A lot has been reported in the news about school violence. In fact, I have written a post about it. Click here to read the post. Lives have been lost, spirits have been broken. Am I talking about grave incidents like shooting and killing students and teachers alike? Partly.

The school violence I am pondering about are those not trivial and uncommon events like bullying, petty theft, teasing, gang-related activities, and a whole lot more. We perhaps have at one time, or maybe have not experienced these, or maybe our younger children haven’t experienced these yet but who’s to say they won’t? Now, I am not being negative here but then again, it is best to observe a trend about school violence.

Several decades ago, the behavior problems that besieged school systems seem petty: littering, cutting classes, swearing, not following instructions, hitting (punching, kicking), graffiti writing, pulling fire alarm, teasing and a host of other behavior not exactly acceptable in a school setting.

Several decades ago, the discipline problems that schools had to deal with are mostly running in the halls, talking aloud, cutting classes, not doing required school workload, gum chewing, cutting in lines, cheating during test and eating inside the classroom. These violations seem a lot more manageable.

These days though, the offenses are bigger, stronger and more frightening. Those mentioned above still happen but a lot more has changed. How? School violence now include assault, not only to fellow students, teachers, school authority but even innocent bystanders are affected. School violence now includes carrying lethal weapons like knives and guns. School violence now also includes rape. School violence also includes verbal as well as physical fights.

These days, schools have to deal with assault, rape, plagiarism, robbery, pregnancy, drug abuse, shooting, alcohol abuse, racial discrimination, and even suicide.

Everyday, school violence differ from each other. One day a student may be physically assaulted in the bathroom. Maybe another student would be forced to give money to bullies for fear of being physically hit. In another type of violation, another student would be cheating during tests while another downloads articles from the internet and pass these as his own writing. Or they can be physically molested by other students or worse, by their own teachers! Why, we even saw a physical fight between rival fraternity members in front of the UP Diliman church gate some years back!

The list goes on and on. What can we do to protect our children?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Being a (Special Ed) Teacher, My Thoughts, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.