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How to Protect Schools from Violence in Chile    

By Andres Kogan Valderrama

HAVANA TIMES – Following the progress in the Chilean Senate of the “Protected Schools” bill, promoted by president Jose Antonio Kast and presented by him as a firm response to the school violence crisis in Chile — after various incidents such as the case of the school inspector murdered in Calama by a student — it seems that the security-based approach is deepening under this “emergency government,” as it calls itself.

I mention this because the bill is a continuation of other security-oriented initiatives, which also promised to restore order, strengthen teacher authority, and return peace to educational communities. However, they have proven to be reductionist approaches that oversimplify the phenomenon of school violence, focusing on the symptoms while leaving aside its deeper causes.

One of those causes, among others of course, is patriarchal school culture, which the different governments we have had since the return to democracy have done little or nothing to confront. Whether through denial, minimizing the problem, or simply an inability to seriously address it in schools.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The so-called “Safe Classroom” law, approved in 2018, already established a similar logic: in the face of violence, speed up sanctions, facilitate expulsions, and reaffirm institutional control. More recently, the new educational coexistence law has attempted to broaden the approach toward wellbeing and prevention, incorporating notions of respectful treatment and even timidly opening the door to a gender perspective.

But there is a blind spot running through all these initiatives: none of them explicitly address the issue of hegemonic masculinity. And this is no minor detail. Because school violence, far from being a neutral........

© Havana Times