CAMPUS SECURITY
School and campus security: the challenges and solutions in 2021 “Far from being a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence.” — UNICEF
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orldwide, school and campus security systems are under increasing pressure to identify and prevent wide-ranging criminality that includes shootings, stabbings, sexual predation, robbery, kidnapping, rape, bullying, arson and cybercrime, while at the same time trying to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. According to UNICEF: • Half of the world’s students aged 13-15 (about 150 million) report experiencing peer-to-peer violence in and around school.
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SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA OCTOBER 2021
• Slightly more than one in three students between the ages of 13 and 15 experience bullying, and about the same proportion are involved in physical fights. • Around 720 million school-aged children live in countries where they are not fully protected by law from corporal punishment at school. • Between 2005 and 2020, the United Nations (UN) verified more than 13,900 incidents of attacks, including direct attacks or attacks where there has not been adequate distinction between civilian and military objectives, on educational and medical facilities and
protected persons, including pupils and hospitalised children, and health and school personnel. South African educational facilities, from primary schools to colleges and universities, are facing the same challenges, exacerbated in many instances by limited budgets and legacy systems. According to The Conversation, one in five children are victims of sexual abuse in South Africa, and while statistics are difficult to come by and probably “seriously under-reported”, it estimates that 22.2 percent of the country’s school children have been victims of violence.
securityfocusafrica.com
