policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Lethal lesson
Schools and universities are becoming
more deadly, report finds.
By Loren Smith
L
earning isn’t typically associated with danger, but that
connection is increasingly palpable. Over the last five years,
there have been over 12,700 attacks harming more than
21,000 students and educators. These statistics, courtesy of
the latest report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education
from Attack, cover both deliberate and indiscriminate violence in
universities and schools in 52 nations.
The GCPEA’s previous, 2014 report found that between 2009
and 2013, just 30 countries had experienced such attacks.
Education Under Attack 2018 reveals that nine countries bore
the brunt of the suffering. Education institutions in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), Israel/Palestine, Nigeria, the
Philippines, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Turkey were
either subject to more than 1000 attacks, or attacks that harmed
more than 1000 people.
“GCPEA’s finding that violence against education has increased
signals that the education space is increasingly perceived as key
to the development of society,” a spokesperson from Scholars at
Risk commented.
TERROR ON CAMPUS AND IN THE CLASSROOM
The countries with the greatest number of campus attacks
were Bangladesh, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. At the University
of Dhaka in Bangladesh, for example, there were at least
35 explosions. Other significant numbers arose from Kenya,
where, in 2015, al-Shabaab militants killed 142 Garissa University
College students either while they slept or after they were
taken hostage.
Pakistani students, too, experienced fatal violence. In 2013,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi terrorists bombed a bus on the campus of
Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University in Quetta, Balochistan.
Fourteen people were killed, and around 19 were injured.
Attacks weren’t limited to universities: schools were also assailed,
in nations including Afghanistan and the DRC. Girls were frequently
targeted. In the DRC in 2017, for example, militia reputedly
abducted eight girls from a primary school and held them captive
for three months, where they were subject to repeated rape.
POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Terror and war – or political instability – are often interrelated. This
was visible in the fact that military bombardments of armed groups
often wreaked collateral damage on schools and universities.
Arrests, detentions and the violent quelling of protests were the
main sources of violence on education personnel in Egypt, India,
Sudan, Venezuela and Turkey.
In Venezuela, students both s tarted and were heavily involved
in anti-government protests, opposing rates of violence, inflation
and perceived authoritarianism. Over 600 students were injured
in clashes, and many were abused in detention. Scholars at Risk
reported that 331 students were abused while in police custody in
February 2014. Similar incidents occurred in Egypt between 2013
and 2017, where students and university staff were also killed.
Schools and universities in 29 countries were used for military
purposes between 2013 and 2017, including as bases, barracks and
detention centres.
NOW WHAT?
The point of the GCPEA collecting this data is to create strategies
to avert such violence in the future. That’s why it has called on
nations to endorse a preventive plan: the Safe Schools Declaration.
Already three years old, the declaration has so far been endorsed
by 74 nations.
“States, higher education leaders and civil society can do more to
protect this space, and must,” the Scholars at Risk spokesperson said.
Education Under Attack 2018 is the fourth publication to address
attacks on education in a military or political context. The first one,
by UNESCO, was published in 2007.
Despite violence inflicted on educational institutions having
increased since then, in general, military violence has drastically
decreased worldwide since World War II. ■
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