What we must do

Create a safer environment

Seeking to remove students from violent homes, removing violent students from schools and avoiding the possibility of abuse by restricting one-on-one connections between students and professionals all look as if they would increase student safety. Instead, these approaches tend to restrict important talk about experiences of violence. This silence decreases safety, and decreases learning, for many students who are denied any possibility of exploring the meaning of their experience. For these students, connections to build trust with adults become limited, and if they act out or become violent themselves, they are likely to experience repeated confrontations and continually decreasing control over their learning environment.

Opening up talk about violence can create a safer environment. In the long term, policies with regard to child welfare and safe schools should be opened up to extensive research and reviewed. In the meantime, student isolation can be reduced by adopting approaches that normalize experiences of violence and provide information on actions and supports that can be accessed following disclosures of violence. Schools and youth programs need to acknowledge the complexity of students' lives and recognize that families may not be supportive of student learning. Schools need to be cautious about how and when to engage families in students' education, and always recognize that this may increase violence in the home. When school personnel are careful to make the policies visible, to engage students in identifying "consequences," and to clearly separate the behaviour from the person, they decrease the chance that students may feel they are being judged as bad and punished unfairly. Exploring possibilities of reframing students' "bad" behaviour and enabling students to test out alternate identities might prevent escalations of bad behaviour and violence. Afterschool programs such as LOVE offer an exciting model for addressing violence issues in the lives of youth and for supporting students to reframe their identity. They learn to see themselves as leaders with a role to play in reducing youth violence rather than as trouble-makers or victims of violence.