Forms of violence and strategies to narrate it in children and youth literature from Colombia

Abstract

Although violence is a controversial topic for children, it starts to be present in the contemporary literary production more regularly. This research takes 12 books of children's literature from Colombia written in the last thirty years to track the types of violence that are represented in them. For this purpose, the following categories are used: direct, structural and cultural violence, proposed by sociologist Johan Galtung. Both the ways in which the categories are specified as the narrative strategies and symbols that the authors build to address this phenomenon are analyzed. The conclusion from this analysis is that the current of realism is being reutilized with more direct proposals for the readers; the use of narratives by protagonist children is common and part of the construction of meaning is delegated to the image.