Violence in close relationships and the dramaturgy of violence

Abstract

The assumption, at the basis of the report, considers the bullying - inside the systemic approach - as a state of oppression caused by the identitary uncertainty of many teenagers. Today, the violence between peers is characterized as one of the most effective strategies for the construction of atypical identity or troubled identities, in specific relational contexts (frames). The mutual acceptance and the permanence in the deviant group, allows the creation/attribution of an identity to each member of the group, and it is subject to the so-called "cognitive responsibility", which allows the voluntary perpetuation (replication) of a "dramatic scene" (framework).This last takes the form of a ritual, a drama in which each participants assume the role expected from the character that plays. The violence between peers, therefore, is both an instrument of regulation of relations and attribution of identity, and an autonomous social force capable of shaping the identity of participants in a special deviant relationship. It, as a force able to structure certain groups, gives a role to participants in the report - those of the victim, the executioner and the viewer - and therefore a "identity of role", which is however subordinate to the possibility/impossibility that the "public" - the set of the viewers who are members of the same group - "likes or not" the performance of co-actors, and then give them a recognition of identity. From this point of view, the viewer performs the principal function in the same staging of deviant group.