Deciphering Reality from Perception. Learners’ Tales on Sociocultural Setup and Gender-Based Violence in Schools in Uganda

It is time to hear straight from the horse’s mouth. The continuous publication of poor school results from rural parts of Uganda makes all the research reports and policy briefs appear ill-focused. This paper seeks to answer one broad question: What do school children know about the contribution of sociocultural factors to gender-based violence in schools? This child-focused paper draws on a study which employed qualitative approaches, methods and designs guided by the interpretative phenomenological analysis to enlist thoughts from learners between ages 10 and 14 as participants from selected public schools in three districts in the Busoga sub-region. This mainly idiographic study is also informed by a deliberately reviewed pool of literature and traces of social and historical chronicles. The findings highlight sociocultural beliefs, gender power relations and psychosocial anxieties as the leading attributions of school-related gender-based violence against and among children. These findings highlight the importance of a child as a principal stakeholder in their education journey as well as his/her psycho-historical and sociocultural development and the need for condensed attention pitched towards early detection, prevention and elimination of gender-based violence in schools and beyond.