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V. Violence

For many children, the biggest threat to their right to education is not discrimination or lack of access to schools, but violence within or near their schools that undermines their ability to learn, puts their physical and psychological well-being at risk, and often causes them to drop out of school entirely. Children’s right to education entails not only the presence of schools and teachers, but also an environment that allows them to learn in safety.

In Kenya, our 1999 investigation found that for most schoolchildren, violence was a regular part of the school experience.⁸⁶  Teachers used caning, slapping, and whipping to maintain classroom discipline and to punish children for poor academic performance. The infliction of corporal punishment was routine, arbitrary, and often brutal. Kenyan children were commonly hit with a wooden cane, though they were also subject to flogging with whips made of rubber, slapping, kicking, or pinching. Boys were commonly hit on the buttocks, while girls were hit on the palms of their hands. Children were also beaten on the back, the arms, the legs, the soles of the feet, and even the face and head.

Children received anywhere from two to twenty or more cane strokes at one time. At some schools, caning happened only once or twice a week, while in others, children reported that they and others were caned on and off throughout the day, nearly every day, routinely receiving five or more strokes each time.

At the time of our research, Kenyan education regulations allowed the use of corporal punishment for certain behavior, after a full inquiry, and in the presence of a witness, but not in the presence of other pupils. However, we found that illegal and severe forms of corporal punishment remained widespread. Of the twenty schools visited during our investigation, only one administered corporal punishment in accordance with official guidelines.

Corporal punishment was used against Kenyan students for a wide range of disciplinary infractions, some serious, others extraordinarily minor. Children received corporal punishment for coming to school late, missing school without permission (even for unanticipated illnesses), having a dirty or torn school uniform, rudeness, graffiti, fighting, stealing, drug use, and any form of disruptive classroom behavior (writing notes to other students, fidgeting, talking to another student, “noise making,” and so on).

Corporal punishment was widely used to punish unsatisfactory academic performance. In Kenyan classes, for example, it was not uncommon for teachers to strike children for giving the wrong answer to a problem. If a school did not perform well on national exams, an entire class might be caned regardless of the individual performance of each student.

Elizabeth, age twelve, reported:

In one of my classes, one girl was slapped so hard that two of her teeth came out. The teacher was very angry because some of the girls failed a test, and so the teacher gave these girls a choice: three slaps from his hand or ten strokes with the cane. This girl chose the three slaps and so he hit her on her face three times, very hard, and her mouth was bloody and her two teeth came out. And the other girls cried out to the teacher, saying, ‘Look, you have taken out her teeth!,’ and then the teacher was so angry that he caned everyone again. . .

Bruises, swelling, and cuts were regular by-products of school punishment in Kenya. More serious injuries, including broken bones, temporary or permanent hearing loss, knocked-out teeth, or internal injuries were not infrequent. Some children died after severe beatings.

Many cases of violence against schoolchildren were never reported to authorities, as children and parents feared retaliation from teachers and headteachers. Human Rights Watch received numerous reports of serious retaliation against people who challenged severe corporal punishment. According to many interviewees, complaints from parents about excessive punishment could lead to more severe punishments in the future for the child, or punishment of the child’s siblings or cousins.

When children were injured by corporal punishment, schools—or individual teachers—at times provided or paid for medical assistance for the child, but teachers who injured children were rarely disciplined, let alone dismissed or prosecuted. Most continued to have children in their care, and taught in the same schools where they previously abused children. In practice, children were left with little remedy against corporal punishment, and in many cases, children responded to severe punishments and injuries by transferring from abusive schools, if they were able to, or by dropping out of school altogether.

In April 2001, Kenya’s Minister of Education banned corporal punishment. This legal notice repealed an earlier notice that permitted corporal punishment under the Education Act. Progress has been made in implementing the ban including several cases of teachers arrested, tried and imprisoned for inflicting corporal punishment on students.  Despite these efforts, accusations of corporal punishment continuing in some schools underlies the need for more in-service training and education for teachers on the harmful effects of corporal punishment and effective alternative methods for maintaining classroom discipline.

