Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 06, 2018 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
The incident involving a child who was denied entry to his school because he turned up shirtless even though his costume was intended to display indigenous wear, has led to public consternation.
The child was reportedly turned back at the school’s gate because he was shirtless. This aspect of the child’s experience has been featured prominently in the media, even attracting a protest from indigenous groups.
But there is the more serious aspect which has to do with how that child was made to feel by her peers.
When his parents came to pick him up after school, the child complained that he was mocked by his peers. By the time school was dismissed, the mockery and ridicule had overwhelmed him.
He stripped himself of the indigenous wear that he had donned earlier in the day because he was jeered and made to feel embarrassed by his own peers.
Children can be extremely cruel to each other. The violence can be both physical and emotional, the latter involving the callous use to mockery, jeering, tantalize and ridicule.
Guyana’s schools are some of the country most violent institutions. Some of the cruelest incidents in any child’s lives take place at school. Children can be unkind to each other.
And there is need for action at the level of policy to address the varied forms of bullying which take place daily at school. Teachers need to be trained to identify this behaviour since it can affect a child’s performance. They must stop it when it occurs because it constitutes emotional violence against the child.
The trauma of being bullied can have lifelong effects.
Children need, also, to be made aware of the dangers and viciousness of bullying. The victims of such behaviour need to be encouraged to report such incidents.
They must be heard and given redress.
All schoolchildren need guidance as to how their behaviour can impact negatively on others. This sort of training and guidance is not being provided adequately within our education system and this is why we have so many problems in society today. Children are leaving school with disturbing experiences.
In the case of the child at Mae’s School, he was made to feel ashamed of his cultural wear by his peers. This is an assault, psychologically, on this child and he needs to receive counselling.
Further action needs to be taken to ensure that these practices are eradicated from our school system.
It is not going to be easy but a start has to be made. Children learn what they see and this is the behaviour which they learn from their elders in society and which they imitate.
Children who are bullied in school, endure fear and trepidation each day which they attend school. They are afraid of attending to school. For them, school is a frightening experience.
They have trouble concentrating during class because they are worried about what will happen during recess and when school is dismissed. Some of the torment takes place within the classroom itself.
We have had tragic incidents in the past. Children are tormented for all manner of things, including what they wear and the social class to which they belong.
In one incident, many years ago, a young schoolgirl killed herself because her parents did not buy a name brand boots for her to wear to school.
She must have been scared to go to school and face the disdainful look of her peers.
In another well-known incident, some rich schoolgirls urinated in one of their peers’ water bottle. This is the level of cruelty, which is meted out to children each day at school.
Children are also physically bullied. Small and weak children are physically ‘roughed up’ by older ones. Sometimes deprived of their money and belongings; others are hit on by their classmates.
Many of these children do not report these things for fear of retribution.
A poor mother whose child was the victim of a road accident and who is now incapacitated, related that she had to make arrangements to send her child to a private school since he was constantly bullied at the public school which he had previously attended.
The other children kept taking away his personal things. The public school, she said, was not responsive to her complaints.
A national policy on bullying in schools should be developed. Civil society should be asked to provide guidance counsellors to help launch a campaign against bullying in schools.
The Amerindian child at the centre of the controversy at Mae’s was offended not just by the administration of the school but also by his own schoolmates, the cruel ones who mocked and ridiculed him for wearing indigenous wear, reducing the child to tears. That sort of cruelty and emotional violence can be just as traumatic as being physically assaulted. It is all part of the bullying to which thousands of children are subjected each day and which go unnoticed by our extremely ‘busy’ teachers.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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