In late June, a high school student who made an extreme choice was found dead in a hillside in Gwangju.
When a video of school violence was found on his cell phone, it was revealed to the world that he was a victim of school violence for a long time.
Around the same time, a Finnish creative opera premiered at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in France and received great acclaim. This opera, titled 'Innocence', is unusually based on a school shooting incident. In this opera, a shooting incident at a high school in Helsinki, Finland 10 years ago and the wedding of the murderer's brother take place back and forth between the past and the present. A dramatic reversal takes place when the victim of bullying turns out to be the perpetrator of the shooting, and the victim of the shooting turns out to be the perpetrator of the bullying.
Although the Finnish high school shootings in the opera are fictional, there have been several real school shootings in Finland. The explosion that occurred in a shopping center near my house in 2002 was also a case where a school bullying victim became the perpetrator of a suicide bombing, although the location was not a school. It was a major accident, in which 7 people were killed and hundreds of people were seriously injured. Fortunately, I was able to avoid the incident by not going there that day, but I still vividly remember how my heart was swept through the evening news as I watched the familiar shopping center collapsed and tanned by bombs.
Finnish media initially speculated that the terrorist attack was similar to the 9/11 incident. However, it was soon discovered that the crime was committed by a 19-year-old teenager who was included in the death list, and Finnish society was shocked. As for the motive for the crime, it was tentatively concluded due to psychological problems such as depression, but a more definite motive remained an unresolved task for a while.
Two years later, a book called Poikani Petri Gerdt, written by the father of the deceased youth, was published. He said, 'I was in so much pain that I felt like I had to write something, so I started writing.' (According to the book) Petri has been bullied since childhood. Petri, who was exceptionally tall, played as a basketball player on the school basketball team, but could not even take a break with his teammates. The father blamed himself for not knowing all the details of his son's difficulties at the time, and said that he had not been of much help and that it was difficult for him to forgive. A few years later, my father appeared in the press again. This time, it was a volunteer who became a friend to underprivileged youth. Although he was not a big help to his son, he said that he wanted to help other youths, so he became a volunteer.
Petri's father concluded the interview by saying, "I want to convey the message to everyone that the road can be opened again if we do not give up no matter how difficult the situation."
Even before the shock of the incident was over, there were a series of school shootings in Finland in 2007 and 2008. The perpetrators were all victims of bullying. At that time, Finnish education was ranked first in the PISA test (comparative evaluation of academic achievement in OECD), and the price was high externally. As the saying goes, the bigger the tree, the bigger the shade. Behind the splendid ranking of Finnish education, there was a big and dark shade.
A Finnish acquaintance said that even when she was young, there was a student in her class who was always bullied. Its roots seemed deeper than expected. A few years ago, even in Finland, as soon as a famous politician was appointed as minister, there were many people who said that he was bullied as a child. The ministerial nominee had to apologize publicly, and the situation was barely subdued.
Few people can clearly explain why bullying is so deep and widespread in Finland, which seems peaceful to people in other countries. Because it is a single-ethnic country, the lack of historical and social diversity is also cited as the cause. It is only assumed that the tendency to reject not only immigrants but also Finns as they are slightly different from themselves has hardened due to the inability to accept 'difference'.
After several school shootings, in 2009, the Finnish government began to take active measures at the government level to end bullying in schools. In collaboration with the university's research team, a bullying prevention program called 'Kiva Koulu' was created and distributed to schools across Finland and even exported to other countries.
The subject of this program is the 'silent majority', not the perpetrators and victims, who prevent bullying. It was the many children who could not even squeak in front of him that raised the power of the protagonist, Eom Seok-dae, the 'antihero' of the novel 'Our Twisted Hero'. The key to this program is that the silent majority builds consensus on the victimized student so that the perpetrator is no longer empowered. Fortunately, over the last decade or so, bullying in Finnish schools has decreased by more than 20%.
Dr. Andre Sourander, a Finnish child psychology expert, received great attention for discovering, for the first time in the world, a close correlation between childhood experiences of bullying and adult mental disorders. He said that children who have been bullied for a long time are highly likely to suffer from mental disorders that are difficult to reverse even as adults due to the trauma. It is time to focus more on prevention and early detection.
In 2019, a young man who had been bullied as a child drew a lot of attention when he published an autobiographical novel about his psychological wounds. This book, titled 『Jalat Ilmassa Yalat Ilmasa』 (meaning: Floating Bridge), was written by the author one day when he was in his freshman year of university, while walking down the street, suddenly a fear of unknown cause came over him, and he wrote to find the cause. It's a down text. The root of the fear he dug into was a long experience of bullying that began in kindergarten. As time passed, the perpetrator disappeared, but even as a college student, the terrible experience still did not let him go.
In an interview with the reporter, he said, "The scariest thing than the experience of bullying is a broken heart that doesn't trust people and is afraid of establishing relationships." In the last chapter of the novel, the protagonist gathers courage and jumps naked into a cold winter lake. The immersion in the ice-cold water was painful, but after a while you tell yourself you can get out and hold on as much as you can. After that, strangely, his body warms up little by little, and the novel ends.
Although school bullying is declining numerically in Finland, a significant number of students are still suffering at this time.
In December of last year, in Finland, a third middle school student was killed in school violence.
The incident sparked the story, and earlier this year, Finland's education minister introduced a sweeping amendment to the law on the fight against bullying.
He said, "Behind every bullying incident, there are students who suffer and their parents who have to watch the suffering."
The 'zero tolerance principle' urged everyone to participate, saying that it should be done as an all-out war in which the entire society takes place, not as a struggle to be implemented by the school alone.
The famous slogan representing Finnish education now seems to apply to the issue of bullying as well.
"No child left behind!"
(not even one student can miss)
#In-It #Init
# Meet 'In-It' to read along with this article.
[In-It] A piece of consideration that I have given, to some, lifelong happiness