The lead by the Constitutional Court of South Africa towards making education violence-free, highlighted in Box 6, closes a gap in the human rights rationale against violence in education. The traditional focus in human rights on the protection against abuse of power by the government relies on self-policing by governments themselves, individually and collectively. The existing international standards represent a patchwork while domestic approaches vary a great deal. Some governments recognize their obligation to guarantee individual security and/or safety, others accept only some limits upon resort to violence by the agents of the state. Violence by non-state actors is addressed as a variety of different and unrelated phenomena – racial (or racist) violence, or violence against women, or communal violence, with child abuse occasionally raised to prominence to then disappear again from the public agenda. What governments should – or should not – do to prevent victimization, including by ‘normalization’ of violence at home, in school, in the media, or through computer games, is fiercely discussed but no shared approach is emerging. The common approach is often combating violence with violence, for which the proverbial examples are death penalty for homicide or corporal punishment of school children lest they would continue to be – or become – violent. Violence has appeared on the human rights agenda in its different manifestations, ranging from arbitrary executions and death penalty to football hooliganism and child abuse. Calls to recognize a right to violence-free life illustrate desires to extend human rights further. Thus the 38 Right to Education Primers No. 3 Declaration on Violence against Women included, in an early draft, a ‘right to violence-free private and family life,’ 48 which does not appear in its final text. Such a right was, however, written into the Inter-American Convention on Violence against Women, which declares that ‘every women has the right to life free of violence.’49 In 1993, the General Assembly of the United Nations, responding to information on widespread killings of street children, recognized that all children have the right to ‘freedom from violence and harassment.’ 50 Attention of the United Nations subsequently shifted to violence by not only against children. The mass media are often accused of glorifying violence, sometimes also of nudging people, particularly children, to imitate the violence portrayed on TV screens or computer games. A hypothesis that violent behaviour results from exposure to violence has been subjected to empirical verification many times, especially for children, yielding mutually contradictory outcomes. A middle-of-the road view holds that ‘exposure to images of brutality could turn an already disturbed child towards violence. At the very least, 48 Division for the Advancement of Women – Background material on international action relevant to a draft declaration on violence against women, 28 August 1992, p. 6. 49 Organización de los Estados Americanos – Convención interamericana para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia contra la mujer (Convención de Belem do Para), adopted on 6 June 1994, Article 3, Doc. OEA/Ser.P AG/doc.3115/94 rev.2, 9 June 1994. 50 United Nations – Plight of street children, General Assembly resolution 48/136 of 20 December 1993, preamble.