Taking a Stand Against School Violence

Unlike the US, most countries, including France, are still highly sensitized to violence in their schools.  Several weeks ago, an 18 year old student was stabbed at his high school outside of Paris.  Hospitalized for several days, he eventually succumbed to his wounds.  The national ministers of education and the interior were immediately dispatched to the school to meet with school officials.  The education minister, Luc Chattel, also called (FR) for a nationwide moment of silence to be observed the following week.  Then, yesterday, 4,000 persons, including the President of the Ile-de-France region, took part in a march (FR) in remembrance of the victim, the son of Tunisian immigrants.  In an interview, Chattel, said what he feared most was not that violence was on the rise, but that such incidents are at risk of becoming banalisé (FR).  Hard to know when the US passed that point, but we are certainly well beyond it now.

Fraternité at Work?

Le Monde documents (FR) recent measures by Socialist mayors to address public disorder in urbanized areas. What struck most me was how a strain of fraternité seemed to underpin many of the reforms being discussed. The idea of volunteer citizens on call to diffuse an escalating situation, which has the additional effect of minimizing police presence, could work only in a society that, in theory, treats solidarity as a paramount virtue. Hard to say whether such efforts would be effective in some of the tougher U.S. projects, where levels of violence and drug trafficking are several orders of magnitude greater than what the average French cité experiences (mostly arson to cars and buses and petty vandalism). And certainly one must be careful not to exaggerate the French neighborhoods in question as tightly-knit communities. But American mayors could definitely stand to take some cues from these initiatives.