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Education for Peace Program
Meeting of Government Experts to Design a
Draft Program of Education for Peace in the Hemisphere
MEETING OF EXPERTS TO DESIGN
A DRAFT PROGRAM OF EDUCATION
FOR PEACE IN THE HEMISPHERE
October 14 and 15, 1999
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia |
OEA/Ser.K/XXIX
REPEP/doc.6/99
7 October 1999
Original: English |
VIOLENCE, DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION: AN ANALYTIC
FRAMEWORK
(Paper presented by the World Bank)
“Education provides people with the keys to the
world.” José Martí (1853-95)
Introduction
On October 21, 1989, the Berlin
wall fell, announcing the collapse of the Soviet empire and the demise
of 20th century socialism. In a much celebrated article published the
same year, a senior official of the US Department of State, Francis
Fukuyama, announced the “end of history”, celebrating “the unabashed
victory of economic and political liberalism and the universalisation
of Western democracy as the final form of human government”. Indeed,
the Cold War is over and we can all rest in peace. Capitalism has
prevailed and we can now use interchangeably such words as market
economy, freedom and democracy.
And yet, how do we reconcile the
triumph of Western liberalism with the pictures of chaos, war, crime,
terror and poverty which continue to appear in the daily news? These
disturbing images do not come only from the unruly former republics of
the Soviet Union, the fundamentalist regime of Afghanistan, or the
fanatic dictatorships of Saddam Hussein and Slobadan Milosevic. They
originate also from the rich democratic societies of our planet. For
example, in the United States, the wealthiest nation of the world, 20
percent of the children live in poverty, 3.5 million people are
homeless, one-third of low-income families go hungry on a regular
basis, 25 million adults are functionally illiterate, 42 million
citizens live without health insurance, 23,000 people are murdered and
50,000 rapes are reported every year, and the country boasts the
highest concentration of jailed people in the world. Are these
staggering statistics just reflections of accidental events and
crises, or does violence coexist, in a significant fashion, with
capitalism and democracy?
To begin to address these
questions, this article is divided into three parts. First, it
presents a framework which brings together different forms of violence
in a systematic way. Second, it discusses how this typology can be
used along various analytical dimensions. Finally, it focuses on the
complex relationship between violence and education as an illustration
of how the framework can be applied to issues which are not commonly
looked at from a violence and human rights perspective.
The Different Categories of
Violence
Most people think of violence in a
narrow context, equating it with images of war (as in Kosovo), murders
(as in Washington D.C.), or riots (as in Indonesia). But violence,
defined as any act that threatens a person’s physical or psychological
integrity, comes in many forms. Four main analytical categories can be
put forward to classify the different forms of violence that can be
inflicted upon a human being:
• direct violence; • indirect
violence; • repressive violence; and • alienating violence.
When people write or talk about
violence, it is usually direct violence they refer to, those physical
acts that result in deliberate injury to the integrity of human life.
This category includes all sorts of homicides (genocide, war crimes,
massacres of civilians, murders) as well as all types of coercive or
brutal actions involving physical or psychological suffering (forced
removal of populations, imprisonment, kidnapping, hostage taking,
forced labour, torture, rape, maltreatment). What the Serb army and
police have inflicted upon the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo
for the last ten years is a sad illustration of this category of
violence. In the 17th century, the Turks would cut out the tongue of
any Armenian citizen caught speaking Armenian. Two centuries later,
they took even more drastic actions when they attempted to wipe out
the entire Armenian population in 1915. The conquest of the Americas,
by Spanish and Portuguese colonists in Central and South America and
by British settlers in North America, brought war, massacres and
slavery to the Native Americans. Entire populations were decimated as
the European settlers took over the land and looted the gold and
silver mines of the American continent.
Indirect violence is a category
intended to cover harmful, sometimes deadly situations which, though
due to human intervention, do not involve a direct relationship
between the victims and the institutions, population groups or
individuals responsible for their plight. Two sub-categories of this
type of violence need to be distinguished: violence by omission and
mediated violence.
