School violence: How we can fix at least one of the reasons it persists

This story is part of School Violence, a CBC News series examining the impact of peer-on-peer violence on students and parents.

A recent CBC News series featured heart-breaking stories of violence physical, psychological and sexual inflicted on students in today's schools. All of this came hard on the heels of the horrendous stabbing death of 14-year-ol Devan Bracci-Selvey in front of Hamilton's Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School.

Raising our consciousness about the dangers students face is much easier than grappling with why Canadian schools are falling short in addressing the chronic problem of violence, bullying, and sexual harassment in the first place.

That challenge has confronted us for more than a decade since the release of Julian Falconer's massive January 2008 report The Road to Health,which looked attackling student violence in the Toronto District School Board.

School authorities from province to province, we learned from the CBC investigation, still collect incident reports on student violence in vastly different ways. The result is a crazy-quilt patchwork of data with far too many schools and regions that file no reports at all.

Only two of the provinces, Ontario and Nova Scotia, require schools to share their school violence statistics with their education ministries. Even so, in the case of Ontario, that data was found to be incomplete and inaccurate.

Given the paucity of reliable statistics, it's next to impossible to analyze this disturbing social trend in our schools.

Canadas broken student violence reporting system

5 years ago

Duration 2:42

A violent attack on a high school student that was shared on social media but not reported by the school board seems to exemplify a broken system in Ontario. An exclusive CBC News investigation has more on the gaps and inconsistencies in Canadas system for keeping track of student violence.

To get to the bottom of the problem, CBC's Marketplace commissioned a nationwide survey of 4,000 young people, ages 14 to 21, in September of this year.

The results were startling: Two out of five (41 per cent) of boys reported being physically assaulted in high school; one in four girls (26 per cent) experienced unwanted sexual contact at school; and one in four students first experienced sexual harassment or assault before Grade 7 in elementary school.

Five key factors can be identified, based upon the CBC investigation and credible research on violence in schools:

• 'Head-in-the-sand' denial: Much of the school violence experienced by students is treated by officials as isolated incidents, or events requiring too much time-consuming investigation in order to assign blame or responsibility. In the absence of required reporting, it goes unacknowledged and, all too often, is swept under the rug.
• Ineffective oversight: Even where reporting of student violence incidents is expected or required, it's often not deemed a priority unless or until a publicized incident hits the media and arouses parental unrest. School-by-school reports may be filed, as in Ontario, but oversight is weak or non-existent and the absence of reports is not questioned, even in some cases when it involves incidents featured in local media reports.
• Under-reporting: Many principals and administrators under-report the number of actual school violence incidents, as revealed when compared with student-reported data. In American states, where student violence reporting is more established, data generated from the victims is incorporated into the official statistics.
• Fear of reputational risk: School administrators are often protective of a school's reputation and reluctant to report higher counts, which might result in them being labelled a "dangerous school" if their numbers are high or rising from year to year.
• Feeble public accountability: Educational oversight by elected school boards and district educational councils is woefully inadequate.

Illustrating that last point, Manitoba provincial school boards association president Alan Campbell says that maintaining "a safe learning environment" is the "No. 1 priority." However, public disclosure of data is non-existent there, and levels of sexual harassment and hateful name-calling are higher than any other province in Canada.

Why elected boards do not insist upon full public disclosure is hard to fathom, especially when it's their responsibility to identify critical needs and allocate district resources.

How one school is confronting school violence by promoting trust

5 years ago

Duration 4:45

More than one-third of students between the ages of 14 and 21 say they were physically assaulted at least once before reaching high school, according to a survey commissioned as part of CBC News School Violence series.

Much can be learned from American school research, which includes critical analysis of how Ontario has collected violence statistics over the past eight years.

UCLA Professor Ron AviAstor, co-author of Bullying, School Violence, and Climate in Evolving Contexts: Culture, Organization, and Time, has published more than 200 academic studies on violent behaviour in schools. In the CBC News series, he confirmed that Canada has no real system at all for collecting data, exemplified by uneven provincial policies, lack of consistent definitions for offences, varying collection systems, and inaccurate or incomplete statistics.

Ontario deserves credit for requiring mandatory reporting, but the system does not stand up to close scrutiny.

The most recent data documented 2,124 violent incidents in 2018-19, averaging about 10 incidents province-wide each day. That simply does not stack up, because 18 of Ontario's 76 school boards have reported zero incidents for several years, eight show radical variations from year to year, and four boards are in non-compliance for having failed to file reports at all for some years.

While the CBC News report documented serious levels of violent incidents in the province when it surveyed students, more than three-quarters (77 per cent) of Ontario schools reported having no incidents of violence during the previous year.

School Violence: How to fight for safer schools

5 years ago

Duration 22:31

How to fight for safer schools. We test schools across the country by asking a simple question: How many students have attacked other students?

Negligence in reporting and underreporting simply compounds the problem. When the violence statistics go unreported or are full of zeros, it becomes guesswork when allocating resources not just funds, but counsellors, psychologists, and social workers to rectify school problems with student behaviour.

Transparency in identifying problems is, after all, the critical first step in developing more effective, evidence-based harm reduction policies and in implementing school-level programs that work in reducing the incidence of student violence.

• This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read ourFAQ.

Read more stories in CBC's school violence series:

• SCHOOL VIOLENCE |Why so much student violence still goes unreported
• SCHOOL VIOLENCE |'I thought he was dead': CBC survey reveals 4 in 10 boys are physically assaulted at school
• SCHOOL VIOLENCE |Student-on-student sexual violence highest in Prairies, CBC national survey finds
• 'I just ignored it': Violent, homophobic incidents common in high schools but few students report them
• CBC INVESTIGATES |Here's what witnesses say happened before a Hamilton student was fatally stabbed

If you have feedback or stories you'd like us to pursue as we continue to probe violence in schools in the coming months, please contact us at schoolviolence@cbc.ca.