The Decibel - Violence is rising in schools. How do we stop it?

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

The Toronto District School Board – the largest school board in the country – recently reported that more than 300 kids were involved in violent incidents this year. In March, Quebec’s education minister announced he was preparing a strategy to deal with increasing violence in schools. These are just two examples of the more frequent reports of violence in schools across the country, particularly among teenagers.Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt is a professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Children’s Mental Health and Violence Prevention. She’s on the show to explain why violence in schools is on the rise and what research tells us about how to prevent it.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

In the last few months, there's been a rash of headlines about teenage violence. Like, in Halifax, a 15-year-old student was charged with two counts of attempted murder after staff members were stabbed at a high school. And also, in northern Saskatchewan, a fight at a high school left a student stabbed, as well as a staff member who tried to break up the fight. So today, we're speaking with Dr. Tracy Viancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa and the Canada Research Chair in School-Based Mental Health and Violence Prevention. Dr. Viancourt will help us understand what might be causing this violence and what we can do to change it.

I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Dr. Viancourt, thank you so much for being here today. Oh, thanks for having me. I just want to start by really laying out what we're talking about here, because sometimes I think it's hard to know if something is actually trending upward versus maybe we're just hearing about it and it seems like it's trending upward. So I know we're hearing about lots of reports of violence by teenagers, but is there actually an increase?

It's a great question. And I've been thinking about this for quite some time, just simply because, you know, when something's salient, or when we have this perception that there's an uptick, then, you know, it becomes an entity when it may not be truth, right? So if we look at actual data from different sources, like you can look at police data, you can look at there's some data coming out from Statistics Canada, you know, it suggests that that's not the case. But those data tend to lag. What does seem to be the case, though, is when we look at school board data. So those data do suggest that there is an uptick in school violence. And they're pretty good at

collecting data. So they have data that would be anytime an individual was sent to the principal's office, anytime police were called into the school, they have to, in Ontario is one example, collect data on bullying every two years. It's part of the Education Act. So by law, they have to collect data so we can compare it to previous data. So there does seem to be something going on in terms of school violence increasing. And are we talking about student on student violence specifically, or also students against teachers as well? So we're talking about everything. Exactly. So when we look at the data coming out of school boards, there's a suggestion that there is an uptick for student-on-student violence, but also

student-directed at teachers and other staff member violence. And what about the age of kids? Is this primarily teenagers or is it really across the spectrum? I haven't really seen elementary school data. Mostly the data I've seen have come from middle school and high schools. Let's talk a bit about where the numbers come from when we're talking about these incidents and the tracking here. How do we actually measure this? So what we tend to do is we use cross-sectional data to give us an idea of what this looks like at the individual level. And it's not the best way to do it. There's other things

that happen. So I have a data set where we've been collecting data on bullying since the time the youth in Ontario were 10, and they're now 26 years old. And we've asked them questions every year. And we have data from them, from their parents, from their schools, we have their official school records, we even have biological data on them. So those types of studies are very expensive. They're very hard to manage and to conduct. And so we don't have tons of data sets that look like that in Canada. And I know education is usually done on a provincial level too. Does each province and territory measure things in the same

way across the country? So not only do the provinces and territories measure it differently, even within school boards, they're measured differently. So what I'm trying to argue for and what I'm trying to push even in Ontario, so we'll use Ontario as an example because this is where I reside, would be for us to have a standardized measure where every student in Ontario would be asked the same questions year after year. Obviously, short-term effects of violence are bad. But I wonder, what about the long-term effects on students who witness and experience this kind of school violence? So this is, I think, where we have our clearest understanding on is the impact to targets. So we know that in the immediate, it affects their

mental health and their physical health. So they're more likely to have internalizing problems like depression and anxiety, post-traumatic stress symptoms, acute stress symptoms, that sort of thing. And then it also affects their physical health. They're more likely then in turn to even become sicker because of that with viruses and the like. It also affects their memory and their performance academically. It impairs their relationships with others. You know, you tend to not think that the world's a kind place

if you're the target of violence. And then the impact's the same on those who witness it. What really frustrates me is that we have about 30% of Canadian youth who are targets of bullying. And we know that that has an impact on their immediate well-being and their future well-being. And yet we haven't been able to reduce that other than a reduction during the pandemic that has not been sustained. 30% of kids are bullied. So that's like one third of kids that experience this. And 10% experience it on a daily basis. But do we know, like, why is this so common? It's pervasive because it works. I know that's hard to reconcile because we wouldn't want aggression to serve a utilitarian

purpose, but it actually does in many social groups. Aggression is used to achieve and maintain hegemonies, to achieve power. It feels better to be the perpetrator than to be the victim, right? Our studies show that over time, a lot of times, victims of bullying become bullies themselves. So, you know, this is what's happening. So when we're talking about like social power, so this is essentially kind of to increase your social status in a way to kind of gain that power in your friend group, essentially? And not just in your friend group, in the broader social context of the school.

And that's what our research has shown over and over again. So my dissertation was on popular bullies. And so think of mean girls like this has always existed. I mean, we've been talking about the kids who are experiencing this, but I guess what about the community at that school, Dr. Vaillcourt, like teachers, other staff members that even just the sense of community of that place, how are they affected by this? also worried about your safety, that you're trying to do your best to motivate students, to teach them, to ensure that they have a bright future. And then you're worried about your well-being as well. We'll be right back. So let's get into understanding what's actually happening here to cause this.

And of course, I'm wondering about the pandemic, because we had all those lockdowns, the kids had remote learning from home, a lot of disrupted school for them. So how much is the pandemic actually playing into this? We were not at our best during the pandemic. And I think that our poor behavior translated into poor behavior for children and youth. If we were to throw everything into a statistical model and see how much variance is accounted for by everything, I think that school closures will have a little bit of variance. It will account for a little bit of variance in the uptick in school violence.