Violence by omission is defined by
drawing an analogy with the legal notion of non assistance to persons
in danger. In some countries, there is a legal penalty to punish
citizens who refuse or neglect to help victims of accidents or
aggression in need of urgent care. Addressing violence by omission
requires applying, at the social or collective level, a similar notion
of “criminal failure to intervene” whenever human lives are threatened
by actions or phenomena whose harmful effects are technically
avoidable or controllable by society. For example, some historians
have accused the US Government of failing to intervene early enough on
behalf of the victims of the Nazi holocaust, arguing that the State
Department had received sufficient information about Hitler’s “final
solution” as early as 1942 . Only in January 1944, after reading the
conclusions of a secret memorandum entitled “Acquiescence of This
Government in the Murder of the Jews”, did President Roosevelt order
the US army to take immediate steps to rescue the victims of Nazi
extermination plans. A new book written by Richard Breitman documents
a similar failing in Great Britain, where Anthony Eden’s government
did not react to reports of mass executions of Jews . Because of his
strong anti-Semitic feelings, Anthony Eden refused to act upon the
devastating information gathered by British intelligence monitoring
German radio communications.
This “violence by omission”
approach does not apply only to the lack of protection against
physical violence, but also to the lack of protection against social
violence (hunger, disease, poverty), against accidents, occupational
and health hazards, and against violence resulting from natural
catastrophes. In countries where resources are abundant but unequally
distributed, the victims of poverty, which Mark Twain called “the
greatest terror”, could be regarded as experiencing violence by
omission. This is certainly true in the case of mass hunger. In 1944
and 1945, for example, the French occupation forces in Indo-China
contributed indirectly to the death by starvation of two million
Vietnamese by denying them access to rice stocks after the crop had
failed .
The absence of strict gun control
laws in the United States is another striking illustration of this
type of indirect violence. To give just one recent example, in
December 1998, a woman was shot dead by her ex-husband in New Jersey,
even though she had obtained a restraining order from a judge because
she feared for her life and the police had forced her ex-husband to
surrender his gun. But the angry ex-husband needed only to drive ten
miles to the neighbouring county, to walk into a store, and purchase
another gun before going to kill his ex-wife. It could be argued that
gun manufacturers, the US Government, and perhaps, even more, Congress
members bear a significant degree of responsibility in this death and
the several thousand gun accidents, suicide and murders which occur
every year.
The impact of natural disasters can
similarly be seen as a form of indirect violence, whenever it is
recognised that human intervention could have lessened the impact of
seemingly uncontrollable acts of God. For example, experts have
established that the Armero catastrophe in Colombia in 1985 would not
have killed as many people, had the Nevada del Ruiz volcano been
carefully observed and the population evacuated before the fateful
mudslide .
In contrast to violence by omission
which happens in a passive way, mediated violence is the result of
deliberate human interventions in the natural or social environment
whose harmful effects are felt in an indirect and sometimes delayed
way. Examples of mediated violence are all forms of ecocide involving
acts of destruction or damage against our natural environment. The use
of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars by
the US and Soviet armies, which was primarily intended to destroy
crops in enemy territory, has caused genetic malformations among
babies in the infected areas and cancer among war veterans. The sale,
in developing countries, of pesticides and medical products banned in
the country of origin is another illustration of this type of
violence.
Paradoxically, embargos against
repressive regimes, motivated by generous principles of solidarity
with populations suffering under a dictatorial regime, can also be a
source of mediated violence. A recent book by the former UNICEF
representative in Haiti documents the terrible impact, on the children
and women of that country, of the UN imposed embargo against the
illegal government of General Cédras . In the countryside, for
example, many people died of common diseases because transport was
disrupted as a result of the embargo on petrol.
Repressive violence refers to the
most common forms of human rights violations, regularly documented and
monitored by international NGOs like Amnesty International or Human
Rights Watch. Violations of civil rights occur whenever people are
denied freedom of thought, religion, and movement, or when there is no
equality before the law, including the right to a fair trial.
Violations of political rights exist in countries where there is no
genuine democracy, no fair elections, no freedom of speech and free
association. Violations of social rights occur in countries where it
is not legal to form a trade union or to go on strike.
Democracy is a fairly new
phenomenon in the history of human civilisation and, until a few
decades ago, repressive violence was widespread in most countries of
the world. But the gradual disappearance of dictatorships in Latin
America over the past twenty years, the recent abolition of apartheid
in South Africa and return to civilian rule in several African
countries, and the elimination of the Soviet Empire have brought about
a significant reduction in the need for and reliance on repressive
violence by governments. It does not mean, however, that this form of
violence has vanished altogether. Repressive violence continues to be
prevalent in many countries, even in the more ancient democratic
societies. In Great Britain, for example, the Thatcher administration
promulgated new laws in 1980 and 1982 which restricted the rights of
trade unions and workers. Grave judicial errors were committed in
connection with the intervention of the British army in Northern
Ireland, such as the notorious case of the Guilford Four portrayed in
the movie “In the Name of my Father.”
