Legal measures badly needed to deal with violence on campuses

A number of girls beat and kick a fellow female student who kneels down on the ground in Yongxin county, Jiangxi province. [Photo/ Weibo]

ON FRIDAY, THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, along with eight other central departments, jointly published a guiding document on preventing campus violence. The document stresses that if the perpetrators break the law they should be handed over to the police. A Beijing News editorial praises this move:

This is not the first time that the ministry has introduced measures aimed at curbing campus violence. As early as May, it launched a campaign to deal with the issue.

Yet campus violence is still quite rampant. Several cases have even aroused nationwide concern, because the perpetrators not only beat the victims, but in some cases also removed the clothing of female victims and took photos of their naked bodies, which left psychological scars on the victims.

The root problem lies in some schools insisting on punishing the perpetrators with campus discipline instead of calling the police, even though some incidents have already broken the law and the perpetrators should face legal punishments. The disciplinary penalties of the schools are, of course, much lighter than judicial punishments.

The schools do not want the perpetrators of such crimes to go to court because it may harm their reputations so they prefer to "forget the bad things". They think that by turning a blind eye to any wrongdoing that happens on campus, they can cheat everybody and avoid a scandal. The problem is, the more they try to hide it, the bigger their scandal is.

Worse, by trying to hide the scandal instead of solving it, the schools have actually encouraged the rampancy of campus violence. When the minors who brutalize their schoolmates get extremely light penalty because of their young age, they might commit serious crimes in the future.

Some very severe criminal cases committed by secondary even primary school pupils have already shocked the nation. Among them, a most notable one must be the case of three pupils, aged from 11 to 13, who killed a female teacher in Shaodong, Central China's Hunan province. This July, a 13-year-old killed three children in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, yet he received no judicial penalty because he was under 14.

Such cases should arouse our concern. It is time we solved the problem of campus violence with rule of law.