The disturbing rise in bullying incidents among Jamaican youth should not surprise us. The numbers from the National Children’s Registry show a steady climb, but what we are witnessing is not an isolated crisis within schools, it is an undeniable reflection of the society we have built.

The recent video which went viral involving students from Jamaica College has ignited outrage, as it should.

Violence among children is never acceptable. But too many of us are eager to condemn the boys in the video, as though they emerged from some moral vacuum, detached from the cultural environment that shaped them.

Parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Education, Senator Marlon Morgan, made a point in Tuesday’s Observer that deserves attention. His statement that schools are microcosms of society is a diagnosis for the problem we have long ignored. Students’ aggression, their readiness to resolve conflict through force, is not learned in isolation within school walls. They are absorbed from homes, from communities, from the very language and attitudes that saturate everyday life.

We cannot continue to pretend that our children are the problem, while absolving ourselves as the cause. Just listen carefully to the public reactions following the most recent assault. There is a chilling consistency in the calls for swift, brutal punishment. Children should be “locked up”, “taught a lesson”, and “dealt with harshly”, some said. Others even suggested exposing them to the very violence we claim to abhor, as if cruelty can cure cruelty. It is the same logic that fuels the bullying itself, the logic of might over right, dominance over dialogue, and punishment over understanding.

And then we have the gall to ask, with straight faces, why our youth behave this way.

There is a deep hypocrisy here. The same voices lamenting the country’s brutishness are often the loudest advocates for vigilante justice and harsh punishment.

The same adults who preach discipline endorse lawlessness when it suits their anger. We are, in effect, modelling the very badness we claim to reject. And our children are watching and they are learning.

Hogs and swine breed hogs and swine. A society that normalises aggression, glorifies retaliation, and dismisses empathy should not be shocked when its offspring replicates those traits. We cannot plant violence and expect to reap peace.

This does not mean that wrongdoing should go unpunished, as accountability matters. But there is a profound difference between discipline and vengeance; one seeks to correct and rehabilitate and the other seeks to inflict pain. If our response to children’s misbehaviour is rooted in the same cruelty we are trying to eliminate then we are not solving the problem.

If we are serious about addressing bullying, then the work must begin far beyond the school gates. It must start in our homes, in how we speak to and about one another, in how we handle conflict, in the values we reinforce daily.

Taking the blinders off means accepting collective responsibility and acknowledging that the culture we tolerate is the culture our children inherit.

This reality of the need for change now is further underscored by Monday’s fatal stabbing of a Seaforth High School student at the Morant Bay Bus Park. The problem is no longer confined to bullying, it has escalated into irreversible violence.

Until change happens we will continue to watch these incidents unfold, shake our heads in disbelief, and ask where it all went wrong.

But deep down, we already know the answer.