DR Pearnel Bell has urged educational institutions to take greater care in the way they punish youths involved in violence at school.

She noted that expelling or suspending a youth often did more harm than good, certainly as one looks at the violence perpetrated in the larger society.

“Schools, to a large measure, contribute to some of the violence because of the kind of punishment that is given. There is too much punitive punishment,” Bell told Career & Education.

Instead of sending youths home — many of them to families with limited financial means to provide them with alternatives to further delinquency — Bell proposed that more productive sanctions be identified and utilised.

“Punitive sanctions [such as expulsion] is negative; it does not teach much. So some positive consequences should be implemented. Students with behavioural problems should not be given some of these negative punishments, such as suspension or expulsion. They should be given positive consequences,” the psychologist said.

“So if it is identified that a student is inclined to exhibit behaviour problems, put them in a situation where they will have a positive experience. For example, if a boy who is giving trouble in school is a good cricketer, put him in charge of a cricket team,” added the doctor, who specialises in treating children with behavioural problems from her Montego Bay-based practice.

Dr Elizabeth Ward, chairman of the board of the directors of the Violence Prevention Alliance, agreed.

“It is a few people out of control who are causing the problem. Kicking them out of school won’t help,” she told Career & Education. “School retention programmes are what make the difference. But those kids don’t learn the way other kids do. You have to use alternate methods to keep them excited.”

While not disputing the value of positive sanctions, Michael Stewart, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), insisted that suspensions and expulsions were options of last resort for schools.

“Whenever suspension and then expulsion take place, those are normally last resort in terms of the administration of the school taking decisive action. Prior to all these, the students would have been counselled, the parents would have been brought in, guardians would have been brought in. We also would have referred them to the CDA (Child Development Agency), the churches and other stakeholders who have an interest in seeing to it that these students change their deviant behaviour,” he told Career & Education.

Stewart added that schools also had to consider the interest of the larger school population in taking such decisions.

“No school would want to expel a child. But you would understand that getting the student out of that environment after the student becomes very violent would be the best thing to do because the teachers, the students and other persons at the institution would be put at risk if we have a child who reacts in a very violent manner,” he said.

Still, the JTA boss said schools were neither oblivious nor insensitive to the plight of students who are expelled and who could develop greater problems without the right intervention. It is against this background, he said, that the JTA has called for the establishment of a time-out facility.

“We would not want to know that a child is sent home and be turned loose into the community where the child can become involved in activities that would promulgate that deviant behaviour. We would not want that child to become a part of what I would term the lumpen proletariat group,” he noted.

“That is why we are calling for the Ministry of Education to move expeditiously to set up the time-out facility where the students who are violent can be taken to these facilities to be rehabilitated and not to be sent on the streets to become a part of gangs. And we are saying also that the CDA and other agencies, which are invested with the authority to deal with these children that they become proactive,” Stewart added.

Meanwhile, Ward said that the answer to resolving Jamaica’s violence problems rest with everybody getting involved in the effort, from parents at home to teachers in the classroom, to members of parliament.

“If we don’t get national will and people volunteering their time to help in whatever way they can help, then we are spinning wheels,” said the woman, who is also a part of the Institute of Criminal Justice and Security at the University of the West Indies. “If you don’t create a critical mass for change and have a will behind it, then you are not going to be making a difference. People will listen, but they need to have some hope.”

Ward noted that parental involvement was especially important.

“There is the primary prevention which is intervening for children — the video, newspaper, what you see on the street — those are things we can have an impact on. Then at a secondary level there is keeping kids in structured, supervised after-school activities and mentorship. But it is not peer-on-peer mentorship, it is older people who can help them with the issues,” she said, adding that “kids who do good things under difficult circumstances” should be rewarded.

Ward has, in the interim, urged youths not to arm themselves whether with guns or other weapons.

“Most of it [violence] happens between home and streets. Once you have a weapon, you are most likely to use it. If you lose your temper, you are going to be tempted to use. And if somebody sees you with it, then [that could also stir trouble],” she cautioned.

Bell added that youths needed to take greater responsibility for their actions. For one thing, she said they needed to learn to reign in their anger.

“If there is any confrontation, they should be able to walk away before it gets to a boiling point. They must learn to control their anger and learn how to talk about a situation rather than fight it out,” Bell said.