When a Student Is Violent, Are We Teaching Others That It's Their Fault?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that failing to address student violence teaches staff and other students that the violence is somehow their fault or their problem to absorb.
Key Takeaways
- Inaction sends a message - When violence goes unaddressed, victims learn that they're expected to tolerate it
- This parallels victim-blaming - Asking what the teacher did to provoke the violence mirrors toxic dynamics in other contexts
- Address the violence directly - The message must be clear: violence is the aggressor's responsibility, not the victim's
Transcript
Let's talk about violent student behavior that happens at school, like fighting, hitting teachers, throwing furniture, and the other things that maybe are short of weapons-type violence, but that are happening more and more and are still pretty serious.
And I've been thinking about this idea of exclusionary discipline, right?
The idea of sending kids home for a couple days, suspension, maybe, you know, for more serious or more repeated things, maybe longer term suspension or even expulsion.
Those are increasingly being talked about as unhelpful and harmful to students.
And I think we've got to really think about what healthy boundaries look like for organizations, you know, for schools, for the school environment.
But also the kinds of boundaries that we're modeling for our students and that we're asking our staff to allow in their own lives.
Because normally when someone is violent toward you, the most important thing to do is get away from them.
I think that's been kind of the age old wisdom is if someone is violent, do not spend time around that person.
Do not be around that person.
Do not allow that person into your life because they're probably going to hurt you again if they've hurt you once before or if they've hurt somebody else.
Schools are compulsory environments, right?
Like kids have to come to school.
They don't have a choice and Teachers, you know if they need a job they have to come to school.
They don't have a choice so this idea of like Excluding kids from school for acts of violence seems to be one of our only tools like what else do we have other than exclusionary discipline and that is going to allow us to keep people safe and teach the lesson that if someone is violent, the appropriate course of action is to get away from them or to get them away from you.
I'm really concerned that we're modeling for a whole generation of students that if someone is violent toward you, it's your fault, that you should just find a way to not set them off, that you should try to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
That's what we do as educators.
We try to prevent things from happening, And that's, that's a good thing, but I'm very concerned that we're sending the message that it's our fault that these things are happening.
And that if people experience violence in their lives, it's their fault and not the fault of the perpetrators of that violence.
So I think there's a responsibility angle here too, that when someone is violent, you know, we can look for contributing factors and try to mitigate those.
But at the end of the day, people are responsible for their decisions.
No one causes someone else to make the choice to be violent and to hurt someone else.
And I don't think we want to leave our students with that message that anything that happens to them because of another person's choice is actually their fault for not preventing it.
Let me know what you think about this issue.