Say Yes, Summer 2006: Violence in Schools (2)

Every child and adolescent has the right to be protected from harm and the right to expect schools to provide a safe and secure environment in which to study and develop. Bullying and corporal punishment are contrary to these principles, causing considerable short term physical and mental distress to children as well as having longer lasting effects on their education. The problem of how to manage violent behaviour in students without further violence was one of the most important points for discussion at the First Symposium on Violence and Schools.

Violence between Children

Increased media focus on violence in schools the world over continues to encroach on the public perception of schools as safe places for children. Unfortunate, yet essentially isolated, incidents of serious injury or worse tend to be presented in sensational rhetoric while the everyday problem and the real burden that it represents for children and educational systems remains largely unexplored.

The altogether more widespread and pervasive aspects of the problem are difficult to quantify in purely statistical terms and the lack of a comprehensive database on bullying in schools in Turkey was one of the main reasons why MONE hosted the First Symposium on Violence in Schools in the first place. There have been some national surveys in various European countries, the United States and Canada, which show that numbers of children who will say that they have either bullied or been bullied are consistently high.

The damaging effects of bullying on the physical and mental well-being of the child are inarguable -- regardless of whether he or she is the injured party, the perpetrator or simply a witness. To this end, participants at the Symposium generally agreed that the difficult behaviour of a bullying child requires careful management before he or she affects other children through injury or by example.

However, the underlying causes of violent and aggressive behaviour in children -- difficulties at home, special educational needs that are not met, lack of confidence or some deeper form of psychological disturbance -- are often hard to identify. For example, a child can easily become unruly and disruptive when he or she is unable to follow lessons or study properly because of a reading problem which may be difficult to diagnose. Teachers need to be trained to meet children half-way in such cases: students are less likely to behave badly if they are shown respect and their teacher takes a demonstrable interest in their progress.

Failure to respond to bullying when it occurs in any form can put a school at risk of inadvertently supporting the problem. Lacking confidence that their teachers will take action, children tend not to report that they are being bullied. If children are to feel safe within the school environment, their adult carers need to show that they are ready to listen and respond with a consistent zero-tolerance approach to violence.

Interventions by children themselves can also be a successful means of preventing violence: dispute resolution by peers or older children can successfully defuse a potential bullying episode whereas passive bystanders provide an audience that will usually exacerbate the situation. Counselling programmes within the school curriculum on how to deal with bullying have successfully reduced violent incidents in schools throughout the United States and Canada.

Continue to the third part of Violence in Schools.

Read the full text of the Declaration by participants at the First Symposium on Violence and Schools.

Read more about the UN Secretary-General’s Global Study on Violence Against Children in this issue of Say Yes.

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