Be Very Careful About Creating Victims

How we are developing our kids to be victims!

It’s unfortunate, but reality. In general, we create victims! As schools, society, and in many cases…parents. We don’t do this purposely and certainly not knowingly. BUT, you need to be aware of this.

Think about your child in school today:

Someone walks up to your child, and punches them in the face, grabs their hair and throws them on the ground, assaults them.

Now, answer this question:

In general, what does the school expect your child’s response to this to be?

If you said “do nothing…walk away and let someone else resolve their problem” you would be correct.

Next question: Does someone else resolve their problem? Rarely! And definitely not in the moment, the time where they are being assaulted and vulnerable to injury.

I cant tell you how many times, as a police officer, that I had parents come to the police department, and file complaints that their child was getting assaulted regularly at school and they wanted our help to stop it. My obvious first question to them was “have you talked with the school about it?” Their response – “I’ve been to the school 3, 4, 10 times and it continues to happen and even gets worse”.

Now think about this:

What are we teaching our kids? Not only that they shouldn’t defend themselves, but its actually wrong to defend themselves and then, when they need to be able to defend themselves guess what they have no idea how to do? And then, someone comes to their school to hurt them and what happens? Victim counts pile up and, its always someone’s else fault…the school didn’t do enough to keep our kids secure, law enforcement didn’t respond quickly enough or appropriately, and on-and-on. BUT there is typically little accountability for our role, and what we did or didn’t do, what we accepted or didn’t accept, as parents.

Don’t you think it might be a good idea to teach our kids that its OK to defend themselves when necessary and even to teach them how to do it if necessary?

“And keep in mind that child victims become adult victims.”

I’m not in the business of telling anyone how to raise their kids however, this is something that you, at minimum, need to be aware of and consider and, there are many things that happen within the walls of our schools that are little more than facades to securing our kids.

The bottom line is this: Your kids school will not keep your kids secure and you need to understand why this is the case, in spite of appearance, in spite of the presence of School Resource Officers, drills, training, etc. Why? Because in the end, the responsibility is yours. Stay with The Real Security Journal for resources to understanding the threats, the problems with what we do, and the solutions.