School-Based Violence across Canada
This article was written by Bo-Ning Gao, Master’s student at Carleton University’s School of Journalism.
“Violence in the classroom has become more and more prevalent,” said Preston Huppie, an educator and a member of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF/FCE) Advisory Committee on Indigenous Education. In his testimonial he shared with CTF/FCE’s ABSENT podcast, he said that having dysregulated students in the classroom makes his teaching experience like “walking on eggshells.”
A lot of Canadian teachers have similar feelings. Tantrums, hitting, kicking, biting, and spitting – Violence in schools has become a serious issue across Canada that affects the teachers who are on the front lines and experience these incidents on a daily basis. The CTF/FCE spoke with teachers and educators across Canada, and a lot of them feel they are constantly on edge, fearing for their safety, and struggling to provide a nurturing environment for their students because of the rise in violent incidents.
How common is school-based violence in Canada?
School-based violence refers to violence, aggression, and harassment occurring in schools.
In 2018, the CTF/FCE conducted a research review of survey findings from over 40,000 teachers across Canada. About 80 per cent of the respondents estimated that violence had increased over their careers.
Similarly, a study by the University of Ottawa estimated that more than half of the elementary school teachers in Ontario had experienced one or more acts of violence during the 2017-2018 school year.
The study, which was done with members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and conducted by professors Dr. Darcy Santor and Dr. Chris Bruckert, also revealed that violence against educators had increased almost seven-fold in 15 years.
“As a criminologist, whenever I hear rates are going up, I usually think, oh, reporting rates are going up, or this is an artifact of the media. But, in this case, it seems to be legitimately increasing and at an almost unthinkable rate,” Bruckert told ABSENT.
To make it worse, the researchers believe this alarming data represents a very serious underestimation.
Santor and Bruckert initiated the Harassment and Violence Against Educators Project in 2018. To date, the project has surveyed over 1,500 elementary school teachers – specifically ETFO members – and over 3,000 Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) education sector workers. In their surveys, the researchers have found that a lot of teachers don’t report violent incidents for a variety of reasons.
“It ranges from: they ‘do not see that it is sufficiently severe’ to ‘there’s no support from administrators to do something about it,’ to believing that ‘it just will not make any difference’ to report that,” Santor told ABSENT. As a matter of fact, half of the respondents did not even report their worst incidents of violence in their teaching careers.
Ontario teachers are not in this alone. In 2023, the International Barometer of Education Staff (I-BEST survey) revealed that in the past 12 months, 40% of Canadian respondents have been victims of workplace violence. Compared to the other participating countries (France, Spain, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, Argentina, Morrocco, Cameroon, and Japan), Canada is the highest.
How does school-based violence impact teachers?
The consequences of school-based violence are severe.
“The truth is quite simply that violence ripples through the lives of these teachers and it affects everything,” Bruckert told ABSENT. “The more physical violence that you experience, the more harassment that you experience, you also report lower levels of mental health, poor physical health, and an erosion of your ability to do your job well.”
Other researchers echo this finding.
Dr. Kristen Ferguson and Dr. Melissa Corrente from Healthy Professional Worker Partnership found that education workers experiencing violence were almost twice as likely to report having a mental health issue.
To recover from the violence that they are experiencing, a lot of teachers use their sick days and take a leave of absence. Eventually, some of them consider a different career path. “In our study, we found that both experiencing workplace violence and suffering from a mental health issue predicted education workers not only leaving an organization like a board or a school but also leaving the profession entirely,” Ferguson said. She described it as “the ramifications of violence in the classroom.”
Why does school-based violence occur?
All of these did not happen by chance or in isolation.
In 2024, the Alberta Teachers’ Association published a report that found that aggressive behaviours in schools have increased following the pandemic. The pandemic certainly exacerbates the situation, but the escalation has also been partly attributed to growing societal divisions, an increase in the use of social media, and a decrease in student social-emotional intelligence and level of maturity. All of which have bred less empathy and less social awareness.
According to Santor, students resort to violence when they have not yet learned how to deal with their emotions.
“As a psychologist, much of the aggression that is witnessed and experienced is going to be the result of the frustration that is experienced by kids who do not have or are not sufficiently equipped to cope with their frustration in an adaptive way,” Santor said.
Teachers on the frontlines already know this, but a lot of them do not have sufficient resources to support students’ needs. In Santor and Bruckert’s surveys, over 70 per cent of educators asked for additional training and resources on social-emotional learning skills to help kids deal with their frustrations.
Heidi Yetman, President of the CTF/FCE, believes that the root cause of school-based violence is the lack of funding. “When we get right down to it, the problem is that we don’t have a system that’s well funded,” she told ABSENT.
What is the CTF/FCE advocating for?
“I am truly scared about what this is going to look like in five and 10 years if we don’t do something dramatic,” Bruckert said.
Right now, many teachers and experts believe that legal protection is necessary for educators to physically intervene to protect themselves and students.
Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada allows teachers to use force in limited situations when it is reasonable under the circumstances. There are lots of scenarios where teachers need to do this. For example, Preston Huppie said that he had to run in the schoolyard, onto the back alley or the busy street, going across into other neighbourhoods, just to bring back students who fled the school.
The CTF/FCE says it is important to have legal protection and language in the Criminal Code of Canada to ensure schools are safe for students and teachers. Canadian teachers would not have the legal protection they need to intervene if Section 43 of the Criminal Code is repealed without amendments. As Section 43 is being scrutinized by the federal government, the CTF/FCE is lobbying for an amendment elsewhere in the Criminal Code.
“What we’re asking is to repeal Section 43, but to amend the Criminal Code in some way where we can put in protections for teachers,” Yetman told ABSENT. “In the past 16 months, we have met over 16 legislators, Members of Parliament and Senators, to propose an amendment to the Criminal Code. We’re hoping by having discussions with MPs and Senators that they will understand our position and hopefully do the right thing and amend the Criminal Code so that we can protect students and teachers.”
