"You're going to be a failure in life." When a teacher says this to a first grader, hardly anyone would hesitate to call it unethical. But most situations in which students experience a teacher's behaviour as hurtful are far less clear-cut, and these are the situations my research focuses on.

Why is it so complicated? Many dimensions shape our judgement, and they point in different directions. A few examples: Intention and impact can diverge, since a remark meant as motivation or a joke may still leave a child humiliated. Expectations of what teachers and students owe each other vary across schools, generations and cultures. And our own biographies matter: whether we have said something similar in a stressful moment, or were once on the receiving end. These are only some of the dimensions at play. Power, age, context and the relationship's history may matter just as much, and there are surely others.

Colleagues' reactions to my examples reflect this complexity. Some want to foreground teachers' everyday struggles, others find the examples not severe enough, and still others point to students' difficult behaviour. I see these responses as valuable perspectives, because each points to a dimension any understanding of emotional violence has to reckon with.

So perhaps the central task isn't to settle what counts as emotional violence, but to build a culture of open conversation, in which hurtful moments can be named without immediate accusation or defensiveness. This matters in schools, and it matters in research, where we need to be able to talk about our own entanglements as part of what we study rather than as bias to be eliminated.

Two open questions to leave you with:

How do we research a taboo topic without erasing the valuable work teachers do?

And what would it take to make our own biographical involvement something we can openly discuss?

Piezunka, Anne/Richter, Sophia (2026): Seelische Gewalt in pädagogischen Settings - eine theoretische Annäherung. In: Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung, H. 2, S. 279–294.