Children face an 'epidemic of violence' in schools

Schools can be dangerous places. Corporal punishment is still legal in more than 60 countries, students worldwide report sexual harassment and abuse by teachers, and violent bullying is rife.

Shockingly, the United Nations estimates that 246 million girls and boys experience violence in and around schools every year.

Yet flick through major global education announcements, including the readout from the recent U.N. Transforming Education Summit, and violence in schools barely gets a mention. Instead, most of the focus is on boosting enrollment and basic numeracy and literacy skills. While that’s laudable, it’s redundant if children don’t feel safe at school.

There’s an “epidemic of violence against children,” Susannah Hares, global education co-lead at the Center for Global Development think tank, told Devex. “Yet the issue is glaringly absent from education reports and donor strategies. This needs to change. Our efforts to get children in school and learning will be worth little if children are not safe while they are there,” she added.

The consequences of ignoring school safety are dire. Research shows that experiencing physical and psychological violence as a child has fundamentally negative consequences for mental and physical health and for educational outcomes. World Bank estimates $11 trillion in future earnings is lost globally due to violence in and around schools.

However, data on the problem is patchy and cases of violence, especially sexual abuse, are likely to be underreported for fear of retaliation or social stigma. But the statistics we do have paint a bleak picture.

On teacher-student aggression, a recent systematic review found that corporal punishment in schools — which includes hitting, burning, and severe beating — is still widespread, affecting half the world’s school-age population — even in countries where it is illegal. A study from Uganda found that 90% of primary school students in some locations have experienced physical violence from teachers.

Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone, research from CGD revealed that during school closures for the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous children said they preferred staying at home because it meant their teachers could not beat them.

An alarming one in eight boys and girls in Senegal and Zambia report having been sexually harassed by a teacher or staff member within the last four weeks, the CGD research found. And a 2018 media investigation revealed that more than 30 girls were sexually abused at a Liberian school.

“Far too many schools and school systems are failing at their core task of keeping children safe from harm and aid donors have been too slow to prioritize and fund this issue,” said Hares, adding that she is shocked at how little attention violence against children receives.

Sohini Bhattacharya, CEO of Breakthrough, an Indian NGO which works with schools to prevent violence and promote gender equality said that academic test scores take priority, ignoring real safety concerns. Breakthrough recently carried out a landscape study that “revealed horrific cases of rape in school, gender slurs, and corporal punishment,” she added.

“If you are not going to offer a safe environment, how can you achieve these learning gains? That has to be primary, rather than just focusing on whether you are learning,” Bhattacharya told Devex by phone.

But while the Indian government’s education strategy talks about tackling bullying and violence, without a “clear roadmap,” progress is very slow, she said.

Through Breakthrough, Devex learned of 12-year-old Sonia — not her real name —, who was verbally bullied at her local school in a village in the state of Haryana, India, for years before the NGO started work at her school. Things got so bad that she frequently missed classes and as a consequence, her grades slipped.

“I would wake up every day with a feeling of dread and felt physically sick at the thought of going to school. I used to try and think of every possible excuse to get out of it,” Sonia recounted in a Breakthrough case study.

Bhattacharya explained the far-reaching negative consequences of bullying on children such as Sonia.

“Bullying might not seem as violent as physical or sexual abuse, but they harm confidence building and stop adolescents from reaching their full potential and perpetuate the cycle of violence in and outside schools,” she said.

Entrenched ideas about discipline and violence can help explain the slow progress in tackling violence in schools, according to Dipak Naker, co-founder of Raising Voices, which works to prevent violence against women and children in Uganda. Controlling children through violence has been the norm in many countries and efforts to intervene can be branded as “foreign ideas,” Naker told Devex.

So, there are no easy solutions or “silver bullets;” making schools safe requires a complex response and takes time, something which often puts off some donors and policymakers, Naker said.

“Violence in school is structural; the system endorses it and it is seen as a way of controlling students. So we need to address the ecosystem surrounding the school and … rather than treating violence as an event, we need to treat it as a process happening within a context,” Naker explained.

Corporal punishment can be a “symptom” of a lack of teacher training, according to Haldis Holst, deputy general secretary of Education International, which represents teachers' unions around the world. EI has denounced corporal punishment.

“If teachers don’t … have knowledge of how to address difficult situations with other tools, then corporal punishment becomes easy to fall back on,” Holst said, before going on to add, “it goes back to the need for professional teacher training.”

