Cancer of violence

THE Ministry of Education with the assistance of the Police must take immediate and drastic action to stop the spread of gang violence in the country’s schools. It is more than enough for us to deal with a culture of violence that threatens to pervade TT’s adult society; if we should now permit our schools, our institutions of learning, to become breeding grounds and arenas for all kinds of lawlessness and deviant behaviour we would, in fact, be inviting our own self-destruction. Our view is that any student who brings to school a weapon, who is found in possession of marijuana, cigarettes or quantities of any inflammable liquid is certainly not serious about his own education and, in fact, has become a menace to his school and the entire system. Such students must be made to feel the full weight of the law not only for their own benefit but also in order to send a vital no-nonsense message to the rest of the school population and delinquent parents as well.

Over the last week we have seen the incidence of gang warfare which has affected operations of a number of secondary schools in the south spreading to the north with reports of an attack by a gang of students of Tranquillity Government Secondary School on students attending St Mary’s College. A number CIC boys were beaten in the attack and, we understand, one student of St Joseph’s Convent was injured by splinters from a bottle smashing against the convent wall. Khafra Perez, a form four student of St Mary’s, suffered blows to his head and back and, according to his father, Gerard Perez, he was so traumatised by the attack that he could not attend school the following day. The boy’s father is calling for a thorough investigation of the incident by the Ministry, otherwise he intends to take legal action for his son’s injury. One CIC student who saw the incident told Newsday that Perez was struck on the head with a baseball bat. The attacker was one of a group of 30 to 40 Tranquillity students, both boys and girls, who had apparently planned the assault which took place around Lord Harris Square and lasted for about 45 minutes. After Perez was struck, things went downhill, he said. Tranquillity students were all over the place, some pelting bottles and stones at St Mary’s students who were going home or waiting at the corner for their parents.

“One of them even had an icepick and tried to stab one of us, but that guy got away. Another student from our school got hit on his leg with a piece of wood from a Tranquillity student. Girls of Tranquillity also approached Convent girls,” he told Newsday. We consider this violent and unwarranted gang attack by students of one city school against another a most alarming affair as it takes the growing indiscipline among students of state-run secondary schools to a higher and more ominous level. We support the call of Gerard Perez for an exhaustive investigation of this incident and for the laying of charges against those Tranquillity students who are found to be involved in it. The school must also take its own serious disciplinary action. While the 18-point plan proposed by TTUTA to address this critical problem may be useful in the long term, it seems to us that immediate and decisive measures must be taken to to excise this cancer and restore a tranquil learning environment to our troubled schools.