In 2015, the violence-free school climate policy was issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. The goal of the policy is to promote the government’s agendas in cultivating social harmony and combating rising violence in society.  This policy requires schools provide violence-free school climate so that school would be an ideal place for nurturing peace and social harmony, and more importantly, schools would be the safe place for all school inhabitants, including staff and students. This policy suggests that any conduct related to violence such as physical and verbal bullying, sexual harassment, and other psychological violence should be prevented and banned.  After three years of implementation of the policy, however, research on how the violence-free school climate policy has been understood and enacted by educators at school remains absent.

This present study, therefore, reports on how this official policy informs teachers in conceptualizing school violence and its prevention. Such report is critical to conduct for assessing whether the policy has been effective in terms of its objectives. Teachers’ conceptual understanding of what is meant by violence at school and what is entailed in preventing violence reflects the effectiveness of the policy.

Besides the policy document, literature around the typology of school violence from many different contexts and culture were reviewed to illustrate the larger theoretical argument. The literature suggests different types of violence not limited to the physical but also psychological violence. Psychological violence is coercive or aversive acts intended to lead emotional harm or the threat of emotional harm. The literature indicates that psychological violence is often as destructive as physical violence.

Teachers working in five secondary schools in the five biggest cities across Indonesia were interviewed. The interview explores teachers’ understanding and beliefs regarding different types of violence and how to anticipate the emergence of the violence.  The findings indicated that teacher participants described the different understanding regarding the types of violence. They reported more understanding of physical violence while reported less understanding of non-physical violence. Despite ideas for anticipation and response towards physical violence, these teachers did not have any preconceived notion of ideas of how to anticipate any non-physical violence. This paper suggests that teachers’ understanding of many different types of violence should first be enhanced so that teachers’ approach to implementing the policy of violence-free school climate could be more effective.

Keywords: psychological violence, violence-free school, teacher