Recently, an incident that occurred at the gate of Niucun Primary School in Xinxiang, Henan Province has aroused the attention of netizens. A 9-year-old boy was violently beaten by the parents of his classmates at the school gate, and his mother was not spared, both of whom were injured and hospitalized.
After the incident was reported by the media, netizens were very sympathetic to the beaten boy's mother for a long time, but as the relatives of the beater reported with their real names on the Internet, the trend of online public opinion changed abruptly.
Behind this seemingly contradictory public reaction lies deep concern and frustration about the problem of school bullying.
[Incident Restoration: School Bullying Behind the Violent Conflict]
According to Mr. Li, the father of the boy who was beaten, on the afternoon of April 16, when his wife picked up his son from school, he was intercepted by the parents of a pair of classmates. The couple first slapped the boy twice with the woman's hands, and then the man slapped the boy more than a dozen times, accompanied by kicks, and beat the boy to the head. During this time, Mr. Lee's wife tried to record the process with her mobile phone, but the man snatched the phone and was attacked. The cause was a daily dispute between the two children, and Mr. Li's son claimed that it was the other girl who made the verbal abuse first.
After the video of the incident was exposed on the Internet, public opinion at first unanimously condemned the parents' violent acts.
However, the girl's uncle, a relative of the beating parent, then spoke out, revealing the other side of the incident. He pointed out that the parents of the boy who had been bullying many of his classmates, including his niece, had repeatedly called the police and asked the school for help, but the problem had not improved, and the girl had even faced multiple threats of intimidation.
These remarks were like an earth-shattering shock, quickly reversing the trend of public opinion.
[Netizens are hotly discussed: extenuating "violent counterattack"?]
There has been a significant change in the attitude of netizens who have learned the truth, and they generally believe that when the problem of school bullying has not been effectively solved for a long time, and the victim's family has exhausted all reasonable avenues, the violence of parents, although undesirable, is somewhat excusable.
Their call for "good fighting" is not an affirmation of the violence itself, but a deep sympathy for the children and their families who have endured bullying for a long time, as well as a strong dissatisfaction with the weakness of the current anti-bullying mechanism in schools.
The voices of netizens reflect a general social sentiment: when systems and rules cannot protect the weak, when the intervention of public power cannot stop evil in a timely and effective manner, the "private remedy" behavior of individuals under extreme pressure, although it violates the law and moral norms, may win the understanding and sympathy of some of the public. This seemingly contradictory phenomenon is actually a warning about the lack of order management on campus.
[Reflection and Appeal: School Bullying Governance Needs to Be Upgraded Urgently]
Although netizens' "playing well" is more of an expression of frustration at the failure of the current anti-bullying mechanism, no one should ignore the vicious nature of the violence itself.
Violence against minors by adults, for whatever reason, is a violation of the bottom line of law and ethics, and should be condemned and investigated.
But it also prompts us to think deeply: why does the public resonate with the seemingly illegal "countering violence with violence" when it comes to school bullying?
The answer may lie in the public's deep concern and dissatisfaction with the current state of school bullying governance.
On the one hand, school bullying incidents are frequent, the rights and interests of victims are not effectively protected, and parents have no way to seek help.
On the other hand, when schools, education departments and the judiciary respond to the problem of bullying, they often have problems such as lagging response, ineffective handling, and excessive punishment, which fail to form a strong deterrent effect.
Therefore, in the face of such incidents, we should not stop at the moral judgment of individual cases, but also focus on how to fundamentally improve the level of school bullying governance. This includes, but is not limited to: strengthening anti-bullying education in schools to cultivate students' empathy and legal concepts, improving the reporting and handling mechanism of school bullying to ensure that victims' demands are responded to in a timely manner, increasing the legal punishment of school bullying to form a strong deterrent, and guiding parents to respond rationally to conflicts between their children to prevent personal grievances from turning into violent incidents.
Netizens' call for "playing well" is actually a collective cry for the long-term accumulation of disadvantages in the problem of school bullying. This incident once again reminds us that only by building a scientific, efficient and effective school bullying prevention and control system can we truly protect the pure land for children's growth, so that helpless words such as "fight well" will no longer become the only choice for the public in the face of school violence.