According to the Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment, successful initiatives have banned corporal punishment in schools and penal systems in countries on nearly every continent (for example, in recent years in Ethiopia, Korea, South Africa, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago and Zimbabwe). However, corporal punishment in schools is still allowed by law in at least eighty-seven countries worldwide, and practiced illegally in others. ⁸⁷ In India, one child described why she dropped out of a state-run school. “I refused to go and my mother didn’t bother to make me. The teachers used to beat me. They asked me to write something, and I couldn’t do it, and they beat me, so I didn’t want to go back.”⁸⁸ 

Girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in both the school environment from classmates and teachers, as well as from members of the community as they travel between their homes and schools. Human Rights Watch investigations in South Africa, Zambia, and Iraq documented the effect of such violence in undermining girls’ access to education. Sexual violence against girls compromises their ability to learn in a safe environment, and in some cases, drives them out of school all together.

In South Africa, schoolgirls of every race and economic group encounter sexual violence and harassment on a daily basis. A 2000 investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch in three provinces documented cases of rape, assault, and sexual harassment of girls committed by both teachers and male students.⁸⁹  Girls were raped in school toilets, in empty classrooms and hallways, and in hostels and dormitories. Girls were also fondled, subjected to aggressive sexual advances, and verbally degraded at school.

Girls reported routine sexual harassment by teachers, as well as psychological coercion to engage in “dating relationships.” In some cases, girls acquiesced to sexual demands from teachers because of fears that they would be physically punished if they refused. In other cases, teachers abused their positions of authority by promising better grades or money in exchange for sex. In the worst cases, teachers operated within a climate of seeming entitlement to sexual favors from students. A medical research study found that among those South African rape victims who specified their relationship to the perpetrator, 37.7 percent said a schoolteacher or principal had raped them.⁹⁰

Many girls interrupted their schooling or left school altogether because they felt unsafe in such a violent environment. Most girls, however, remained at school and suffered in silence, having learned a lesson that sexual violence at school was inevitable and inescapable. Interviews with girls subjected to sexual attacks, their parents, teachers, and social workers showed that many of these girls were not performing up to full potential, were losing interest in outside activities, and were failing their higher education matriculation exams.

One fifteen-year-old girl missed weeks of school after being sexually assaulted by a teacher. She said, “I didn’t go back to school for one month after. . .  everything reminds me of what happened. I have dreams. He is in my dreams. He is in the classroom laughing at me. I can hear him laughing at me in my dreams.”

Another girl, gang-raped by classmates when she was thirteen, said:

After the school break, my mom asked me if I wanted to go back to school. I said no.  I didn’t want to go. All the people who I thought were my friends had turned against me. And they [the rapists] were still there. I felt disappointed. [Teachers] always told me they were glad to have students like me, that they wished they had more students like me. If they had made the boys leave, I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it.

South Africa’s epidemic of sexual violence contributes to higher rates of HIV infection among young women than among young men.  Girls are biologically more vulnerable to sexually transmitted HIV than boys, and sexual violence increases their risk of exposure.  The difficult of obtaining timely post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV in South Africa, despite a government pledge to make this treatment universally available for rape survivors, only increases the risk that rape will lead to HIV infection.

Too often, school authorities in South Africa concealed sexual violence and delayed disciplinary action against perpetrators of violence. Schools responded with hostility and indifference to girls who complained about sexual violence and harassment. In many instances, schools actively discouraged victims of school-based sexual violence from alerting anyone outside the school or accessing the justice system, or even refused to cooperate with official investigators.

