Recent months have witnessed a spate of incidents in which children have been hurt or even killed at school.

A gatekeeper at the kindergarten of the No 1 Hospital of Peking University stabbed 15 children, aged 2 to 6, and three female teachers on August 4. One child died. Two other children and a teacher were seriously wounded.

Less than two weeks later in Hebei Province, a knife-wielding attacker rushed into a classroom at the Shijiazhuang Education Centre for Women and Children during an English class and kidnapped two children, who were eventually safely recovered.

On September 11, another attacker brandishing a knife broke into a kindergarten in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, slashing at the children. Twenty-eight children were injured.

In the fourth attack nine days later, a man broke into the Juxian No 1 Experimental Primary School, Shandong Province, wounding 25 students.

In light of these events, schools and governments at all levels are beginning to put more thought into the security of their children.

On September 21, Minister of Education Zhou Ji stressed that government education departments and schools must build a system for administrative accountability. "Severe punishment" should be meted out to any department or school not adopting the system. The minister said education departments at provincial level should report security conditions in and around local schools to the Ministry of Education each month.

Most primary schools in Ningbo, a coastal city in East China's Zhejiang Province, have set up IC card machines called "net police" at their gates, which will begin operating at the start of the new term in September. All students swipe their cards on machines at the gates, which relay to their parents via computer that they have arrived at or are leaving school.

The Shandong provincial government took a more drastic measure, which some lawyers have questioned. Five days after the Juxian Primary School incident, the provincial public security department released an urgent circular giving police the authority, if warnings are neglected, to shoot perpetrators of violent crimes against children on the spot if doing so may ensure the children's safety.

Young children, weak and relatively defenseless, are easy targets of attackers

In the Juxian school case, attacker Jia Qingyou went to the school after his child's teacher refused to change the child's seat for a better one.

Forty-one-year-old Yang Guozhu, with a lame right leg, attacked the Suzhou kindergarten. Yang's fellow villagers said his behaviour may have had something to do with the death of his parents.

Yang believed it was the humiliation brought on by local government officials that caused them to commit suicide. Failing time after time to sue the officials, he targeted the kindergarten simply to vent his anger.

Li Yunlong, a law professor with the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Yang Guozhu's motive was related to his family problems. He wanted to draw society's attention by exacting retribution from it. Since he found that he had no power to get revenge directly, he chose a weaker group."

In the same vein, Tong Lihua, chairman of the Beijing Juvenile Legal Aid and Research Centre, said many Chinese people had no sense or knowledge of the law. One result, Tong added, was tragedies against vulnerable segments of society, such as children.

Following the deaths of a nurse and a boy at a kindergarten in Hebei Province in February, an investigation found that most kindergartens in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital, had no security staff, only gatekeepers.

Another investigation showed that more than 80 per cent of primary and secondary school gatekeepers were either elderly men or middle-aged women and had no training with how to deal with attackers.

"In Chengdu, most school gatekeepers are retired people," said an official from the local education bureau.

"All school staff, including sponsors, administrators and teachers, ought to carefully study and strictly observe relevant State regulations on school management. But they never do."

Police looking into the Peking University hospital kindergarten case found that the killer, 52-year-old Xu Heping, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1999. Two years ago, he started working as a gatekeeper at the kindergarten. The law clearly stipulates that anyone who is mentally ill is forbidden to hold school administrative positions. In this case, the school authorities did not know the basic law.

Zhang Xuemei, secretary-general of the Minors Protection Speciality, a subgroup of the All-China Lawyers' Association, said that under both the Law on Protection of Minors and the Education Law, schools are responsible for their students' safety on campus.

"In China, school administration is still irregular. There are many loopholes," Zhang said.

Shi Fumao, a lawyer with the Beijing Juvenile Law Aid and Research Centre, said the incidents showed that gatekeepers could not function as security guards at schools, and suggested that schools from kindergarten to secondary level set up security systems.

Tong believes it is not enough just to protect children at school. Family, society and governments should take up the responsibility, too.

One investigation has shown that 77 per cent of perpetrators of school violence in Beijing were not students.

Current law says that public security departments are responsible for ensuring the security of all civilians, including students, and that they should take main responsibility to reduce and prevent school violence.

Tong endorses establishing an interactive system between schools and public security organs. Under such a system, schools would report to police "unstable factors," especially those that may lead to violence.

Public security organs, for their part, would conduct security publicity. Some schools have already adopted the system.

Pi Yijun, professor at China University of Political Science and Law, thinks the Law on the Protection of Minors is not feasible because there is no way to monitor local governments' implementation of it. Many law experts in China are currently appealing to revise the law that was adopted more than a decade ago.

(China Daily November 5, 2004)