By Shanaaz Mathews and Lauren October
Child Protection Week is an annual reminder that South Africa is failing our children. Rather than seeing a reduction in violence, we see it being normalised.
A typical day for many children includes getting shouted at and smacked in the home before they go to school and being humiliated and bullied at school by teachers and peers. Many children worry that they might be assaulted or killed on their way to or from school.
Fear becomes the context in which children are expected to learn, and schools can become a place of constant dread. Fear of being harmed by teachers and other learners leads to a dislike or avoidance of school, difficulty concentrating and learning, performing less well at school or even dropping out.
Reports of violence at schools by learners against other learners, or teachers against learners, are common. Recently, a Grade 10 pupil from Isipingo in KwaZulu-Natal committed suicide, leaving her family and the school in shock. Yet, her mother says the signs were there – she did not mix with friends and isolated herself after being ridiculed at school by “bullies”.
This story is becoming too familiar, with accounts of violence in schools taking many different forms. We have to ask ourselves why, as a society, do we allow this to happen? And are we complicit in these routine acts of violence?
Violence experienced by children in schools is a reflection of the violence they experience in other parts of their lives. For example, violence is used in the home to discipline children, starting with corporal punishment and leading to severe forms of punishment and abuse in many cases.
Although corporal punishment in schools has been prohibited for more than 20 years, it is still commonplace. As violence is part of the culture at home, children who are exposed to violence in the classroom often see it as normal. This has serious consequences.
Evidence shows that teachers use and tolerance of violence at school can reinforce children’s use of violence with peers and in their own interpersonal relationships. Children learn to use violence as a means of resolving conflict, as a means of self-expression, and to exercise power over others through acts of gender-based violence and bullying, especially over those who are deemed to be “different”.
Young people who experience physical, sexual and emotional violence are more likely to experience more violence, but they are also more likely to perpetrate violence against their peers in the short-term and against partners and their own children later in life.
Not only is exposure to violence associated with a range of long-term adverse health and psycho-social outcomes, but it also affects educational outcomes and is linked with significantly reduced lifetime earnings. But schools are not just places of potential threat; they also present an opportunity.
The vast majority (98% or 11.3 million) of children of school-going age (7-17 years) attended school in South Africa during 2019. Schools present an important opportunity to reach large numbers of children to tackle violence, stop this normalisation, and break the intergenerational cycle of violence. This is not easy as violence is complex and research on effective interventions to address this problem is still emerging.
We conducted a review of the evidence of “what works” to prevent violence in and through schools. We found that many interventions tackle only one issue, such as dating violence or bullying. Yet, children experience multiple forms of violence at the same time, so our responses need to be multi-component.
In Africa, we have a growing evidence base of what works to prevent violence in and through schools. Our context is one where we have many under-resourced schools, large learner to teacher ratios, low levels of parental involvement in schools, and low levels of in-classroom educator support, all of which increase the likelihood of educators using harsh forms of punishment to manage learners in the classroom.
In our review, we found that relatively short interventions can empower teachers to manage learners’ behaviour, making their jobs less stressful and more rewarding.
We found that engaging multiple stakeholders such as school staff, parents, learners, community-based organisations, leaders and community members in the planning and implementation and encouraging their participation is an important feature of successful programmes.
Such programmes are normally school-wide, aimed at developing the capacity of school-based leaders (teachers and learners), and investing in addressing values, policies and practices that target the whole-school environment to reduce violence by shifting the school culture and values.
Engaging parents and the wider community has been shown to reduce harsh parenting and improve communication between parents and their children.
Programmes such as the “Good School Toolkit” in Uganda has adopted this approach and has shown that schools have enormous potential to help children learn non-violent ways of relating, inside and outside school. But there is a gap in the evidence available on effective programmes in the Global South, including violent contexts such as South Africa.
A collective of Global South practitioners and researchers have come together to form the Coalition for Good Schools. The coalition is committed to preventing violence against children using a Southern lens. As a founding member of the coalition, we believe that the focus on Southern challenges will yield new answers and solutions to the unique problems that we face in our context.
Schools offer great potential for us to break this cycle of violence by reaching large groups of children and their families, but we must be serious about investing in sufficiently large programmes that have the potential to target the multiple forms of violence that children experience in different settings.
* Professor Mathews is director of the Children’s Institute at UCT and October is a junior research fellow at the institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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