What is behind the increase in post-pandemic school violence that worries Chile?

The images show the fury of the students inside and outside the classrooms. Physical and verbal aggressions between classmates, burning of buses in the streets, attacks on teachers and anonymous threats of massacres have marked in recent months the return to the classrooms in Chili after one of the strictest quarantines in the world due to the COVID-19. The students are now on vacation, but school violence continues to cause alarm in the southern neighbor.

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Among the acts of violence that broke out in high schools after a total or partial closure of more than 70 weeks due to the pandemic, there are beatings and assaults with knives. In mid-March, a video was released showing how a group of students from Viña del Mar attacked each other outside the Colegio Casteliano. One of the mothers told the 24 Hours program that some adolescents “were armed with pistols, they were wearing mittens. This is on another level, I can’t send my son to school.”

In May, a high school closed temporarily in Santiago due to a threat of “massacre” launched by someone who claimed to be part of the community and who stated that he would threaten the integrity of his peers, while in Concepción a student was stabbed for opposing the takeover. of your educational center. In addition to the violent fights between students and the burning of classrooms, the news also echoed attacks by parents towards teachers or male and female students denouncing sexual harassment. School violence forced many high schools to suspend classes and alter their schedules.

To this were added the marches carried out by the students in which the young people burned buses and clashed with the public force to meet their demands in terms of infrastructure and food. At the beginning of June, a mobilization called by high school students ended with clashes in the Meiggs neighborhood of the Chilean capital. At the same time, isolated incidents were recorded outside the University of Santiago (Usach).

Demonstrators take part in a protest called by students against the Chilean government in Santiago. (Photo: Reuters) (PABLO SANHUEZA/)

“School violence ceased to be an isolated event and physical violence was only suspended during the last two years in which children and adolescents had classes online”, affirmed the newspaper “El Mercurio”.

Data up to mid-June from the Superintendence of Education, collected by the Reuters agency, show that this year there was a 56.2% increase in complaints of physical or psychological abuse among the students themselves compared to 2018 and 2019, that is, before the pandemic.

new conditions

In response to this situation, the authorities of Santiago -where traditional high schools such as the National Institute, Application or the Barros Arana (INBA) registered episodes of violence- promoted a round table with representatives of the educational centers, Carabineros, the prosecutor’s office and the investigation police. The objective was to seek solutions and prevention measures to these events, emphasizing updating the coexistence regulations and focusing the strategies according to the place.

“During the beginning of the school year, in March and April, the most intense cases appeared. There was a stir and a movement at the level of public policy, even a school coexistence commission was created at the ministerial level”, he tells El Comercio Gonzalo Gallardo, coordinator of the Youth Observatory University AED and professor at the School of Psychology of the University of Chile.

Regarding the causes of this violence, the Minister of Education, Marco Ávila, proposed as a thesis that “the abrupt return to face-to-face attendance, to the full school day, caused an outbreak of violence, since in two years the children had not been linked to the community.

“El Mercurio” points out that the experts are clear in stating that “this was a phenomenon that has always existed, but that has been exacerbated as an effect of the health crisis and its amplification from its viralization on social networks, although they assure that these levels of violence had never occurred”.

The increase in cases of school violence worries the Chilean authorities. (The Mercury / GDA)

Along these lines, Gallardo explains that the return of attendance is being considered as a factor that triggers this situation because after two years of being in strict confinement, students have to meet again and occupy spaces at all levels, something which represents a challenge not only for them, but for the whole society.

“The fact of not having seen each other among students and the increase in mental health problems of caregivers also due to the pandemic are two elements that influence an emotional numbness of the ties that at the time of return has made it much more difficult to relate. ”.

He adds that in all schools there are school coexistence teams and psychosocial pairs, whose care and support work was highly valued in the pandemic. “And now in the return we have a common challenge because nobody knows how it comes back from a pandemic. All these frictions when returning to face-to-face attendance can also be forms of resistance to meeting and going from zero to one hundred, from not having been in school in two years to being in classes again and having to advance in learning.”, he points out.

Beyond the pandemic factor

However, experts point out that it is key to recognize that violence does not only occur in the school context, and that the pandemic may not be the only cause, especially when it comes to protests. After all, Chilean students, at all levels, have traditionally been active political actors.

Students often lead many of the protests in Chile. (Photo: EFE)

“There are different forms of violence and they have to do with a society that is experiencing significant amounts of tension and aggression,” says Gallardo.

He considers that there is political violence that has been installed in some high schools in Santiago and that since the return to face-to-face attendance it has been seen more forcefully in some emblematic schools where there are students who are replicating behaviors that are derived from the social outbreak of 2019 , such as burning buses, taking over schools.

“These are students who are doing acts that have a political, aesthetic character and that seek to make a claim or a complaint against society. This form of violence and active conflict demands a type of treatment that is not the same as that required by the forms of violence that may exist between students and that is not the same as bullying, which is systematic and sustained violence, or cyberbullying. . It is important to distinguish this”, he points.

On the other hand, it defends that peer violence can be improved by activating the tools that schools have and that are already in public policy. “With this they can organize themselves, develop their manuals of coexistence, build their own internal rules that define specific sanctions for certain behaviors, that make sense of the sanction, that intervene in mediation and the construction of cultures of peace. In addition, long before intervening when the violence has already occurred, schools could build tools at the level of school coexistence for the promotion and prevention of these situations.“, he concludes.

Source: Elcomercio