Bigger than our fears

The Department of Education (DepEd) originally scheduled a nationwide simultaneous school safety drill but postponed it to September after several professional groups, including the Philippine Psychiatric Association, called for deferment. They highlighted the risks in simulating a shooting incident for children, cautioning that this may do more harm than good. More recently, President Marcos was quoted as saying that he was open to banning Facebook and other social media platforms and gaming apps as a response to increasing child safety in online environments.

It makes sense to feel fear and panic when a school shooting happens. For parents, it is our worst nightmare: we entrust our children to their “second home” only to realize that they are not as safe as we think. For teachers and schools, we feel the immense responsibility of keeping children safe and want to make sure it doesn’t happen on our watch. For the government, the safety of its citizens is paramount and demands immediate remedy. And of course, for the children themselves, it is a harsh reality to wake up to a premature confrontation with death and danger.

Inasmuch as fear and panic are present, however, we must not let them dictate how we act. Fear-based responses were evident across the country, not just in Tacloban or Zamboanga. Some schools immediately required transparent school bags. Others released a laundry list of items that students are not allowed to bring. Ateneo de Manila University got a bit of media attention as its tightened bag security checks led to inordinately long lines. Each of these interventions may have its merits. If all we cared about was deterring the bringing in of guns and weapons to schools, then perhaps these directives make sense.

The problem with fear-based responses and strategies is that, ironically, they elicit more fear. I received private messages from concerned parents who must deal with their own fears alongside helping manage their children’s fears because of what is happening in schools. Children worry if what happened in Zamboanga will also happen to them. Parents are being asked to check for signs that their own child may be a potential danger. Children now see their peers with a veil of mistrust. People leap to vigilance around violence when encountering a child with mental health concerns, even though it has been proven that there is no such link.

How do we keep safe, not just from violence, but from our own fears?

We must not turn vigilance into hypervigilance. Healthy vigilance is where we make sure that no child falls through the cracks. In this ideal, children’s needs are seen and addressed. For this to occur, the adults in charge of the children’s care are adequately supported. They have both the material and internal resources and skills to provide for such needs. The government provides the framework and infrastructure to ensure such resources and support by enhancing the school staff’s capacity to tend to students’ various needs and strengthening the community’s resources to support schools and families.

We must also ensure that we, as adults, remain safe for our children. That includes not exposing children to weapons and modeling nonviolent communication. Police and law enforcement must promote the safety of our children and be a model of discipline, instead of being an inadvertent source of deadly weapons. We must show our children how to resolve conflicts peacefully instead of engaging in verbal aggression. We must show them how to conduct ourselves appropriately, not just in real-life situations, but in online environments. We must show them how to embrace our emotions and manage them in ways that don’t hurt us or others.

Hypervigilance, in contrast, is where we see every person as a potential source of danger. Instead of building community, we begin to fear and mistrust each other. Because we don’t trust each other, we turn to increasingly severe methods of restricting and controlling behavior. Hypervigilance comes at a great personal cost, too. It requires a constant state of alertness, which increases our likelihood of being stressed and burned out. It also gets in the way of a life worth living, hampered by constrained autonomy and freedom. Choosing this route worsens our collective mental health, depleting us of internal resources to think of long-term innovations that can get us out of fear mode.

The sustainable solution to fear that is induced by community violence is not more fear, but to counter it with a strong sense of community. If we strengthen our relationships with each other, we’d have fewer “unknown variables” to be scared about. If we can anchor ourselves in the safety net of a tight-knit community, we are less likely to feel isolated and alone. People are less likely to fall into desperation, a driver of destructive behavior, if they know they have a community to fall back on. Instead of caving in to our fear-based impulses, let us support each other in becoming bigger than our fears.