) headlined “Gun Violence at Schools Has Risen Since the Pandemic”, reporting a notable increase in this type of violence in United States schools, and The Scotsman newspaper reported a 76% increase in the 110 incidents of school violence over the three years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic (February 2025). School climate has deteriorated globally during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and violence in schools has increased in many countries around the world. In different countries, cyberbullying (Espelage et al., 2024; Molcho et al., 2025), students aggression toward teachers (McMahon et al., 2024), bullying toward students with special educational needs (Cornell et al., 2025), school shootings (Scott et al., 2024), physical and psychological school violence (Imran, 2024), and the influence of structural aspects (Canci et al., 2024) have increased (Forsberg and Thorvaldsen, 2022; Țîroiu, 2023).

This global issue has gained social and political interest, and violence in schools has become a priority focus of international education policies. Such is the case of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations (2015), which has established the need to address the ways of living together in schools in order to foster a culture of collaboration, inclusion, peace, and non-violence, to achieve high-quality education.

After the return to in-person schooling, international studies revealed a complex picture of post-pandemic challenges affecting children and adolescents. Although bullying appeared to decrease during remote learning (Stewart et al., 2024), the reopening of schools coincided with rising levels of violence, anxiety, and school victimization (Anderman et al., 2024; Aylin-Arici et al., 2024; McMahon et al., 2024). In some countries, such as Germany and Bangladesh, increases in youth crime and suicide rates were reported (Nägel and Kroneberg, 2023; Rahman-Himel et al., 2024). Globally, anxiety, depression, and emotional distress have been increasingly rising among children and adolescents after the pandemic (Man Ng and Ling Ng, 2022; Wang et al., 2022). This scenario has posed challenges to various social systems in understanding and addressing these psychological phenomena in specific contexts (Liu et al., 2025). In the field of education, current findings underscore the urgency of designing policies to address the long-term consequences of the pandemic on children and adolescents (Lal and Gupta, 2025).

In the Chilean case, the post-pandemic context has revealed a major crisis in school climate, including violence, insecurity, and an impact on mental health and well-being (Berger, 2024). Thus, a new policy on school climate was recently published, and one of its objectives is to provide a solution to the needs and problems of school climate caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Castro-Carrasco et al., 2025).

In 2022, the return to in-person schooling was marked by a sharp rise in reports of school violence in Chile, reflecting a broader international concern about the post-pandemic deterioration of students’ mental health and behavior (Rojas-Andrade et al., 2024). The increase in violent incidents and emotional distress among students was not isolated, but part of a global trend documented in recent research (Ashraf et al., 2023; Mazrekaj and De Witte, 2024). This underscores the relevance of analyzing expert discourse during that year, as according to Reveilhac (2022), political authorities and health experts used social media to improve communication with the public during the pandemic.

When dealing with crises, such as a pandemic, it is essential that the stakeholders involved in mitigation, prevention, emergency response and recovery are integrated and work collaboratively. In this context, experts and scholars play a key role in risk management (Rindrasih et al., 2024).

In the case of the education emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact on the educational process among 94% of students globally included interruption of teaching, damage to the psychological health of the educational community, poor quality of learning, problems in social–emotional development, deterioration of school climate and an increase in violence (Durrani and Ozawa, 2024). This impact could, in part, be mitigated with appropriate risk management. Tipler et al. (2018) have proposed that adequate risk management in education requires schools to prepare for crises and to receive expert professional support from external institutions.

Accordingly, experts need to show professionalism in the face of emergencies, expressed in the ability to adapt their discourse and services in accordance with emerging social demands (Ray, 2024). Precisely, experts had an important presence in the media during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, guiding the response to physical and psychological health risk, the economic damage caused by the pandemic, education in emergencies and the functioning of society in general (Rouillard et al., 2023).

Experts are often recognized as such due to their specialized knowledge, skills, or their institutional or professional roles (Flick, 2022). However, expert knowledge is not limited to formalized, academic understanding, it also encompasses practical, experience-based knowledge that may not always be explicitly articulated. The relevance of studying expert knowledge is that it can become dominant within a field, shaping the practices and decisions of others (Bogner et al., 2018).

Along with the aforementioned, a relevant dimension of people in the pandemic context was the subjective knowledge that was constructed and shared by different means to respond to the pandemic, for example, beliefs about protective measures (Escouflaire et al., 2024). In the case of professionals, according to Polat et al. (2024), the pandemic context challenged their agency and professional identity, having to face uncertainty based on their experience—professional and subjective—to deliver the services that society demanded in and after the emergency. Additionally, online media gained prominence in the face of containment measures (Reveilhac, 2022), with social media facilitating public health communication and pandemic management through expert engagement (Abbas et al., 2021). This, faced with the significant challenge of conveying factual information and countering conspiracy beliefs that circulated about the pandemic and mitigation measures (Nugent et al., 2025).

