Title: Violence among Students with and without Special Needs in Regular Education
Abstract: The current study focuses on students with special needs who are integrated in mainstream education frameworks. The first aim of the study is to determine whether students with and without special needs exhibit different levels of violence. The second aim is to determine the impact of a specially-designed intervention program which is implemented with students with special needs and intends to increase their understanding of the various aspects of violence. The current study involved 561 (197 of them with special needs) male and female students studying in the 7th-9th grade in an regional junior high school in Israel. All the students completed the “Bully/Victim Questionnaire” [1]. Students with special needs participated in an intervention program based on the Cycle of Internalized Learning (CIL) model [2]. After completing the intervention program, students’ perceptions of violence were reassessed by using the “Bully/Victim Questionnaire”. The pre-intervention findings indicated no difference in the pattern or the level of violence among students with special needs and the other students at the school, where as post-intervention. Findings revealed that students with special needs expressed higher incidences of violence than their peers who had not participated in the intervention.