When Bullies Become Heroes

Teachers in Serbia are confronting the violent behavior of students who were small children during wartime. Part four of a series.

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This is the fourth in a series of articles on the challenges to education in post-conflict societies.

BELGRADE | Aleksandar Grandic knows all the best spots for an after-school fight. Most of the time, he said, kids meet up in tunnels or in the woods.

A Belgrade high school student, Grandic said most fights are organized to take place off his school’s campus, but he recalls regular fights in middle school that happened on school property, sometimes even as teachers looked on. He said violence is part of teenage life, especially for football hooligans like he used to be.

“There are some people who think violence is fun so they beat up other teenagers,” said Grandic, 18, who admits to having been in a few scraps himself. “Our country is poor. Because of that people drink and fight. I think in Serbia it’s always been like this.”

Perhaps, but one humanitarian group is working to make sure it doesn’t stay that way. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Belgrade will introduce a pilot program to high schools in eight municipalities this spring designed to help combat discrimination and violence. It will train teachers in how to deal with such problems and raise student awareness of alternative ways to react, as well as try to get students to be more accepting of one another’s differences.

“Violence has become a priority of the government,” said Sonja Biserko, head of the Helsinki Committee. “It has become a key word. It’s a big topic here, how you proceed with this violence.”

Referring to the country’s recent wartime past, Biserko said the troubled children are products of their environment. “They grew up with this model of violence,” she said. “It is a horrible situation.”

Ivan Kuzminovic, the committee’s executive director, concurred.

“Criminals became heroes when they were actually killers, not just for children but the whole society,” he said. “They are rich, successful, good-looking. Those sort of people simply became role models.”

Kuzminovic cited a toxic mix of war, bad role models, and Serbia’s postwar isolation, as well as football-inspired nationalism, that is contributing to violent and disruptive behavior in the schools.

According to Kuzminovic, 85 percent of students in their final year of elementary school in Serbia report being victims of violence by their peers.

“It was like that 10 years ago, and it’s the same today,” he said.

Police officers began patrolling some schools four or five years ago, he said, but the problem persists. He cited the January beating death of a 15-year-old outside a nightclub in the eastern town of Bor as an example of the extremes such violence can reach.

“The violence is only now becoming visible,” he said.

Kuzminovic said teachers can be the victims as well. The most notorious incident happened last year when a 61-year-old chemistry teacher was beaten by a student. The teacher did not report the incident, and it became public only when the attack was broadcast on YouTube, Kuzminovic said.

State Secretary of the Ministry of Education Tinde Kovacs-Cerovic agreed that this pervasive violence has its roots in the recent past. “Already during the 1990s, there was a clear concern that this kind of atmosphere would have a dangerous spillover effect,” she said. “This is not a new phenomenon. It is not something that wasn’t predicted.”

Kovacs-Cerovic said an anti-discrimination law that the Serbian parliament adopted in August should serve as a beginning to dealing with the problem. She said principals and teachers need to be more accountable for the behavior of their charges and that a violence prevention team should be set up in every school.

Kovacs-Cerovic said programs to counter violence and discrimination tend to be in elementary schools, and funding constraints have kept them from expanding significantly. Only 10 percent, or 120, of the country’s elementary schools, have integrated programs aimed at stopping violence and discrimination.

Natasa Tucev’s 11-year-old son has been on the receiving end of that behavior. She said since he openly declared himself an atheist, other kids have harassed him. At his previous school, he often had to run away from his classmates, she said, adding that he once hid out in a shop while bullies searched for him.

“The boys form a group like a gang in the class,” Tucev said. “They meet him as a group. They attack him as a group.”

The Tucev family moved before the start of this school year. Her son attends a different school, and things seem better. But Tucev said she thinks a Serbian mentality helps breed violence in the schools.

“Patriarchal culture is inherently violent because there is the ideal of a warrior hero with a gun or a sword,” she said. “Even the kids who were too small for war grew up in that time.”

‘A LITTLE SOCIETY’

Kovacs-Cerovic said teachers need to recognize that they are doing more than lecturing and testing their students.

“Teachers are not just teachers. That is an issue we are now dealing with,” she said.

She said the first reaction of most educators is to deny that the problems of violence and discrimination exist. “First everybody says, ‘There is nothing.’ They don’t recognize it,” she said. “The baseline is ignorance.”

Milena Zivotic is a young teacher in her third year in Serbia’s school system. When she started teaching high school math, she thought that would be her sole job, she said. She quickly learned otherwise.

“I want to teach math and nothing else, but I can’t because I’m in these kids’ lives,” she said. “If you’re a teacher, you have to create the atmosphere. You have to make connections. School is a little society.”

Zivotic said students are looking for adults to guide them. When she surveyed her own students about what they liked and what they wanted to be different, she was surprised by the number who wanted her to be tougher on behavior issues. 

“They want me to control them. Maybe because they’re still children,” Zivotic said. “These kids are not punished, but maybe they actually want that.”

PRIME TARGETS

The few programs in place, and the pilot championed by the Helsinki Committee, would target discrimination as well as violence. To that end, it will include schools with a high population of Romani students, who are consistently the most marginalized in school systems across Central and Eastern Europe.

Many Romani students end up in special education, whether they need it or not. Kovacs-Cerovic said Serbian schools recently eliminated screening before primary school so that entry cannot be determined along ethnic lines. But she acknowledged that many teachers have low expectations for Romani students, many of whom do not finish elementary school. They are just waiting for them to drop out, she said. She said nothing is taught about the history of Roma even though there are 500,000 Roma living in Serbia.

Still, Kovacs-Cerovic sees some improvement. She said the number of Roma in secondary schools has increased tenfold in the past five years, from 60 to 600.

Some students say they do not see discrimination against Roma, at least among their friends.

Grandic denied that his schoolmates discriminate, except against homosexuals.

“If someone is a gay person in our school, he will get beaten every day,” he said.

For some students, change, if it comes, will be too late.

One 18-year-old student in his final year of high school said he has suffered harassment and violence because he is gay.

The student, whose name is being withheld for his protection, said one school beating landed him in the hospital for two weeks. He said he was hit on the back of the head and then fell to the floor. His attacker continued to kick and punch him while he was on the ground. Other students watched, but no one intervened. He said his attacker had graduated the year before and returned to school to seek him out. He dropped the charges against his attacker out of fear of retaliation.

The student said he has heard adults talk about programs to curtail violence and discrimination but doubts that they will make any difference.

“Not in this land because of society, culture,” he said. “I don’t think it will get better in 10 years. I think it will get worse. I feel helpless and hopeless. I think it will never stop here in Serbia. They don’t accept differences here.”