Based on the above, this study is aimed at understanding experts’ discourse on school violence on publicly accessible digital platforms during the year 2022—after the pandemic. This study is particularly interested in the experts’ argumentative and explanatory beliefs on these issues, i.e., their subjective theories (Groeben and Scheele, 2020). This is because subjective theories are a type of belief that allow people to justify, explain and direct their actions, as well as to understand the world in general (Flick, 2023). In psychosocial studies of professionals, there is significant scientific literature that shows that these actors use subjective theories to make professional decisions and guide their professional practice (Castro-Carrasco et al., 2024; Goller and Markert, 2024), especially when they do not have objective knowledge (Jancic, 2015) or the work context requires novel and urgent responses.

The main objective of this study is to understand the collective subjective theories in the public discourse of experts on school climate and school violence after educational confinement. Specifically, it aims at understanding the causes, effects, intervention strategies and contextual conditions associated with the challenges of school climate and school violence. This study seeks to answer the following research questions:

Based on public discourse by experts in Chile in 2022, how do experts’ subjective theories on school violence after lockdown converge or diverge?

As stated previously, four subjective theories were excluded from the cross-case analysis due to overlapping features between the social and educational, and the social and psychological domains. Additionally, two subjective theories were excluded as they reflected a more judicial perspective; these were categorized during the within-case analysis as “Judicial Subjective Theory.” Given that these two share distinct features with the three main subjective theories, they will be presented below.

ST 100: Since the system and authorities do not respond to complaints, individuals resort to acts of public exposure (from Spanish, funas) on social media to bring visibility to these cases.

ST 81: Given that cyberbullying takes place in a context of virtual interaction, we need to understand that this gives the attackers “almost absolute anonymity”, which makes it harder to access evidence and proof.

These two Judicial Subjective Theories reflect a distinct explanatory logic that frames school violence through a lens of legal accountability, institutional failure, and the need for alternative forms of justice and access to evidence.

Regarding the cross-case analysis, Table 2 below shows the 12 intermediate level subjective theories. These intermediate subjective theories represent recurring explanatory patterns articulated by professionals across different fields, such as education, psychology, and social work, regarding the post-pandemic challenges of school violence in Chile. Each intermediate subjective theory synthesizes a set of similar micro-level explanations, highlighting shared beliefs about causes, effects, and interventions.

This study sought to reconstruct and analyze the subjective theories expressed by publicly recognized experts in Chile regarding school violence in 2022. Just as scientific literature distinguishes between explanations derived from individual, school, or non-school approaches (Puschmann, 2024) our findings show that these subjective theories are articulated around three dominant explanatory frameworks: educational, psychological, and social. According to our analytical frame, each of these foregrounds different causes, consequences and strategies of intervention. These frameworks reflect discursive positions that shape how school violence is understood, justified and addressed in the public sphere through the media communications, just as previous studies that have shown the relation between the configurations made by the media about school violence and the decisions that are made by policy-makers (Herda-Rapp, 2003).

The Educational Subjective Theory focuses on pedagogical breakdowns and the weakening of school-based formation as causes of school violence. From this lens, the erosion of socioemotional education, the rigid or outdated implementation of coexistence protocols, and the insufficient training of teachers are seen as contributors to the post-pandemic crisis in school climate. This resonates with international research highlighting the role of schools in the development of socioemotional skills after the pandemic (Min et al., 2024), and conflict resolution skills (Santamaría-Villar et al., 2021). Although this explanation focuses on the development of psychosocial skills, its framework is educational rather than solely psychological, thereby considering the development of these skills as a curricular issue and, therefore, a matter for planning and addressing school violence within schools., experts adopting this subjective theory call for formative strategies that foster dialog and promote values, aligning with evidence in research demonstrating greater effectiveness in interventions focused on education and centered on prevention and promotion, such as whole-school approaches to violence prevention (Alonso-Rodríguez et al., 2025; Rojas-Andrade et al., 2024).

