One Answer

CLAUDIA McCULLOCH, Educational psychologist, Torrance

Understand how important school is to children. When you are talking about children who may have very little to start with, they feel powerless when something like this happens. This invasion of their school--the one safe place they can count on every day--hits them hard. These are children who might not have their own bed at home, but here they have their own chair, their own desk, their own property. If that gets violated, their sense of how safe they are and how much the adults can protect them changes.

Their first feelings are of being afraid, sad, angry. Then they worry when it will happen next--not if--but when. Also, they lose faith in the adults around them to keep them safe.

When you create crime from hate, anger and fear, you leave behind a very powerful message simply by the way you committed the crime. The depravity, disregard and the contempt for school and what it means to the children are very evident. Children see this. These young children see violence on television, but in their world they think it’s the big people doing it to big people and not to them. The cruelty of killing their pets hits them personally. It’s one thing to destroy their books; but killing a pet is very personal to them because they have become very attached to a living thing.

People who commit this kind of crime are extremely angry. They feel isolated; they probably don’t do well in school and are isolated from the mainstream. They have no empathy and no impulse control. This is probably not the first time they have committed a criminal act. They have committed crimes in their homes, their communities. You do not start out killing people, you start committing small crimes and move from there. If they haven’t encountered serious consequences, intervention or support, they most likely will continue to victimize.

Everyone involved, teachers and students will suffer from post-traumatic stress. Children look to their teachers for love, support and nurturance. The teachers may feel guilty that they couldn’t protect these children, even though they were just as powerless. They should talk openly to the children about their feelings. It’s not just the physical cleanup that they must contend with.

The children may want to do something ritualistic until they feel safe. Every Friday, for example, they can put up a big sheet of paper that reads something positive like “Please respect my classroom.” This could give the children a sense of communication with the victimizer and in turn ease their fears of returning to the classroom. Only time will soften the raw edges.