The notion of alienating violence,
which refers to the deprivation of a person’s higher rights such as
the right to psychological, emotional, cultural or intellectual
integrity, is based on the assumption that a person’s well-being does
not come only from fulfilling material needs. Looking at alienating
violence means paying attention to the satisfaction of such diverse
non-material needs as empowerment at work or in the community, the
opportunity to engage in creative activities, a young child’s need for
affection--some child psychologists are now talking about the crucial
role of a dimension called emotional intelligence--, the feeling of
social and cultural belonging, etc. Examples of alienating violence
are found in countries with deliberate policies of ethnocide
threatening to destroy the cultural identity of an entire linguistic
or religious community. In Morocco, for example, the Berber part of
the population, which represents 60 percent of the total population,
does not have official recognition at school or in the media. In
several African and Latin American countries, indigenous population
groups are being gradually assimilated, losing their identities as a
result of discriminatory cultural policies. Racism, and any form of
prejudicial practice against any particular group in society, such as
homosexuals or the elderly, are other forms of alienating violence
found in many places.
Freedom from fear is a key
dimension in this discussion of alienating violence. The daily life of
millions of people throughout the world is affected by feelings of
anxiety, apprehension and dread. This is found among communities
caught up in situations of direct violence, such as war, civil strife
and repression, and often continues for years after the end of the
conflicts. Colombia, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Bosnia and Kosovo are
present-day examples. People living in urban areas with high crime
rates are also subject to anxiety. A recent survey among inhabitants
of the largest metropoles in Latin America indicates that, even in
cities with relatively low levels of crime like Buenos Aires, a large
proportion of people live in fear. The rapid growth of security
products and services in both industrialised and developing countries
is a sad illustration of the importance of this dimension of fear. In
his Annual Message to Congress in 1941, President Roosevelt had
mentioned “freedom from fear” as one of the four essential freedoms he
wanted to preserve for the American people, together with freedom of
expression, freedom of worship and freedom from want.
Table 1 below summarises the main
dimensions of the proposed analytical framework and indicates possible
levels of responsibility.
Table 1. Typology of Different
Categories and Forms of Violence
Perpetrator Category Individual
Group Firm Government Direct Violence (deliberate injury to the
integrity of human life) murder massacre genocide torture rape
maltreatment forced resettlement kidnapping / hostage taking forced
labour slavery
Applying the Analytical Framework
for Violence
How can this framework be used? Its
main advantage is that it constitutes a flexible analytical tool for
investigating complex situations in a systematic, thorough and
objective manner. One can compare situations of violence along several
dimensions, for example geographical, historical, ideological, and
institutional in order to establish and study patterns of
interconnections and causal relationships in a consistent way.
Along the space dimension, levels
and occurrences of violence can be analysed in different countries
using the same methodological approach. Linkages can be found even
across national borders. For example, between the look of wonder of a
European child buying her or his first electronic game and the
exhaustion in the eyes of an Asian child worker who spends his or her
day assembling tiny electronic components, there is a whole set of
complex economic and social relationships.
Second, along the time dimension,
one can look at historical patterns of violence, outlining for example
the causal relationship between colonialism and the growth of the
Western economies. To quote the Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop
Desmond Tutu of South Africa, “When the missionaries first came to
Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘let us
pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and
they had the land.”
Third, the same approach can be
applied to compare different realities across ideological boundaries.
The typology of human rights violations can be used for capitalist and
communist societies, for kingdoms and republics, for secular and
fundamentalist regimes. Looking, for example, at the defunct Soviet
Union through this analytical framework, it is possible to identify
the main dimensions of the human cost of socialism as it functioned in
that context. The history of the Soviet regime is indeed filled with
tales of terror, massacres, mass executions, deportation of entire
population groups, purges and concentration camps, reflecting
unprecedented levels of institutionalised state terrorism .
Fourthly, the framework is helpful
in identifying harmful situations in democratic societies where,
theoretically, human rights are fully protected by the rule of law.
The French Government has recently been condemned by the European
Court of Justice for the use of torture by police against common
criminals. Amnesty International has launched a campaign against
capital punishment in the United States which is one of the few
countries in the world, together with Iran, Pakistan and Somalia,
where the death penalty can still apply to young people under the age
of 18.
