Incidents of violence, parental neglect and aggression involving teachers and students appear to have grown significantly last year and reflect a five-year upward trend, Ministry of Education schoolyard safety reports say.
Reports obtained by the Taipei Times showed that violent incidents, including cases related to bullying, rose 36 percent last year. Overall, schools across the nation reported 2,703 cases of violence during the year, with 47 percent occurring in high schools and 34 percent at junior high schools, the reports said.
The reports showed clashes between teachers, students or parents grew 37 percent with 285 cases reported last year, compared with 208 the previous year. Those incidents were again mostly concentrated in high schools and junior high schools, together accounting for more than 69 percent of reported cases.
PHOTO: CNA
Of this figure, 57 included cases of violence or serious abuse between students and educators, the reports said.
The number of reported cases five years ago was 15.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲), who sits on the Education and Culture Committee, attributed the increase to lax enforcement by local governments and school officials, exemplified by a recent controversy at Bade Junior High School in Taoyuan County.
Wu Chia-ku (於家穀), the school’s former principal, was suspended on Tuesday, after a petition from more than 60 teachers at the school accused her of turning a blind eye to rampant bullying and abuse. Over the past year, students had gone as far as to threaten teachers with guns, the petitioners said.
Senior ministry officials “tried to complicate the issue and dodge responsibility” following the incident, Kuan said, pointing to comments made by Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji (吳清基) on Tuesday to the effect that bullying was a “small matter” as he addressed students at the school.
“Making those remarks when figures suggest [otherwise] gives us the impression that he is … out of the loop,” Kuan said. “We should be treating schoolyard bullying as a matter of great concern.”
Problematic behavior addressed in the reports includes gang-related beatings in schoolyards, alleged shootings and armed robbery. Nine high school students were suspected of murder over the year, the report for last year said, although official charges didn’t appear to have been finalized.
The reports recorded an increase of 58 cases in the number of fights involving high school students last year, bringing the total to 375, two more than the number recorded by junior high school officials. Also, 378 high school and junior high school students were suspected of taking drugs on school grounds.
On Wednesday, a poll showed that 40.2 percent of all students had witnessed violent incidents at school.
Scrambling to contain the fallout, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said all bullying cases should be prosecuted equally under the law.
While the ministry has insisted it spends as much as NT$182 million (US$6.09 million) a year ensuring safe school environments, documents provided by Kuan showed the majority of the funds was spent on school safety certification and an anti-bullying Web site.
The remainder amounted to less than NT$6 million, she said.
The anti-bullying Web site (www.peacefulschool.org) is severely lacking in information, containing a short three-line paragraph underneath “Understanding Bullying” and blank spaces elsewhere.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater