The look in their eyes

Every year between 500 million and 1.5 billion children experience some sort of violence, often in school. Violence in schools happens everywhere, every day. Violence in schools can for example be bullying and corporal punishment. 90 countries legally permit corporal punishment in schools. Girls are especially vulnerable to rape, exploitation, coercion and discrimination perpetrated by students and teachers. The consequences include unwanted pregnancies, poor performance at school and high dropout rates. An eight years old girl from Paraguay has said this about violence in schools: “our school principal punishes us very hard. She makes us go down on our knees over small stones or bottle screw tops for over 20 minutes and also she often pulls our ears.” A fifteen years old girl from Uganda has said: “our teachers should be there to teach us and not to touch us where we don’t want or to solicit love favors from us girls. (…) I feel like disappearing from the world if a person who is supposed to protect me instead destroys me.”

At the preschool where I volunteered in Kenya they sometimes used a stick to discipline the children. The first time I saw it I flinched back as if it was me that was being hit instead of one of the children. The teacher could see that I did not condole this, but she just laughed it off, I knew that you cannot make them change unless you give them an alternative and there is always an alternative to violence. So I planned to give the supervisor of the preschool an article I had found about one of Plan’s campaigns: Learn Without Fear. The article was from a project in Kenya and I thought that was good since that could make it more personal for them. That was naïve and it in no way achieved what I wanted. The article starts out by explaining different forms of violence which occurs in Kenyan schools and had been going on previously on the project the article was about. Before going on to explain the method they used to combat the violence. The violence which occurs when a child does something he or she is not supposed to do. It was simple really, they introduced a system of yellow and red cards much like in football/soccer. But the supervisor and all the other teachers who were by now reading as well could not look past the beginning and see the solution. They kept saying: “this is child abuse, we don’t abuse the children, we just discipline them,” ‘ken’ them, they called it. I kept saying that I wasn’t accusing them of abusing the children, it’s like they don’t notice the reaction of the child that they are ‘kenning.’ Some cry even before they are hit, some sit quietly but their eyes betrays them, blinking madly, mostly they try to get as far away as possible. I do not understand how they can’t even see what they are doing, they don’t cause any long lasting physical scars, but nonetheless violence in schools has devastating long-term consequences. I know it is not as bad here as some places and they do realize that corporal punishment in schools in Kenya is illegal and bad, but still they do not believe that is what they are doing.  I will never forget the look in those children’s eyes.

I came at a bad time to change things, as the school was almost over as soon as I began, but I left the roots of a plan for the next volunteer. A plan that centers on praising the children and awarding them with stickers when they do their homework well or sit nicely. Because as it is, it seems that even the children who do the homework well gets hit as an afterthought. When the children has nothing to aspire towards, why would they aspire at all? If the children end up associating working or school with something negative they probably won’t try at all in the future. Schools should be safe havens were children can run off to and forget about all other worries, not adding more worries, children have the right to be safe in school.