Nobody Deserves to Be Hit: When System Problems Become People Problems

Everyone is talking about violence in classrooms. Teachers are being hit, kicked, bitten and injured. Educational assistants are describing workplaces that feel increasingly unsafe. Classrooms are being evacuated. Unions are raising concerns about violence, and stories about aggression in schools are increasingly part of the public conversation.

A familiar narrative quickly follows: student behaviour is getting worse. Children are more aggressive. They are more dysregulated. Their needs are more complex. Schools are dealing with behaviours they were never expected to manage, and staff are paying the price.

There are very real experiences underneath that narrative. People are getting hurt, and nobody deserves to be hit. But notice how quickly a systemic problem can become a people problem.

A student hits an adult and suddenly the problem has a very clear location: the student. The incident report reinforces it. The student refused. The student escalated. The student swore. The student threw something. The student hit. We document the child's actions in extraordinary detail while everything surrounding those actions begins to fade into the background.

The staffing shortage does not hit anyone. The inaccessible environment does not throw a chair. A failure to accommodate does not kick. An overwhelmed classroom does not bite. Systems do not have bodies, so when something finally goes wrong, the behaviour we can see becomes much easier to document than the conditions surrounding it. That is how system problems become people problems.

A classroom may be chronically understaffed. A student may not have reliable access to the accommodations they require. The environment may be loud, crowded and unpredictable. Staff may be expected to support needs they have not been given adequate training or resources to meet. A child may have spent weeks or months communicating distress through avoidance, shutdown, elopement, refusal or escalating behaviour. Then someone gets hit, and suddenly there is an incident that can be counted, recorded and attributed to a person. The complicated conditions surrounding that moment become secondary to the concrete fact that a child caused harm.

The conversation also becomes extraordinarily difficult to reopen because nobody deserves to be hit. Of course they don't. But that statement can become a full stop rather than the beginning of an investigation. Examining what happened before the incident can be interpreted as excusing violence. Examining the adult's actions can sound like blaming the person who was hurt. Examining disability can sound like removing accountability. Examining the environment can sound like avoiding the obvious problem standing directly in front of us. So the safest place for the conversation to remain is with the child.

This is especially visible in the way incidents are documented. Adults control much of what happens within schools: schedules, demands, transitions, movement, access to spaces, consequences and responses to distress. They also have professional responsibilities that children do not. Yet when an interaction ends badly, the adult can become almost passive in the written account while the child's every action becomes a verb.

Over time, those reports create a history. One incident becomes ten, and the file begins to describe a student who is aggressive, unsafe, defiant or difficult to support. The person with the least power can become the most documented person in the room, while repeated patterns in staffing, environment, accommodation and adult responses remain much harder to see. Eventually, we are no longer talking about a child experiencing barriers within an educational system. We are talking about a behaviour problem.

Once the problem has been located within the child, the solutions tend to follow it there. Behaviour plans, safety plans, increased supervision, reinforcement systems, consequences and regulation strategies are introduced to help the student cope, comply or respond differently. Some of these interventions may have a place, but notice what can remain remarkably unchanged around them. The classroom can remain crowded. Staffing can remain inadequate. Accommodations can remain inconsistent. Demands can remain unchanged. Adults can continue using approaches that repeatedly result in escalation. The system can remain almost entirely intact while increasingly elaborate plans are created to change the child.

Accountability cannot begin and end with the person whose behaviour is easiest to see. If an incident is serious enough to document, then the conditions surrounding it should be serious enough to examine. That means looking beyond the final act of aggression to the decisions, interactions, barriers and systemic conditions that preceded it. Otherwise, accountability flows almost entirely downward toward the child, while the systems and adults with considerably more power remain largely outside the frame.

A student can cause real harm while an adult's practice still warrants examination. A staff member can be injured while systemic conditions still matter. A child can be accountable for their actions while a school remains accountable for the conditions in which those actions occurred. Accountability does not become less meaningful when we widen the lens. It becomes more complete.

If we are serious about reducing violence in schools, incident reporting has to do more than establish who did what at the moment things went wrong. It has to help us understand the conditions that made that moment possible. Otherwise, we can become exceptionally good at documenting the consequences of problems we remain unwilling to change.

Nobody deserves to be hit. That should make us more curious about how we got there, not less. Because when system problems become people problems, the system gets to remain exactly as it is while the person carries the record of what happened.