Resolution of conflicts and violence between members of a community who share their daily living at a school or a workplace is achieved under a dual system consisting of criminal justice procedures designed to impose criminal punishments, and dispute resolution procedures based on the internal norms of the community. The dual system allows for resolving certain forms of violence that do not constitute crimes under the criminal law, such as bullying, through the dispute resolution procedure of the community. It also allows victims to deal with harassments and the resulting serious harm in meaningful ways. The structure works in a way that allows the community to resolve the impact of violence on itself and the victims and consider the shared responsibility for restoring the community, while providing for the means to fulfill the offenders’ criminal and civil liabilities toward the victims. Acts of violence at communities where members share their everyday living, in particular, need to be dealt with through approaches and procedures informed by an understanding of the community’s norms and responsibilities, as such acts are linked with the issue of victim-offender relationship, their characteristic as recurring and continued everyday acts, and the collectivization of violence.
However, dispute resolution procedures currently observed in today’s communities are similar to the existing judicial procedures, and focuses on the guilt of the offenders in the legal sense and the restitutive punishment of the offenders. These procedures fail to take into account the regret expressed by offenders, fulfillment of responsibilities, and the improvement of relationship between the victims and the community. In this context, this Study looks into the procedural norms of school communities that operate in the course of resolving conflicts and violence at schools. Apart from the laws on school violence and the official procedural norms, the Study focuses on unofficial resolutions and procedures invoked between the concerned individuals or by teachers, in an attempt to elucidate the restorative principles under the community norms and procedures required for the fulfillment of the community’s responsibilities and the role of such norms and procedures. To this end, the Study analyzed violence between students in a school community and the dispute resolution norms and procedures therein by breaking them down into several categories: official and unofficial, judicial and non-judicial. Based on this approach, the Study analyzed how the current School Violence Prevention Act, the school violence handling procedures employed by the Ministry of Education and the offices of education in various cities and provinces, and the unofficial resolution procedure employed by the teachers themselves overlap. The analysis formed the foundation for looking into the varied dimensions of community norms and dispute resolution procedures, and the often conflicting relationship between those dimensions. In addition, questionnaire surveys and interviews were conducted to investigate the experiences and needs of various parties involved in school violence as well as the members of school communities in general, to verify the difference between resolution under the School Violence Self-governing Committee, the official resolution procedure currently in effect, and resolution through reconciliation mediated by teachers and the application of restorative justice programs. Lastly, based on the above findings, the Study discusses the significance, substance, and procedures under the current approaches to dispute resolution for violence and harassment in communities, and suggests the principles and possible improvements for creating dispute resolution procedures for school communities that are consistent with the needs of the members of the communities.