Dear Editor,
Weeks after, and mother and father were still in tears, in sympathy with their tearful daughter who had been one of the students that only heard of the abusive wound inflicted by a group of school-mates on one other at her East Coast primary school.
The collective tears sent an eloquent message of the traumatising effect the ‘incident’ must have had on others, very possibly for an indefinite period.
So that the simplistic decision to transfer to another locus of possible misbehaviours did in no way erase the ‘incident’ from the memory of those remaining (to learn in an environment which had been abused) including teachers and, threateningly, other parents apprehensive of any repetition.
But then there is the victim transferee school or schools whose staff would be apprehensive about the imposed aberrant behaviours infecting, even compounding, those already resident. Like so many others they are likely under-prepared, without appropriate strategy or training to deal with similar or related implosions.
The fact is that it is not a matter of normal indiscipline but, as has been continuously recognised recently, this type of misbehaviour has become an endemic societal scourge involving different generations of our populace.
So that more than the trivial non-productive intervention by one agency, it requires the holistic response upon which so many have insisted.
It is a situation which demands the urgent collaboration of all the relevant social scientific competencies to develop a combined remedial and preventative strategy aimed, not merely at restraining negative influences, so much of which are transmitted through virulent technology, but critically at involving parents whose own contributory indulgences also desperately need to be curtailed.
All must understand that there is little or no choice but to be proactivists and now save our children who are our future parents.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
