POSITION PAPER 3

NOOR NADIRAH BT ZAINAL
0727636

“Violence in the school is a result of differences outside school. We as counselor can’t do anything about it.” Discuss

I strongly disagree with the topic that said counselor can’t do anything about violence in school. For me, counselors play an important role in shaping the students in terms of their personality and behaviour. Before we go any further, we need to understand what the definition of violence. According to www.wikipedia.com violence is the expression of physical or verbal force against self or other, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt.

Nowadays, school violence does not limit itself to the student population only, frequently we been heard about teachers say that they are threatened with violence on school area. There are also some cases that reported the teachers are being physically attacked by the students. Therefore, while the society think that school violence needs to be addressed, we must also concern about students who want nothing more than to receive a good education in a safe environment. In my opinion, the main causes of the violence happen include mass media, socioeconomic status, community and family environments, races and culture issues and many more.

In 1990s, the Internet, blogging, e-mail, and cell-phone text messaging are introduced. Today, many popular video games feature high levels of realistic violence. In research conducted by Ohio State University, found that high school students who had more exposure to violent video games are likely to have pro-violent attitudes, hostile personalities, were less forgiving, believed violence to be more normal, and behaved more aggressively in their everyday lives. Cell-phone text messaging and e-mail can lead children or teenagers learn how to become aggressive and it can lead to cyber bullied. Cyber bullying occurs when young people use electronic media to taunt, insult, or even threaten their peers.

Besides using internet, children and teenagers can easily influenced by their fantasy heroes like Power Rangers and X-Men who aggressively fight whoever comes against them. It will create the problems like violent fantasies. These fantasies can later turn into an actual behaviour where the students will hurt other person. According to Albert Bandura, children are liable to imitate what they see on the television screen, particularly if the behaviour is performed by an attractive role model and is either rewarded or goes unpunished. In this case, counselor can make a movie show about the film that contained the violent behaviour. They must tell the students about the bad effect and the punishment that they will get if they violate the rules. Children are likely to be afraid of the rules, and with this program, we are teaching them to follow the rules to avoid being punishment.

The differences of cultures are also one of the causes that can lead to violent. For example, Ali comes from Kedah and transferred to the boarding school in Kuala Lumpur. He struggle to associate with others because of the difference cultures. Other students will think that Ali is not the same as them because of coming from the rural areas. As a counselor, in order to make students respect other people who live in the different places, we can make “Anak Angkat program” to make them experienced live in other places. Besides that, counselor can make the culture’s day that involve the participation of all the students. This program allowed them to show up their unique culture according to different state and will help students to associate with students that came from different background.

Further more, differences in terms of races can also being an issue that can contribute to violence. For example, when Indian students are labeled as aggressive and always create problems in school. Some of peoples are still think and judging people through their skin colour. There is also the existence of the gang between Chinese, Indian and Malay in school. Counselor must keep reminding students not to differentiate between races and try to make them involve in the programs like 1 Malaysia. The purpose of it is to make them know that there is no boundary between all races and to emphasis the important of unity and to avoid the 13th May from happen again.

Another reason that contributes to violence in school is the differences of socioeconomic status. Mostly the low SES students are highly exposed to being bullied. For example, Aminah are coming from the low SES background that entered the school that has students from high SES. If Aminah cannot learn how to adapt with the new environment, of course other students will insult her because of her low economic background. In this situation, I think the counselor should make some effort that can make all students realize that it is not a good attitude to insult people, and try to make them feel the importance of helping the needy. Counselors can also make them cooperate together and demolish all the boundaries that they made between the high and low SES by providing programs such as Teachers Day and Sports Carnival and make sure that there is a reward so that they can cooperate with each other to win.

Besides that, community environments also can cause the violent in school. As with families, communities also can neglect children. If our communities are not responsive to the needs of families and their children, this neglect can develop into school violence. A child who starts acting violently will often do when their parent are not at home. In addition, family environments also can contribute to this. When we look at the current economy, it difficult for parents to meet all their children's needs because of certain problems. The children are neglecting because of their parents need to work. The worst thing is when the children are raised by single parents or they are raised up by teenage mothers. This problem can make the children feel that they are not important to their parents and they try to do something without telling their parents.

Parents should model the positive behavior to their children, when they fail to do so, children may develop negative behaviour such as violent and aggression behavior. Abusive family environments can also decrease the communication skills and will damage the self-esteem. In homes where positive behavior is not show by the parents, children cannot differentiate whether their behaviour are right or wrong. Our society also believes that when the parents are involved in domestic violence it will increase their children to follow their parents' footsteps. From these two examples that I give, counselor must make programs such as seminar or talk that involve parents and community. These programs contained a speech from someone who had successfully raised their children in terms of education. This will help parents to find the best way to raise their children by providing the Islamic education and give full attention to their children. We also can tell them the consequences of neglecting their children such as it can lead to violence in school. If parents feel not comfortable to tell their problems or need to have their own space, the counselor can offer their help by making the counseling session. With this effort, I believe that all parents can open their eyes and mind to cooperate with the counselor in order to curb the violence in school.

On the other hands, after the ”bully hot line” exist under the Ministry of Education, people might said that there is the ineffectiveness of the school administrator and the counselor in doing their job. Further more, the mass media also had reported to society showing that the school is now not longer become save to students anymore. For me, I look it at the positive site which is when this problem happen is not only just the counselor and the school administration that are responsible, but all the agencies like the ministry of education need to play their role by helping the school. With this, it is easier to curb the problems by having cooperation from all parties.

If someone say that the counselor is not doing their job because of the violent cases are still happen in the school, I want to ask them back does the police not doing their job because of crime cases still happen everywhere? We cannot stop this problems to be happen, but we can reduce and to control it.

As a conclusion, a school counselor’s goal is to recognize the problems and issues that demand their services. No matter what the issues are for each school, a guidance counselor must identify them and find answers to each new problem. A more recent set of goals developed by Schmidt (2003) included promoting improvement in one’s attitudes, facilitating improvements in students’ relationships at all levels, and improving one’s coping abilities and communication skills. Another goal included helping students develop their ability to make important decisions. The last goal of a school counselor involved developing the student’s full potential and promoting self-development. By looking at these goals, one can see that the role of the counselor is an important one. Hopefully, through helping students think through their actions and becoming effective communicators, the incidences of school violence will decrease over time. From all the point that been given, again, I want to emphasis that the school counselor can do something that can prevent the violence in school from happening.