The Psychological Subjective Theory, by contrast, situates school violence within a framework of emotional vulnerability and mental health deterioration among students. Experts holding this subjective theory emphasize the effects of prolonged isolation and dysregulation caused by the pandemic, demanding a stronger integration of psychosocial support within the school system. This explanation finds support in recent studies that document rising levels of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress among children and adolescents after the pandemic (Man Ng and Ling Ng, 2022; Wang et al., 2022). Thus, the Psychological Subjective Theory understands school violence as an expression of unprocessed suffering requiring individualized and preventive care, which is also part of the Educational Subjective Theory. Summarizing, this subjective theory aligns with the individual approach (Puschmann, 2024), as referred to in previous research.

In this sense, this type of explanation seems to blur the role of the school when addressing school violence and its influence as the context in which it occurs. As such, it could be functioning as an argument that inhibits the school’s actions or agency. It is an argument that externalizes the school problem to a psychological and health context. This is consistent with the common finding that teachers externalize the causes and responsibilities for school problems, usually considering them to be internal to the student and therefore outside the scope of education (Carroll et al., 2023; González González et al., 2019).

Thus, the finding of the Psychological Subjective Theory does not imply that intervention within the school is impossible, but rather that the work that needs to be done is mainly on a psychological level. The expert argument presented in this subjective theory matches some of the explanations given by another relevant educational actor, such as the Chilean Ministry of Education, in the first year of the return to in-person classes. This institution has emphasized health factors and psychological aspects, such as the deficit of emotional self-regulation, both as causes of school violence issues and as a policy to be implemented, thus leading to a psychologization of the problem (Castro-Carrasco et al., 2025; Ministerio de Educación, 2024; Vargas-Pérez et al., 2024). This psychologization of the problem could lead to reductionist approaches to intervention. However, such interventions should not be dismissed, as some show greater support in the area of school climate. Specifically, Tapullima-Mori et al. (2024), in a systematic review of interventions, highlight that those based on the development of emotional intelligence are among the most effective, although this finding could be influenced by the prevalence of this type of approach in interventions that are commonly implemented precisely because of the significant incidence of this way of understanding the problem. Another interesting finding is that this Psychological Subjective Theory is not mainly represented in this study by experts in the field of mental health. Rather, expert psychologists within the educational context tend to offer a psychoeducational explanation over the individual psychological argument.

The Social Subjective Theory, finally, frames school violence as a symptom of broader societal fractures. Experts drawing on this perspective point to systemic inequality, societal patterns of aggression, and the digital environment as underlying conditions that normalize violent behavior. This aligns with educational and sociological research that conceptualize school violence as an expression of dynamics of exclusion, injustice, and marginalization (Pabayo et al., 2022; Qorbani et al., 2022). From a critical point of view, this subjective theory is also externalizing the problem, as the Psychological Subjective Theory, and negatively implies focusing on aspects that are probably difficult to change within schools, once again taking away the agency from this institution. However, if one expands the view on schooling to include a political dimension, this subjective theory aligns with perspectives in which resistance and the role of schools in social change are relevant (Giroux, 2024). This explanation associated with school violence has also been found when studying the subjective theories of the Chilean Teachers’ Union (Castro-Carrasco et al., 2024).

The judicializing subjective theories identified in this study, although less prevalent, reveal growing concerns with legal framing of school violence. These subjective theories suggest a discursive shift toward punitive approaches, which contrasts with formative and damage-repairing orientation of most experts. The tension between punitive versus formative approaches reflects debates in the literature about the risks of this approach when dealing with conflict at school (Ortiz-Mallegas et al., 2023). On the other hand, Latin American (Adduci, 2020; Mota and Gois, 2023) and worldwide research have revealed a concerning tendency in the media to address school violence from a criminalizing and delictual perspective associated with reactionary responses (Mosqueda et al., 2021). Nonetheless, our findings show that this approach is less prevalent in Chile, among experts consulted by the media. This may be positive, given that specialists in the field are interested in developing a social construct of school violence that does not stigmatize or individualize the phenomenon from a criminal perspective (di Napoli and Sáez, 2022). As such, public discourse would influence the design of comprehensive educational policies.

Expert discourse disseminated through digital media is inevitably shaped by the conditions of its production and circulation. As journalistic discourse is embedded in specific historical and social contexts, it is regulated by institutional norms, editorial projects, discursive practices, and material constraints (González-Arias et al., 2024). In the case of web news and short interview videos, explanations about school violence are produced within formats that prioritize immediacy, intelligibility, and relevance for broad audiences. As a result, expert knowledge is often condensed into accessible narratives that fit the conventions of these genres such as news articles, interviews and opinion pieces.