Fifthly, the typology allows
measurement of the respective roles and responsibilities of different
institutions, from individuals to groups of people to firms to
governments to multinational companies. For example, thousands of
Bolivians and Paraguayans died between 1932 and 1935 because their two
nations were at war; but in reality it was a war by proxy between two
giant oil companies--Standard Oil of New Jersey and Shell Oil--
competing for control of the Chaco oil fields at the border between
the two countries.
A final observation concerning the
application of the framework is that a particular occurrence of
violence may fall under several categories at the same time. Slavery,
for example, cuts across all four categories of violence. It
encompasses the direct violence of the manhunt in West Africa, the
forced voyage to America and the denial of freedom, the indirect
violence of the slaves’ living conditions, the repressive violence
inflicted upon people who never had any rights whatsoever, and finally
the alienating violence involved in uprooting Africans and plunging
them in a totally foreign cultural and social environment and denying
them their basic dignity as human beings. As an extreme illustration
of the relationship between individual cruelty and the significance of
slavery as an economic system, one can evoke a “delicate” practice
used in 19th century Cuban plantations to preserve the continuity of
the slave population. Before punishing a pregnant slave woman who had
misbehaved in her work, a hole would be dug in the ground so that the
woman could lie on her stomach and be whipped without any damage to
the baby she was carrying .
Violence and Education
Can the same analytical framework
be applied to the concept of education? At first sight, violence and
education do not fit well together. The former refers to harmful
situations which cause people to suffer, and the latter to a positive
process of intellectual and moral growth. But these two notions which
appear to belong to very separate realities have, in fact, many points
of intersection. In some countries, schools are violent environments
and the education process, or lack thereof, are important determinants
of violence. At the same time, education can be a powerful instrument
to reduce violence and improve the human rights situation in any given
society.
As early as 1948, the international
community decided to include in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights an article affirming that “Education shall be free, at least in
the elementary and fundamental stages.” The Declaration went on to
indicate that elementary education should also be compulsory. Several
other texts and legal instruments have reaffirmed the importance of
this basic human right, for example, the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the 1959 Declaration of the
Rights of the Child, and the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the
Child ratified by 191 countries .
The UNESCO Convention against
Discrimination in Education has introduced a second, related
dimension: equality of educational opportunities. This refers to the
obligation of States to offer access to education equally to all
children, regardless of differences in terms of regional, ethnic,
religious, linguistic or gender background.
The third dimension of education as
a human right defended by the United Nations system is the notion of
freedom of choice. The International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights mentions that “The State Parties to the present Covenant
undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents … to ensure the
religious and moral education of their children in conformity with
their own convictions.”
To emphasise the importance
attached to education as a human right, the UN Commission on Human
Rights, under the authority of the Economic and Social Council, has
begun to issue, since 1998, a yearly report on the degree of
compliance of countries with the right to education as defined by the
United Nations system. However, the content of the report reveals a
relatively cautious and restricted discussion of the issues involved .
With regard to access and availability, the report focuses on national
legislation on compulsory and free education, without reviewing actual
compliance. The equality of opportunity dimension is looked at
exclusively from the viewpoint of gender inequities, undoubtedly a
crucial element but certainly not the only one. Unequal access
deserves to be analysed as well along socio-economic, ethnic,
linguistic, and religious lines. Finally, there is little consensus,
among the members of the General Assembly, on considering “the choice
of parents” as a fundamental human right at the same level as access
to basic education. Many States view it as a Western, capitalist
notion designed to legitimise existing patterns of social or racial
inequality or justify the introduction of voucher systems.
To ensure a more systematic and
thorough assessment of the relationship between violence and
education, it is possible to apply the analytical framework presented
earlier, looking at the linkages from two complementary angles: first,
education as a place or a determinant of violence, and second
education as an instrument to reduce societal violence. To begin with
direct violence, it is unfortunate to observe that schools are not the
sanctuaries of peace and harmony they should be. In many countries,
societal violence reaches into the schools. The US example is the most
striking one in that respect . In a society where gun violence has
become a major public health hazard, schools are not immune. In many
urban schools, passing through a metal detector is the first daily
“educational” experience of a student. Police officers and dogs on
patrol are part of the regular school landscape. The frequency of
school massacres, such as the Stockton massacre in January 1989 or,
more recently, the Columbine High School killings in Colorado in April
1999, has increased in dramatic proportion.