A 2002 Human Rights Watch investigation in Zambia found similar problems.⁹¹ Sexual abuse and exploitation in school environments was all too frequent. Some of the perpetrators were teachers who prey on vulnerable girls, exchanging answers to tests or higher grades for sex. Most abuses by teachers are not reported, and few teachers are penalized. A more typical outcome is that the teacher is cautioned and possibly transferred. In some cases, parents negotiate for the teacher to marry the girl. Advocates for girls’ education have tried to get stiffer penalties against teachers who abuse students, and to ensure that those found responsible are dismissed. However, the onus is on the girl’s parents, not the school, to report the case to the police so that criminal charges can be brought. School administrators sometimes interfere with the process by transferring the teachers elsewhere, which makes it extremely difficult for the case to proceed.

In Iraq, widespread reports of sexual violence and abduction of girls since the US-led war and occupation kept many girls out of school.⁹²  Although a break-down in police record-keeping and reluctance to report violence incidents make an accurate count of such cases almost impossible to obtain, the public perception is that abduction of women and girls from the streets increased significantly following the war. In May 2003, Human Rights Watch found that throughout Baghdad, Iraqis spoke of girls being seized from public locations, particularly while walking down the street, even in broad daylight. Human Rights Watch obtained credible information on twenty-five cases of sexual violence and abduction of women and girls, including one case involving a nine-year-old girl, and another involving a girl aged fifteen.

Of the thirty or so women and girls Human Rights Watch interviewed in Baghdad, virtually every one cited fear of abduction and sexual violence as justification for not returning to or looking for work, holding children back from school, and in many cases, even preventing young women and girls from leaving the house. In late May 2003, girls were rarely seen outside in Bagdad, even during daylight hours when male shoppers and workers crowded the sidewalks and streets. 

The fear of sexual violence and abduction directly affected girls’ school attendance. In mid-May 2003, Save the Children UK conducted an assessment of three schools in the Baghdad area, finding attendance in the schools they surveyed at less than 50 percent. The survey found that lack of security and fear of kidnapping topped the reasons for girls’ nonattendance.⁹³

Lina attended evening classes until early May 2003, when Fatima, a young woman she knew was rumored to have been attacked while driving in Baghdad. Although Lina did not know the details of what happened to Fatima, the fear that she too would be attacked drove her inside:

I am not going to school anymore. I used to go [before I heard about my friend], I’d get together with a group and we’d go together for our safety. But after this, I prefer to stay at home studying instead of going to school. And my other classmates, they also are not going. There were fifty girls in the class. I hear that maybe eight or nine attend now. Nobody would go now. Even if they wanted to, their family would prevent them.

A teacher at Lina’s school told Human Rights Watch that before the war, her class, all girls, had thirty-two students. As of June 3, 2003, only six were regularly attending.

In June 2003, school attendance increased in Baghdad, as families began arranging for their daughters to travel to and from school in groups, and as more male relatives began escorting female students to school. Still, such solutions often left women and girls dependent on the ability and willingness of others to be able to go to school.

Human Rights Watch found that many of the problems in addressing sexual violence and abduction of girls derived from the US-led coalition forces’ and civilian administration’s failure to provide public security in Baghdad. A public security vacuum was marked by a smaller and poorly managed police force compared to that before the war, limited police street presence, fewer resources available to the police to investigate, little if any record-keeping, and mismanagement of complaints.

Other aspects of the problem have needed to be addressed for many years. Girls live in an atmosphere where, if they are raped or even believed to have been raped, they have poor legal recourse and have well-grounded fears of social ostracism, rejection by their families, and even physical violence. Although rape and abduction are serious crimes under Iraqi law, long-standing cultural stigma and shame attached to rape often positions victims as the wrongdoer and too frequently leads to lenient treatment of perpetrators.

