Moral disengagements in association between eletronic games and the massacre at Suzano

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the association between electronic games and the Suzano massacre from the perspective of moral disengagement. For this, we analyzed 982 comments, collected in full in Folha de São Paulo and processed by the Iramuteq software between April and July 2022. Reinert's method was chosen, whose function was to organize word classes from the textual segments that were treated not as language units, but as a set of ideas that came together to form a representative conception of that class. Two terms caught our eye because they appeared in the most significant class of words, represented by 64.6%: electronic games (or games). The massacre on screen already pointed to the consummation of a confluence of psychosocial factors whose knowledge, in this research, was deepened, so that the pedagogical intervention is well oriented and scientifically conducted, since, in Suzano, the social thought that pervades the school and is also determined by it, tends to guide discourses that exempt from responsibility in the production of the horror that assailed it. Data analysis confirms the displacement of responsibility as the most recurrent moral disengagement, denouncing the heteronomous and reductionist nature of the comments, in which common sense marks are evident in the face of the episode that promotes the explanation from the causal centrality attributed only to a factor, blaming individuals and never social processes. Comments understood as disengaged and unethical, illustrated in this research, present the power and foundation of the culture of violence that ends up promoting the process that generates massacres in schools, by preserving traditional and uncritical discourses about the causes of the phenomenon. Therefore, there is a clear lack of a multifactor analysis with different approaches to the phenomenon, capable of guiding pedagogical practices in facing problems in these dimensions.