Will Madani Caning Students End School Violence

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“We must also admit that schools mirror society. Moral, religious, and civic education as taught has yet to nurture a genuine culture of respect and empathy.”
- PKR lawmaker Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad
The most common solution you will hear when dealing with the anti-social and criminal behaviour going on in schools is the claim that everything could be solved with a good beating.
Sri Aman MP Doris Sophia Brodi seems to think that our education system has produced a “fragile” generation, and she hearkens back to a time when "spare the rod and spoil the child" was the foundation for creating productive adults.
Bagan MP Lim Guan Eng believes a surveillance state and a good beating will ameliorate these problems. Of course, there is talk of increasing police presence around schools.
First of all, there is nothing fragile about school children these days.
What the bullying (online and off), harassment, rape, gang violence, and anomie demonstrate is that far from being fragile, most school-going children who do not commit anti-social or criminal behaviour are made of sterner stuff than the “beat them to make them learn” generation.
Furthermore, the older generation created the world these children live in, so it is not as if those beatings we received in school made us better human beings who created a better world for our children.
The state has been whipping people for certain crimes for decades, and has this stopped these types of crimes?
I do believe, though, that children respond when they feel that teachers sincerely care for their welfare. And the system has always marginalised such teachers - that is the problem.
School, ministry’s reaction
It should be shocking, but it isn’t that those teenagers who gang raped a schoolgirl posted a video of the rape online and distributed it.
According to reports from the press, a teacher informed the mother that a video was circulating of the rape, and the mother made a police report. Think about that for a moment.
Here we have a school teacher who has evidence of a rape, and the teacher or the school does not make a police report, but just informs the parent? So, if the mother does not make a report, the school does nothing?
Education Ministry director-general Azam Ahmad said many sexual harassment and bullying cases were swept under the rug. These are adults who are supposed to keep children safe.
So, either these adults were not beaten enough when they were young, or they did receive the required beatings but still engaged in behaviour which was detrimental to society and which was enabled by the state.
The education minister’s feeble attempt to clarify what the DG meant made the situation worse. What it did was make the ministry incompetent or worse, negligent.
Federal agencies sweeping things under the rug is not new. Since we are talking about children here, in 2016, Reuters did a story on how child sexual abuse went unpunished in Malaysia.
A couple of interesting points were made in the article that demonstrate how insidious the problem is.
Defending the rather dubious practice of not publishing child sexual abuse data because it is protected under the Official Secrets Act, then head of the police Sexual, Women and Children Investigation Division, Ong Chin Lan said, “We don't want people to misinterpret it.”
Addressing the same point, DAP’s Kashturi Patto wrote, “While I know her (Ong’s) heart is in the right place, by not revealing data on this type of crime, the issue remains largely unaddressed and will inadvertently contribute to the increase in the number of potential paedophiles and abusers.
“By also concealing information like this, it makes victims and victims' families hesitate to make reports, thinking that the matter is taboo.”
Exposure, understanding of sex
Let us talk about sexual activity. On the one hand, we have all these religious and moral values that demonise sex. These same religious values also sexualise children to the point that justifications are made for child marriages and how they should dress.
Add to this a social media which reinforces certain forms of misogyny and gender behaviour, and we get children exposed to and replicating the sexual behaviour of adults. This, of course, cuts across race and religion.
So all these religious groups asking for the state to crack down on porn and online violent content are not only missing the point but also willfully gaslighting people into not looking at religious institutions and discovering that prosperity and repression have supplanted any kind of ethical education these institutions inculcate in the flock.
The social and political environment normalises bullying, and in the Malaysian context, it means it is acceptable to bully people in the defence of race and religion.
Children will replicate this behaviour in the school yard, and I don’t mean this in a simplistic “monkey see, monkey do” way, but rather that certain norms are established which make it difficult to argue that bullying is an anti-social behaviour.
Online bullying and harassment can lead to suicide, which again points to a deeper systemic dysfunction rather than that there is something wrong with children.
Is the answer banning youth of a certain age from participating in social media? This is the terrifying aspect of technology. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Banning certain age groups from social media is a band-aid solution. They will eventually get on in.
The question really is how social media is being used by people and the agendas of tech companies in ensuring a toxic environment. It is extremely difficult to legislate that without sacrificing foundational democratic ideas.
Children wired differently
Children can suffer mental health issues like adults do, which is why schools must be equipped to deal with these kinds of situations. But here is the thing: we only think of this when a child is stabbed 200 times by an obviously mentally ill student.
The state and public rarely pay attention to schools until something bad happens, and then people are outraged.
Instead, Madani, in this instance, sees no issue with spending RM600 million on restoring heritage buildings but contemplates all sorts of dubious measures for children instead of equipping schools with the necessary expertise needed for addressing the mental health issue of school-going children.
Children's brains are wired differently. They engage in risky behaviour and disregard normative values until they get older.
Couple this with social media, hypocritical adult behaviour and failing educational policies - you have a Molotov cocktail of anti-social behaviour in some students.
What we are dealing with is not some sort of epidemic of school anti-social and criminal behaviour, but rather the logical conclusion of the social and political policies that define an ethnocratic kakistocracy.
S THAYAPARAN is commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall”.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.

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