In contemporary digital media environments, the boundaries of news have become increasingly fluid, as information circulates across platforms and genres within a hybrid media system (Ekström, 2023; Ibarra Herrera, 2020). News discourse frequently consists of representations and recontextualizations of discourses originating in other settings, such as interviews, statements or expert commentaries, which are selectively reproduced for public dissemination (Ekström and Westlund, 2019). Thus, the apparent simplification of expert subjective theories in media discourse should not always be interpreted as a reduction enacted by experts themselves, but rather as the outcome of platform-specific logics and journalistic mediation. These dynamics demonstrate how subjective theories function as public interpretive frameworks, shaped by and responsive to the communicative demands of contemporary media ecosystems.

Despite its contributions, this study presents some limitations. It focuses exclusively on public discourses disseminated through media in Chile. Future research could explore other national cases, which could further illuminate how subjective theories about school violence circulate and shape beliefs and explanations about the school systems in different countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented global experience, with no previous evidence to guide its management. It is therefore understandable that subjective theories based on personal professional knowledge and experience prevailed over explanations based on the scientific evidence that was being produced in parallel (Castro-Carrasco et al., 2024; Goller and Markert, 2024). This background is relevant to consider, given that subjective theories are beliefs whose argumentative structure justifies, but also guides the actions of professionals (Flick, 2023). If this is the case, then there is a need to advance toward the development of action plans based on the experience of schools and their stakeholders (professionals and students) during that period, in dialog with the accumulated experience of experts at the time and the scientific research produced in this regard. These plans could be integrated into universal educational policies and used by decision-makers and experts who face future situations with risks similar to those experienced in recent years (Cuadra et al., 2018), as a general reference to guide the construction of interpretations, recommendations, and action strategies (Jancic, 2015). For instance, one of the actions deemed important would be updating existing school protocols so that they respond to the needs and realities of the current generation of students.

On the other hand, this emphasis on individual responsibility could be related to possible biases that may be operating in the initial training in the disciplines of the experts considered in this study. Professional training may be prioritizing an individual perspective on the origin of the problem, paying less attention to contextual factors. Likewise, a reductionist analytical approach may be taking precedence over a broader, more systemic one that views social behavior as a message from complex mechanisms derived from different spheres. If this is the case, then it seems relevant to revisit the initial training of professionals recognized as experts in psychosocial issues (school violence, in this case), in order to include a broader understanding of how school violence develops. Likewise, it is important to raise awareness and provide training in favor of a professional disposition toward: (1) historically and institutionally situated analysis; and (2) privileging a comprehensive and interventional interdisciplinary approach. Both dimensions are aimed at advancing toward the collective and multidisciplinary construction of interpretations and proposals that ensure the relevance and effectiveness of the action strategies produced (Rindrasih et al., 2024; Tipler et al., 2018).

A general explanation of school violence from a psychological perspective centered on individuals, as it has been stated, risks being reductionist, taking the spotlight away from educational actions. However, as experts’ discourse points out, it is necessary to address the gap in socioemotional skills that increased during the pandemic period. In this respect, the role of play within the school context should not be underestimated, particularly as a means to promote collaboration and positive peer interactions, overall improving school coexistence. Non-academic activities, such as sports competitions, could contribute to strengthening students’ sense of belonging and community. Likewise, promoting creative activities that are not subject to formal assessment may encourage participation, expression, and cooperation in less pressured contexts. Thus, without necessarily opposing an explanation that emphasizes the psychological aspects of school violence toward a more contextual and educational view focused on prevention, these proposals may help reinforce a sense of agency and rise of collective self-efficacy within schools, positioning them as spaces where conflicts are addressed internally rather than displaced. For instance, to implement these proposals, the creation of multidisciplinary teams could be a practical strategy to respond to socioemotional and relational challenges in a more coordinated manner.

This study contributes to the understanding of expert discourse on school violence in a moment of uncertainty such as the return to face-to-face education after the pandemic. By reconstructing subjective theories disseminated in the media, it highlights how expert knowledge operates as both an interpretive framework and a media resource. The experts’ discourse describes school violence, but it also shapes public agendas, justify interventions, and allocate responsibility (Browne Monckeberg and Rodríguez-Pastene, 2019).

Studying the experts’ role in education, in a situation of social crisis such as the pandemic, provides greater understanding about the assumptions from which expert knowledge and society in general recommend proposals for addressing school violence, and recognizes the coexistence of preventive and reactive perspectives. This study has contributed to synthesizing these different conceptions, and can be useful as a comprehensive and situated framework for the design of holistic interventions and public policies that overcome reductionism and distance from the polarization between preventive or reactive approaches to school violence. As abovementioned, this can be seen in the experts’ discourse in the communications of the media.