Abstract
Violence in South African schools impacts on children, their families, and society more generally. Much of what occurs in schools is learnt through exposure to violence at home and outside the school, necessitating an integrated approach to addressing school violence that moves beyond a limited focus on the school itself. The Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention National Schools Violence Study provides an indication of how bad school violence is in South Africa, and through the wide range of data collected, provides a framework for interventions that cuts across sectors and conventional school-based stakeholders.
Highlights
Schools exist primarily to ensure that effective learning takes place, so that children are socially and intellectually prepared to become responsible adults who actively participate in, and make a positive contribution to, society and the economy
The National Schools Violence Study (NSVS) showed that the classroom is one of the most common sites for violence, and that teachers often spend as much of their time outside the classroom as they do inside, leaving learners unsupervised
One in three (31 per cent) of learners who had been victims of violence within the home experienced violence at school, opposed to 14,2 per cent of learners who had not experienced direct violent victimisation at home. This relationship shows that young people are surrounded by violence in all their spheres of life, and suggests a complex relationship between victimisation in different environments, with a vulnerability to victimisation common within a range of different environments. These findings suggest the need for a range of urgent, targeted, well-planned and coordinated responses from the Department of Social Development (DSD), as well as a more limited role for the South African Police Service (SAPS)
Summary
Violence in South African schools impacts on children, their families, and society more generally. Articles appear almost weekly in various national and regional newspapers, reporting on yet another incident of violence or drug use at secondary and primary schools Those seeking to reduce violence and crime increasingly look to schools as a key site for interventions in a long-term strategy to halt unacceptably high levels of violent crime in South Africa. Actual acts of physical violence, acts such as robbery (experienced by 4,6 per cent of learners), assault (5,8 per cent of learners), or sexual assault and rape (2,3 per cent), have profound effects on the development of children and their ability to form trusting relationships with their peers and adults Such violence often results in serious physical injuries. Threats of violence contribute to increased truancy and dropout rates, both risk factors for later delinquency, as the threatened child is too afraid to attend school
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