​​”I’m not saying that some teachers don’t overstep the line, but if we don’t work with them then we won’t change their way of acting. Teachers have to be part of the solution,” Holst added.

The lack of robust data is another challenge, according to Hares.

“There is no consistent measure of school violence that we can compare across countries and years. And so even if there is progress being made on reducing violence year on year, we don’t have the data to show this”.

Despite an array of challenges, some interventions have been shown to reduce violence in schools.

In India, Breakthrough works with government schools to tackle violence by ensuring they are places where progressive gender norms are reinforced through a ‘gender sensitization curriculum,’ known as Taaron Ki Toli.

The NGO has signed contracts with government education departments in Odisha and Punjab to implement Taaron Ki Toli. Under the program, which is aimed at adolescents, Breakthrough trains teachers to deliver a gender-sensitive curriculum and facilitate open discussions “to empower adolescents to transform their gender attitudes, aspirations, and behaviors,” Bhattacharya explained. The curriculum was recently evaluated by J-PAL South Asia and shown to effectively change attitudes.

Neha, who participates in the Taaron Ki Toli program, was relentlessly bullied by a boy at school, according to a Breakthrough case study shared with Devex. As the oldest of five sisters, Neha was responsible for caring for her siblings while her mother struggled to feed the family. The verbal abuse had a profound effect on Neha’s school work and mental health, but when she reported the incidents, it was ignored by teachers.

The Taaron Ki Toli program has given her an outlet to move on and she feels she has a stronger place in the community.

“I am trying to function as a normal teenager but it is hard to pretend that everything is okay,” says the 13-year-old from the village of Garhi Khajur in India’s Haryana’s Karnal district.

In Uganda, Raising Voices has pioneered ‘The Good School Toolkit’ which is designed to change the operational culture of a school through a variety of activities, such as discussions, school assemblies, suggestion boxes, collective formulating of school policies, and student courts, which target teachers, students, and the local community.

A randomized control trial showed that the Toolkit reduced children’s risk of experiencing physical violence by school staff by 42% over 18 months. Bolstered by this evidence, the Toolkit is currently being rolled out at scale in Uganda in 23 districts, with Raising Voices supporting more than 1,000 primary schools.

According to Naker, the global development community is finally starting to prioritize school violence, although there is still a long way to go.

In 2016, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children was launched by the U.N. as a multistakeholder partnership — more than 700 organizations including governments, NGOs, foundations, private sector, and faith-based groups — to raise awareness and provide funding for initiatives working to reduce violence against children. In 2019, Safe to Learn was established in a bid to end violence in schools.

Safe to Learn marks a significant step because it brings together a diverse set of actors around school safety, according to director Chloë Fèvre. In the past, school violence straddled two sectors — education and violence prevention — when it needed to be embedded within both, Fèvre said.

“All the evidence points to school-based interventions to prevent violence,” Fèvre told Devex in a phone interview. “We needed to reconcile and make collaboration between both sectors more tangible.”

The aim is to “speak with one voice,” she said.

Safe To Learn also seeks to widen the group to tackling school violence to include finance ministries, donors, civil society groups, the private sector, and relevant U.N. agencies, Fèvre explained.

This global recognition has been a long time coming given that countries officially committed to protecting children in 1989 under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This included prohibiting corporal punishment.

“The issue of school violence is on the cusp of gaining legitimacy but it is still not an integral part of the global education agenda,” she said.

Furthermore, voices from the global south are missing from the discussion, she said.

“There is a wealth of accumulated insight from the front line about what works and what doesn’t in developing countries. We need to find a way of bringing these voices into developing the global response at these early stages so that we don’t end up prioritizing the ideas of people who are far removed,” Naker said.

He pointed to the Global Coalition of Good Schools, of which Raising Voices and Breakthrough are founding members, as a good place to start.

Fèvre agreed that we know what works in tackling violence in schools; the money is what’s missing.

“We need a fund geared towards preventing violence in and through schools … it’s so critical [because] the consequences of bypassing violence in schools are so long-lasting and multipronged that it really doesn't make sense to not invest in it,” she said.

However, while CGD’s Hares is more skeptical about the existence of scalable solutions, saying that more research and evidence are needed, she seconded the call for a dedicated fund.

“We need to get to a place where eliminating violence in schools is a core part of global education policy, accompanied by a sharp uplift in funding,” she said.