While less newsworthy, corporal
punishment is another important dimension of direct violence which is
part of the daily experience of students in many countries, especially
in the developing world. Beatings are seen in many cultures as a
normal enforcement tool to help students learn better. In Morocco, for
example, most primary school teachers work with a ruler, a stick or a
piece of rubber garden hose which are generously used to hit the
children. The American researcher Maher, who spent a year in the
Moroccan countryside, recalls that teachers usually "shout their
lesson, delivering ridicule and blows freely". As one teacher
explained, "the children have always been hit, beaten at home and in
the street. If one takes up a different system in school, they become
too spoilt and one cannot control them anymore. True we are taught
many things at the teacher training college, everything about
psychology and pedagogy, but when we arrive here, we don't know how to
deal with them. Using the stick is the best way." Corporal punishment
and school bullying is also widespread in socially cohesive societies
like Japan, where the 1994 suicide of a 13 year old boy, Kiyoteru
Okochi, brought this issue to international attention .
Illiteracy, a strong factor of
poverty, is one of the most debilitating forms of indirect or social
violence. For the millions of girls and boys who are denied access to
school, or who are thrown out after only a few years, living without
the capacity to read and write will be a serious handicap during their
entire life. It affects their ability to find remunerated employment
and become more productive if they are self-employed. It has also a
negative impact on their health and that of their family, especially
in the case of girls and mothers who usually play the leading part in
the transmission of progressive hygiene and health habits.
The scores of children who are
excluded from schools are usually the victims of negligent government
policies which have failed to make “education for all” a real national
priority. Some groups in society can be affected more than others. In
many South Asian, African and Arab countries, for example, girls fare
systematically worse in terms of access to school and permanence in
the education system. Sixty percent of the 130 million children aged
six to 11 who are not in school throughout the world are girls. In the
Caribbean region, by contrast, there is a reverse pattern of gender
inequality, whereby the school performance of boys is below that of
girls. In several Latin American countries, children from the
indigenous populations are less likely to enter school or to stay in
school than the rest of the population.
Sometimes, government negligence is
compounded by deliberate discriminatory practices against “minority”
groups from a social or legal standpoint. In South Africa until the
early 1990s, education for the black majority was a powerful
instrument of perpetuation of the unjust apartheid system. In 1970,
for instance, less than one percent of the African and coloured
population had finished 10 years of formal schooling, compared to 23
percent for the white population. In the words of the Minister of
Native Affairs, “… my department’s policy is that education should
stand with both feet in the reserves and have its roots in the spirit
and being of Bantu society… There is no place for [the Bantu] in the
European community above the level of certain forms of labour .”
Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka are other examples of countries
whose education policies were purposely and systematically biased
against some ethnic minorities, in the form of explicit or implicit
quotas.
Illiteracy is not only a developing
country social disease. Recent surveys in industrialised nations have
shown that a surprisingly high proportion of the adult
population--between 15 and 25 percent--is functionally illiterate.
This is all the more worrisome as rapid technological change and the
information and communication revolutions are drastically changing the
content of jobs and career patterns. Lifelong education is not a
luxury anymore but a necessity for survival and adaptation.
With respect to the “repressive
violence” category, an uneducated population is fertile ground for the
denial of civic and political rights. Even in countries with a long
democratic tradition, the high proportion of abstentions at key
political votes, for example in the US or in France, could be an
indicator that adult illiteracy and the lack of civic education in
schools are obstacles to full participation of the majority in
democratic life. Successive surveys of college freshmen in the US
indicate that young people are increasingly detached from political
and community life. In many societies, school governance, structure,
organisation and pedagogical practices do not reflect the democratic
ideals which could impact positively the young people educated in
these schools. As two professors emphasised in a recent book on
democratic schools, “the most powerful meaning of democracy is formed
not in glossy political rhetoric, but in the details of everyday
lives.”
The last category of violence,
alienating violence, is particularly relevant to this review of
education and human rights. In many education systems, there is a wide
disconnect between the curriculum taught at school and the community
it is meant to serve. For millions of children, being confronted with
an alien curriculum in terms of content and, sometimes, language of
instruction makes for a very unsettling education experience.
Textbooks often reflect a cultural, urban or gender bias which
misrepresents minority groups or population segments with a minority
status. At times, the level of frustration can be so high as to lead
to extreme reactions. In Sri Lanka, for example, it appears that the
violent Tamil Tigers movement started among students disenchanted with
an education system which totally ignored their minority culture.
Again, this type of curriculum
problem is not isolated to the developing world. The progress of
“creationism” in the US is a striking example of biased teaching in an
industrialised country. Over the past few ten years, Christian
fanatics have taken over school boards in many states and successfully
removed any reference to Darwin and evolutionism from the biology
curriculum in high schools.
