Extremist and pro-violence attitudes of Spanish adolescents in secondary schools

Abstract

This article distinguishes between attitudes towards extremism and attitudes towards violence and illegal acts. It operationalizes both groups of attitudes based on the proposed scales by Ozer and Bertelsen (2018), which are validated for the Spanish case. The combination of the two sets of attitudes favours the use of violence to pursue radical ideological, religious, or political views. The literature on the subject is reviewed, and the results of an exploratory study based on a questionnaire administered to adolescents attending 4 schools in Almería and 1 in Madrid (n = 1170), carried out in May 2022, are presented. The results of two multiple regressions on the indices of extremism and pro-violent and illegal acts, allow us to conclude that the boys, the youngest, of foreign parents, of mothers with a low educational level, right-wing, those who most frequently attend religious centres, show more extremism, and pro-violence and illegal acts attitudes. Those who believe that there is discrimination against LGTBI+ people are more extremist but not more pro-violence. Finally, those who belong to poor families, use many social networks a day, and have suffered physical violence show more pro-violence attitudes and illegal acts, but not more extremism. These results suggest that it is necessary to prioritize transforming violent extremism, especially among the most vulnerable groups.

Keywords

• extremist and pro-violence attitudes
• adolescents
• secondary schools
• Spain