Campus Violence has become so normalized that students in the current generations almostexpect it to happen every year. These bad things happen so often students begin to feeldesensitized to the horror that is campus violence. It shouldn’t be normal for students to expectto get alerts about incidents on campus of violence and criminal activity almost every single day.
By: Calyn Dugat
With a brief look at statistics on most campuses, it is obvious that campus violence is nota new thing. Students have been conditioned since they were young to be prepared for theabsolute worst when attending schools. No matter what school the student has attended. Thereare always rules in place and safety precautions in place to inform the student about schoolviolence, and what to do in those scenarios. However, once they reach a collegiate level, findingthat information is not as easy as it seems. On most campuses, students will have to search forthat information themselves, and will not be told what the emergency procedures are in case ofan incident on campus. However, since most students are incredibly familiar with it, becauseprecautions to take, since that information has been drilled into them since they were very young,it’s become almost second nature to understand, and know, at least a small portion of what to doin case of one of those emergencies. However, campuses are much larger than the typical highschool and elementary school, which makes it a lot more intimidating for students when it comesto preparing themselves for these events to happen.
School and campuses should be a place for students to feel safe and feel they areprotected, but in this current day and age, it’s become a lot harder for students to expect thatprotection and safety, because of the numerous counts of campus violence that add up over theyears. Students growing up their whole lives, expecting something bad to happen in the schoolsystem has become such a normal thing that should’ve never been normalized in the first place.Students shouldn’t have to fear for their lives every day they attend school. Knowing theinformation and the tools that are available to students in case of those events should be sharedevery single semester so that in case an event does happen all students can be prepared and notbe worried about how to act or what to do. All campuses have an emergency preparedness forwhat to do in case a violent situation happens. Most of the time it’s on their website for studentsto find, but it shouldn’t be up to just the student whether they find and search for that informationthemselves. That kind of life-saving information needs to be provided for everyone.
Most schools put their records and documentation of incidents that have happened on andoff campus on their website in a crime log. Students at Sam Houston State University can viewthe crime log for the University by simply going through the Sam Houston state universitywebsite and searching for the crime logs. Looking at the statistics for campus violence is quitealarming. However, while it may be alarming, it’s also become expected to see such highnumbers since childhood, this generation has been prepared to expect the worst when it comes totheir schooling environment. Students have become dramatically numbed to violent events oncampus just because they’ve been trained to expect those things to happen since they were veryyoung.