Another important dimension of
alienating violence is the culture of fear prevailing in many school
systems where tests and exams have become an end in themselves. When
the purpose of each school cycle is solely to prepare for the next
cycle, the anxiety to pass replaces the pleasure of learning. Intense
competition, starting sometimes as early as in kindergarten, is
associated with the dread of failure and engenders such negative
phenomena as widespread cheating, documented for example in Pakistan
and Bangladesh, and child suicides in cultures where school failure
brings humiliation for the child and disgrace to the family, like in
Japan and Hong Kong . Also, as a result of the prevailing physical
violence in inner city US schools and European schools in low income
suburbs, teachers live in fear of being victimised by aggression from
unruly students.
Finally, it is worth mentioning
that, as in any other situation of violence, the different dimensions
of the relationship between violence and education can be mutually
reinforcing. In Jamaica and Colombia, for example, failure at school
and growing unemployment lead young males into a vicious cycle of drug
abuse and street violence.
Fortunately, the relationship
between violence and education is not always harmful, quite the
opposite. On the positive side, education is an important instrument
to overcome violence and improve human rights. In societies where
direct violence is or was until recently pervasive, for example in a
guerrilla-torn country like Colombia or in post-conflict nations such
as Mozambique, South Africa or El Salvador, political and civic
leaders have emphasised peace education as a key channel for changing
the value system and bringing up generations of young people able to
coexist in a more peaceable fashion. In countries with repressive
political systems, universities have always provided a vital critical
voice on important political and social issues. Authoritarian
governments have been overthrown, for instance in Korea and Thailand,
as a result of student protests.
Providing education helps young
people acquire the fundamental skills and values needed to find
productive employment, be able to adjust to changing labour market
requirements over their lifetime, and live a politically, socially and
culturally meaningful life. Higher levels of education also result in
better health and longer life expectancy. Girls’ education, in
particular, has high individual and social health benefits. More
educated mothers maintain better hygiene and feeding habits in their
household; resulting in lower infant mortality. Educated teenagers are
less at risk of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted
diseases. Girls’ education also helps reduce fertility rates.
In several countries, innovative
experiences are taking place to transform the curriculum and improve
pedagogical practices in order to offer a more meaningful education to
underprivileged groups. Escuela Nueva, for instance, is an interactive
teaching and learning approach for multigrade rural schools. Started
in Colombia in the 1980s, it has been successfully adapted in
Guatemala and Honduras. The EDUCO movement in El Salvador, which began
as a grassroots initiative at the end of the civil war in 1992, has
brought about an active involvement of the communities in the
operation of schools in the poorest districts of the country.
Conclusion
To understand fully the role of
violence and the related extent of harm inflicted upon various
population groups or individuals in a democratic society, or in any
society for that matter, two things are required. One needs first to
conduct a systematic analysis of the different forms of violence
existing in that society. Second, on the basis of this analysis, one
must try to establish the patterns and relationships linking these
manifestations of violence to the prevailing economic, social and
political power structures, in order to establish accountability. The
framework outlined in these pages is offered as a tool to facilitate
this type of analysis.
This paper is guided by the
assumption that violence is a multifaceted phenomenon associated with
specific causes and responsible people or institutions. The paper also
reflects a strong belief in the existence of universal human rights
and the premise that the different forms of violence mentioned to in
the article are sources of harm or suffering regardless of the type of
society and culture one lives in and no matter one’s own individual
characteristics. Whether Chinese or Swiss, Muslim or Jew, man or
woman, situations such as torture, hunger, illiteracy, lack of
political freedom, living in fear, and lack of self-determination are
hurtful. The degree of tolerance towards various manifestations of
harm may differ from one person to the other, and from one culture to
the other, but there are common experiences of oppression, suffering
and alienation which affect all human beings alike.
Education’s place in the study of
human rights violations is particularly important because of its
potential role as either a negative or a positive factor with strong
multiplier effects in each case. As discussed in this paper, the
possibility to enjoy an education and the quality of that educational
experience bear on all four forms of violence. This was illustrated in
a dramatic way by the anguished cry for help message left behind by
the two Guinean teenagers who were found dead in July 1999, after
hiding in the landing gear bay of a Sabena aeroplane which flew from
Conakry to Brussels. Their letter, addressed to the “Excellencies and
officials of Europe”, is self-explanatory:
“… We suffer enormously in Africa.
Help us. We lack rights as children. We have war and illness, we lack
food… We have schools, but we lack education…
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