Watching the news no doubt would make anyone unsettled about even sending their little one to school. The news is overrun with stories about young children attacking each other, or most often, ganging up attacking one or two other children. What is going on in the world today that even Elementary aged kids are sending each other to the hospital with permanent injuries? There is something happening or not happening in our midst as parents that we are failing to detect in children. It's not isolated, nor is it rare to hear about attacks, school shootings, or bullying to the extreme anymore. It seems that not only are celebrity behaviors rubbing off on our kids, so are our own terrible and violent ways. Not only do we as parents have to worry about them being promiscuous at a young age, we now have to walk on egg shells because they are abusive.
According to 2007 statistics obtained by Ezine Articles, out of every 10 school drop outs one does so due to being bullied by others and over 282,000 school aged children are physically attacked every month. These are just the assaults that go on record, so one can imagine how many happen that go unreported out of fear. Lest not forget that many of the school shooting aggressors were said to have been the victims of bullying. As I have seen and experienced myself in younger days, teachers often ignore the victims and do nothing to help. Many times, both parties are punished leaving the bullied child feeling helpless. Schools with zero tolerance policies for bullying, tolerance classes, and rules of respect are having results. How much more of this has to happen before all schools put these practices in place? There has really been no definite answer as of yet, and many parents are convinced that law-makers must step in.
There is an epidemic of assaults and violence among the youngest of children. For example, a 10 year old Pennsylvania girl had to be hospitalized in early April, 2008 after two 10 and 11 year old girls pulled her from where she was playing and stomped her on the head and legs. This attack apparently took place because the girl simply asked the two who assaulted her not to splash her younger sister with water, whom she had taken to the playground with her. The youngster ended up with a broken hip and will require future surgeries due to the attack which doctors say will have even more effects on her in the future. You may have also heard about nine third graders who were suspended in Waycross, Georgia for planning to bludgeon and stab their teacher in March 2008. The weapons confiscated from the youngsters included gloves, a paper weight, tape, and a broken steak knife among other things. The police said that no criminal charges had been filed in the case, although it was still under investigation.
One can never forget the endless stream of teens being prosecuted for recording beatings of fellow classmates. In January, 2007 three teens in North Babylon, New York were arrested for attacking another girl and the eight teens charged with assaulting a girl in Lakeland, Florida in March, 2008 while the girls filmed the fight,two boys stood outside as look outs. One of the attackers' mothers said that the beating took place because the victim had been insulting them on MySpace, but the victim's father says that the motivation was to post it on YouTube. With these types of offenses going on everyday, the outlook on safety on and off the playground is bleak.
What can be done to prevent these types of occurrences is much more important than playing the blame game as far as both parties are concerned in many of these cases. Keeping violence away from young children is one way to stop it before it starts, kids are affected by their environment. Youngsters who are exposed to violent television, music, grow up witnessing domestic violence, or live in violent neighborhoods have a higher risk of committing these acts against others. Children do know boundaries and need to be taught them and that there are consequences to overstepping them. Like the young female attackers of the 10 year old, they end up being prosecuted as in the case of the teen beatings. These things need to be stopped by teaching respect for other people and consequences when you violate someone else's space in order to do verbal or bodily harm. Children also need to be taught that just because someone is talking about you on Myspace, it doesn't warrant attacking them. Teens definitely have no excuse, because they will eventually learn that no matter how old you get people will continue to talk about you and the only person you can control is yourself.
The "it takes a village" approach to these measures is key to stopping assaults in school and in the community. It is not just parents' responsibility to teach children, it is also the job of law enforcement, the law-makers, teachers, counselors, friends, and family. One of the biggest obstacles in making tolerance awareness classes mandatory is that those in charge of making laws would fear court cases of those claiming that it is an invasion of privacy or against their own personal beliefs to teach tolerance of others because it would teach racial, religious, disability, sexual preference, and cultural diversity tolerance. The people who argue these types of cases are the ones who are standing in the way of peace and promoting this type of behavior in children. One fact still remains and that is regardless to whether we agree with other people's race, religious beliefs, disabilities, sexual preferences, or culture we all have this one world to share. We all should learn that by promoting tolerance, we are promoting respect and peace, not another person's choice in those matters.