But I think the bigger chunk of variance will be eaten up by our poor behavior as adults. Can you unpack that a little bit for me here, Dr. Vainkor? Like how does adult behavior translate into what we're seeing in schools? The strongest theory that we have for school violence and for youth violence is social learning theory. There's tons of evidence that suggests that the way we behave in turns impacts the way youth behave. And this is why we need to be model citizens. Our behavior needs to be beyond reproach because they are learning from us. especially, right? A lot of people got into their own camps and there was a lot of vitriol thrown back and forth. So what you're saying is that this all plays into how our kids learn how to behave with each other. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, I'm making this a little bit less complicated than it is. Like, obviously, there's going to be other factors that play in. But really, a huge component of all of this is, again, back to social learning. Well, so what are some of the other factors potentially that could also be at play here?

So there's also cognitive mechanisms that take place. So a very strong component of this is this thing called moral disengagement. So we have this ability to make our egregious acts more palatable by, in a sense, shifting the blame. And so we use a variety of different strategies. So we might reconstruct our immoral behavior. So I might say, well, I only called her a name. I didn't shove her in a locker, right?

So that would be that sort of thing. We can obscure our personal responsibility. I only recorded the fight, uploaded it onto social media, but hey, I didn't punch anybody. We can misrepresent the injurious consequences. So we could say that, well, they're a drama queen or they're just squeaky, like it wasn't that big of a deal, like, come on, toughen up. And we can blame the victim, which we often do. If they weren't so annoying, we wouldn't have harassed them. There's this thing

called de-individuation that happens in groups. And it's basically just that, that you're no longer responsible for your behavior. I mean, of course, you are at the end of the day, but you don't see it that way. And when you have a developing teen brain, you know, this is a recipe for disaster. We've talked a little bit around the idea of mental health for teens, but maybe we can just address this directly, Dr. Vaillancourt. Could this violence even be a sign of a bit of a breaking point for kids facing a lot of stress and really difficult situation in their world today? I think so, but I think we need to be careful to not apply the mental health label on it. So mental health and violence tends to be

conflated. We want to understand how somebody could engage in something so awful. There has to be something wrong with the individual. There is something wrong, right? Like their self-regulatory skills aren't that great. You know, they probably have some executive dysfunction. There's going to be something amiss. Their stressors outweigh their protective factors. All of these things are there. But the truth of the matter is that youth who have mental health problems are more likely to be victims of violence than to engage in violence. That's an important thing to remember then. Yeah. We've talked about a lot of really difficult things here. So before we go, I want to I want to actually address maybe some solutions here, what what we can do. I want to ask you about the school board level, because this seems to the world in terms of bullying. So in our Education

Act, we have a very clear understanding what bullying is. We have a universal definition. So there's no wiggle room around what it is and what it isn't. We have very clear policies on what should be done and what must be done if somebody is being bullied and it's a progressive discipline strategy, which is evidence-based and is very well supported. We could do a lot better still. I think one of the things school boards could do to reduce bullying, and there's evidence to support this, so it's not my opinion, it's informed by what the research has shown, is to increase supervision. So kids, youth tend to not misbehave as much when adults are present. Appropriate adults are present. You know, more eyes on teenagers and children would reduce violence. And so when we're talking about supervision in schools, I mean, I have to ask, what about police officers in schools? I know sometimes they're called school resource officers. Does having them around actually help reduce violence there?

The evidence doesn't support that. And it's just one individual. And, you know, there's some mistrust with police. I think that we need to have a better relationship with police services. And I'm really keen to see that repaired with certain communities. But the evidence doesn't support that that is the best program. The evidence would support that we would have universal programs that target social emotional development in the early years. We would have targeted programs for kids who are more at risk. We would have more individuals, adults in schools to help supervise and those things in place, we would reduce violence. And I'll also add that zero tolerance approaches actually cause harm. So this has been shown empirically over and over

again. Because the kids who are most at risk, who then are in a sense, let's say suspended or expelled, are going to find another group that is going to meet their need to belong. And that other group is not going to have any good, let's say, peer input or adult input to help guide them. So putting kids out who are at risk is not the way to go. So the best thing is a progressive discipline approach. This sounds like when we're talking about violence in schools, this can be really scary for a lot of kids, a lot of families who are experiencing this through their kids. What are some things that families, parents can be doing right now to support their kids if they're worried about violence at school? I think if parents are worried about violence at school, they should be working with the school system. So something happened in the past decade where it feels like

it's an us versus them instead of a team effort. So I think that parents and educators should be working together to curtail this issue. Now, in the absence of that, and maybe they're not always going to be welcome, and I hope that could change too, I think what they need to keep in mind is that everybody has the capacity to aggress, that aggression is part of the human condition, which means that we can do things, though, as adults to make sure that this doesn't come to fruition. So we can be better citizens. We could be more tolerant of others. We could be role modeling appropriate behavior in our families. We can make sure that we don't inadvertently promote violence in our homes, like allowing bullying to take place in their family and say it's just sibling rivalry. But that abuse of power

can bleed over into their peer relationships. Another thing we could do is we can monitor our children's peer relations. So studies have shown that aggression decreases when parental monitoring increases. And that don't mean that you're going to read your child's DMs and open up their diary and figure out what's going on. But we could ask things like, who are you going out with? When are you going to be home? Here's my expectation. I expect you to be home at this time.

Those sorts of things. Reduce violence. All of those things we have control over and we can do. Dr. Vainkor, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Cheung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.