In the United States, only 55 percent of students say they feel safe in school.⁹⁴ Human Rights Watch found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in many U.S. schools were subjected to unrelenting harassment from their peers that interfered with their right to education.⁹⁵ Despite the pervasiveness of the abuse, few school officials intervened to stop the harassment or to hold the abusive students accountable; in fact, some teachers and administrators encouraged or participated in the abuse. Over time, verbal harassment often escalated into sexual harassment and other forms of physical violence. These violations were compounded by the failure of federal, state, and local governments to enact laws that would provide students with express protection from discrimination based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Harassment against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students took many forms, including taunts, obscene notes or graffiti. Nearly every one of the 140 children we interviewed described incidents of verbal or other nonphysical harassment in school because of their own or other students’ perceived sexual orientation. For many of these students, relentless verbal abuse and other forms of harassment were “all part of the normal daily routine.”

When harassment went unchecked, it sometimes escalated into more serious behavior. Children interviewed by Human Rights Watch described the destruction of personal property, unwelcome sexual advances, mock rapes, and brutal physical attacks. Students described being cut with knives, dragged down a flight of stairs by their feet, being spit on and hit with thrown objects, and being kicked and beaten. Students suggested that most incidents of physical violence were not reported.

A Texas student reported:

It was small pranks at first, like thumbtacks on my chair. Or people would steal my equipment. Then things elevated. I’d hear “faggot” and people would throw things at me. They’d yell at me a lot. One time when the teacher was out of the room, they got in a group and started strangling me with a drafting line. That’s about the same consistency as a fishing line. It was so bad that I started to get blood red around my neck, and it cut me.

Discrimination, harassment, and violence hampers students’ ability to get an education and takes a tremendous toll on their emotional well-being. Many of the children we interviewed told us that they had skipped school because of persistent harassment or threats of violence. Some switched schools to escape harassment and violence. Others missed a semester or more of classes until they could find a school that they could attend without fearing violence or experiencing persistent harassment. Some simply dropped out of school altogether.

Discussions of antigay violence in schools often focused on the youthful perpetrators of these acts and failed to consider the responsibility of teachers and other school officials to maintain a safe learning environment for all youth. The most common response to harassment, according to the students we interviewed, was no response at all. In interviews, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth explained how teachers and administrators turned their backs, refusing to take reports of harassment, refusing to condemn the harassment, and failing to hold accountable students who harass and abuse.

A Georgia student relayed his frustration at the refusal of his school principal to intervene. He said:

I reported it. I took a folder, wrote down dates and times every time I was harassed. I took it down to the principal. He said, ‘Son, you have too much time on your hands to worry about these folks. I have more important things to do than to worry about what happened two weeks ago.” I told him, “I wanted to give you an idea of what goes on, the day-to-day harassment.” He took the folder away from me and threw it in the trash. That was my freshman year, first semester. After that I realized [the school] wasn’t going to do anything.

Recommendations

• Governments should amend national legislation as necessary to abolish the use of corporal punishment  in all schools, public and private, and ensure that such policies are enforced, and widely publicized.

• Governments should support programs that educate parents, teachers, and society at large about the harm of corporal punishment and about nonviolent methods of discipline.

• Governments should establish accessible mechanisms for students to make confidential complaints regarding physical or sexual harassment or violence by other students, teachers, staff or principals. Ensure the prompt and effective investigation of such complaints, and prompt and appropriate disciplinary action against perpetrators, including counseling, suspension, termination and prosecution when necessary. Bring criminal charges where indicated. Ensure that post-exposure HIV prophylaxis is available to sexual assault survivors, and sensitize law enforcement officials and school officials to the availability and importance of this treatment.

• Governments should provide compulsory education and training for pupils, teachers, and principals on issues related to sexual violence and harassment and gender discrimination, including methods for the early identification of, and intervention to prevent, abusive behavior.

• Governments should enact legislation to protect students from harassment and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Ensure that schools review their nondiscrimination policies to ensure the inclusion of protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

• Governments should provide training to all teachers, administrators and other school staff on addressing the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, and how to intervene to stop harassment and violence.

• Governments should implement measures to protect the safety of schoolchildren, particularly girls, while on their way to and from school.