Confronting Classroom Violence in Kazakstan

Experts say not is being done to protect children in Kazakstan’s state schools from abuse, including by violent teachers.



One in ten schoolchildren polled in a recent survey said they were assaulted by their teachers.



In April, two girls in the tenth grade, the final year of school, attempted to commit suicide by taking a overdose of medicines in the southern city of Shymkent. After they were resuscitated, they accused two of their teachers of tormenting them to the point where they wanted to take their own lives.



They said the teachers started picking on them after their parents had a conflict with a school staff member.



“The teacher started insulting me and my mum in front of everyone,” one of the girls told IWPR. “She’s always shouting at me, telling me off for anything, and even swearing. If she meets me in the corridor she shoves me. It’s like that every day.”



The other girl added, “The teachers have made me a laughing stock, they humiliate me in front of the whole class. They say I’m an orphan, that I don’t have a father, and that there’s no one who’ll look after me. I got sick of living in constant humiliation and it got to the point where I couldn’t stand it any longer.”



The teachers concerned flatly denied the bullying allegations, which one of them described as “fantasy”.



The Union of Crisis Centres, an umbrella group of women’s and child rights groups, conducted a survey late last year in which 12 per cent of the senior-grade school pupils questioned said they had suffered physical violence at school, and nine per cent said the assaults were routine.



The national Children’s Fund, meanwhile, has calculated that 65 per cent of violations of child rights take place in schools and colleges. These include physical assault, verbal abuse and extortion.



In some cases, the bullying involves peers or older kids. In others, it involves teachers who should know better. This latter problem is on the rise, say educationalists.



Nina Kosova, who heads an umbrella group of school associations, cites one case where a child in the third grade simply stopped attending school. “It was only later that he admitted that the class teacher was hitting the children; he was afraid to talk about it,” she said.



“The use of violence by teachers is becoming a childhood reality for the majority of people in Kazakstan,” said the head of a private school in Almaty, who asked not to be named. “Violence has become more common because taken as a whole, standards in state-run education have declined significantly in recent years.”



She explained that in the state sector, low pay and lack of prestige in the teaching profession were compounded by “apathetic complicity” on the part of society as a whole.



State schools were becoming less and less choosy about who they hired, she claimed, adding that “it’s easier to hit children than it is to explain why they should listen to something they don’t find interesting – or even better, to make them interested”.



Kazakstan ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1994, placing the state under an obligation to protect children from discrimination, physical and psychological abuse, ill-treatment and neglect on the part of those placed in charge of them.



A national child rights law sets out similar requirements, but experts say the legislation needs to be more explicit. Zulfia Baysakova, who heads the Alliance of Crisis Centres, says the law does not define what is meant by “cruel treatment”, for example.



Roza Akylbaeva, coordinator of a working group of NGOs in child rights, says it remains unclear how teachers who use physical or mental coercion against their wards should be dealt with.



Natalia Koroleva, an expert working with the provincial child protection agency in the northern Karaganda region, pointed out another definition – “inappropriate education” – which is not explained satisfactorily in the legislation.



At the same time, the government has taken action designed to ensure that child rights are observed, and especially to protect those from difficult backgrounds. Under a special programme aimed at improving children’s lives, launched in 2007 and due to run until 2011, thousands of child psychologists, deputy heads with special responsibility for educational welfare, and school inspectors were brought into the state system.



The inspectors are police officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, rather than education officials, and are supposed to make schools a safe, crime-free environment.



Maya Belasarova, a senior officer dealing with minors at the Almaty city police department, says there are not enough inspectors to go round.



“The inspectors have limited capacity since there aren’t that many of them, and they each have to look after several schools at the one time,” she said.



Ayman Bekkhozhina works as a school inspector, and says she finds parents are often reluctant to approach her and raise concerns, because they are mistrustful of the police force in general.



Belasarova agreed, saying, “Parents will go to the law-enforcement agencies only under the most extreme circumstances.”



Some parents complain that from their experience, the introduction of inspectors and psychologists has yet to change things.



A mother in Almaty who gave her first name as Yulia said she was left dissatisfied after confronting school managers after her ten-year old son complained of bullying by his teacher.



Senior staff at the school said the teacher was very experienced, and merely promised to talk to her.



That is not enough for Yulia, who says, “I want a teacher who lays a hand on the children to be taken out of teaching, or at least away from the junior classes.”



She added that other parents felt the same way, but they did not want to make a fuss so they either ignored the problem or moved their children to other schools.



Akylbaeva said the school management’s reaction was fairly typical.



“The loopholes and lack of clarity in the legislation means it is common for teachers to enjoy impunity; they get backing from the school management and from the state itself, in the shape of education departments at district and other levels,” she said.



This year, schools in Kazakstan introduced another system designed to reveal abuses. Pupils can drop a confidential note into a special post-box to report cases of violence or bullying by teachers, other children or family members.