The Forgotten: The Internalized Effects of School Specific Slow Violence

Due to its nuanced character traits, slow violence has been allowed to persist within our society for centuries, resulting in impacts that have historically reached catastrophic proportions. With a focus on the education realm, this study describes the impact of school specific slow violence on marginalized communities. The purpose of this study was three-fold: (1) It sought to investigate how school specific slow violence has impacted the lives of Black and Latinx folx, (2) to explore how survivors of school specific slow violence made meaning of the experiences, and (3) investigate its influence on co-researchers’ agency via activism as we co-created a social action plan to mitigate specific slow violence acts. This youth participatory action research study centered ten recent graduates of a low-income and majority Black high school in South Florida. The data culminated in four major themes that highlighted the experiences of these recent graduates, which included a correlation between trauma and triumph, slow violence’s impact on the accountability co-researchers assigned to culpable parties, the increase in agency with the introduction of new knowledge and the effects of pride on co-researcher’s perception.