When the school stops being safe

A school is one of the last places where we expect violence to intrude. We send our children there because we believe, almost instinctively, that it is a protected space: a place for learning, friendship, discovery, and the slow construction of a future.

The shooting at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University broke that covenant. A junior high school student entered the campus with firearms, shot a fellow student, and later took his own life. The attack was live streamed. Students fled in panic.

We should be careful, however, about what we make of this tragedy. It is easy to call it an act of individual madness and leave it there. But this is the second fatal school shooting in the country in less than two months. In June, three students were killed and 20 others injured at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City. Two minors were arrested in connection with that attack.

Two incidents do not establish a trend. But they should disturb our complacency.

The public conversation has already begun searching for a culprit: violent games, social media, bullying, mental health, parenting, school security, firearms. But complex violence rarely has a single explanation.

Millions of young people play violent games and spend hours online without becoming violent. It would be careless to claim that digital exposure produces school shootings. But it would be equally careless to pretend that the digital world is socially irrelevant. Young people now encounter ideas about violence, humiliation, revenge, status, and recognition in environments different from those of previous generations. The question is how these experiences become part of the social world through which a young person interprets himself and others.

A more concrete question remains: How did a minor obtain firearms? This is where the distinction between violent impulse and violent capacity becomes important. A thought, however disturbing, does not automatically become an act. Between the two lies opportunity. A gun changes that equation. The responsibility of a society that permits firearms in homes is therefore not exhausted by licensing the owner. It includes securing those weapons from children and others who should never have access to them.

We often imagine school safety in physical terms: gates, guards, cameras, metal detectors. These are necessary. But they are not sufficient. A school is not merely a building that needs to be secured. It is a social world.

Within it, children learn who belongs and who does not, who is admired and who is ridiculed, what it means to lose face, how authority responds to conflict, and whether there is anyone to turn to when something goes wrong. This does not mean bullying explains violence, nor that troubled children should be treated as potential criminals. It means that violence has a social history, even when its final expression is brutally individual.

We should also think carefully about the livestream. Violence changes when it acquires an audience. The possibility of being watched, remembered, shared and discussed can turn violence into a kind of performance. We should resist making perpetrators the protagonists of their own crimes. Not everything that can be shared deserves to be shared.

But the larger question is not how to explain one disturbed young person. It is what kind of society we are creating when children must be taught how to survive an armed attack at school.

We should strengthen security, examine firearm storage and accountability, and improve schools’ capacity to recognize threats and respond to students in distress. Teachers need training and support. Parents need help navigating their children’s increasingly complicated digital lives. Mental health services must be accessible, while avoiding the dangerous assumption that mental illness is synonymous with violence.

Yet prevention must mean more than keeping a dangerous person outside the school gate. It must also mean building the social conditions in which violence is less likely to appear as an answer.

A child should have someone to talk to before anger becomes grievance, before grievance becomes isolation, and before isolation becomes an imagined justification for violence. A teacher who senses that something is wrong should know where to turn. A student who feels humiliated should have somewhere to go that is neither gossip nor punishment. Parents should not have to discover the social worlds of their children only after a tragedy.

We owe the victims more than condolences. We owe their classmates more than guards and metal detectors. We owe parents more than assurances. We owe children something more basic: the ordinary freedom to go to school without having to wonder if they will come home.

A society reveals itself not only in the laws it passes, but in the things it gradually learns to accept as normal.

Let us refuse to learn this one.

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Prince Kennex R. Aldama is a sociologist in the Department of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Los Baños. He was president of the Philippine Sociological Society.