Teachers’ Views about the Reasons Causing Long-Term Disobedience to School Age Children: Could Long-Term Child Disobedience or Aggressiveness Provide Indications of a Subsequent Criminal Personality?

This paper deals with long-term child disobedience and its potential evolution first into aggressiveness and then into criminality. Sixty-one teachers at primary education school units participated in this empirical survey. Teachers agree that long-term child disobedience is due to: a) reasons linked to problematic family relationships, such as lack of affection, absence of rules or limits, conflicting attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of parents, domestic violence, etc., b) reasons linked to education environment, such as children’s learning difficulties, poor interaction between teacher and student, children’s difficulty in adapting to teaching methods, bullying that a child may suffer because of classmates, absence of communication between parents and school, etc. and c) reasons linked to a child’s broader social environment, such as a child’s participation in cliques with out-of-school individuals, rejection by peers, absence from creative extracurricular activities, watching violent child TV series or playing violent video games, long exposure to the internet, etc. In addition, teachers believe that long-term child disobedience may turn first into aggressiveness and subsequently become criminality. According to teachers, aggressiveness is due to family, education and social reasons, while criminality is due to family and social reasons. Finally, teachers assert that long-term child disobedience is not due to genetic or environment factors and criminality is not due to education structures. Their views are listed, analyzed and discussed in this paper.