4.3 Violence against children, violence by children
War is not seen as a gender issue although boys are
disproportionately affected by their socialization into the role
of combatants. Throughout history, schooling contributed to
the militarization of boys. Participation in warfare was a part
of traditional initiation rituals, through which boys become
men, for millions of boys. Glorification of war continues
through those school textbooks which are dotted with wars
and war heroes, through the promotion of violent sports, and
the almost limitless commercialization of computerized war
games. Education for war has, unfortunately, a much longer
tradition and is more commercially attractive than education
for peace.
Nevertheless, education is commonly discussed in
quantitative terms. In countries which have just undergone
warfare, pleas for education in the name of returning to normal
life often means reverting to pre-war education. The extent to
which education actually contributed to warfare is questioned
only if extreme examples of advocating genocide are identified.
Otherwise, schooling is assumed to have been benign. Sometimes, it was even non-existent. If it existed, it might have
contributed to the militarization of boys.
In providing humanitarian aid, an important obstacle to
including education is a view that education is not
indispensable for human survival nor required for
subsistence. The absence of education for victims of armed
conflicts and disasters dooms them to remain recipients of
assistance while preventing them from becoming selfsustaining. Water, sanitation, medical services, shelter,
clothing and food constitute the ‘survival package’ which is
offered through humanitarian relief. Including education in
this package is a development of the 1990s, but overcoming
the previous ‘ideology of survivalism’ has yet to become
institutionalized.
Where schooling is available, it can deny rather than
promoting the best interests of each child. Educational
curricula can be designed with a view to those children who
will continue to higher education, thus failing those who
cannot do so. The contents can be imported from far-away
countries and be incomprehensible in the local circumstances.
Methods of teaching can rely on force and violence. In the
words of Peter Newell, ‘discipline, at home or at school, which
deliberately hurts or humiliates children, especially from
adults they love and respect, teaches first the acceptability of
violence.’46
The Constitutional Court of South Africa has examined
the interplay between different, sometimes conflicting,
demands upon education – to reconcile collective and
individual rights, the rights of parents and the rights of children, the government’s commitment to the parental right to
educate their children in accordance with their religious
beliefs, to translating the right to freedom from violence from a
constitutional guarantee into a rule of conduct for schools.
Highlights from its judgment are presented in Box 6.
45
Supreme Court of India – Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu, Judgment of 10 December 1996, (1996) 6 SCC 756; AIR 1997 SC 699; (1997) 2 BHRC 258.
46
Newell, P. – No nostalgia for corporal punishment, The Independent, 5 January 1994.
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