Malala Yousafzai was 14 years old when she was shot three times in the face and shoulder by a Taliban gunman in the Swat District of Pakistan in October 2012.
Yousafzai, an internationally-renowned advocate for education and blogger for the BBC, had spoken out against the Taliban’s policy of banning girls from being educated and its bombing of schools.
Though her attack led to massive public outcries of support and anger, there are thousands of similar incidents that are no less tragic but tend to be underreported or overlooked.
In Damaturu, Nigeria, gunmen from Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist group, entered a boarding school in the northeastern part of the nation and burned the school to the ground, killing 29 male students last week.
“Some of the students bodies were burned to ashes,” Police Commissioner Sanusi Rufai said of this attack on the Federal Government college of Buni Yadi, a secondary school.
Boko Haram holds that Western-style education is sinful. It has regularly attacked schools in its campaign to destabilize the northeast as it seeks the establishment of an Islamic state in Northern Nigeria.
Early last month, an explosive thrown over the wall of an elementary school playground wounded six children who were playing in the area at the time in Benghazi, Libya. Benghazi has been the site of nearly-daily attacks, due to the difficulties the Libyan government has had in reigning in the rebel brigades.
Education is seen, in many areas, as a challenge to the status quo and as an intentional means to separate future generations from the existing power structure. Other areas see it as a way of “polluting” young minds with “foreign” thoughts and theories.
“The terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions,” said Yousafzai before the U.N. General Assembly in July 2013, “but nothing changed in my life, except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.”
Between 2009 and 2013, five or more attacks on a school, teacher, student or academic were carried out in 30 countries by an armed non-governmental group, a state military group or security force or by a militarized criminal group. Forty other nations reported at least one attack on an educational facility during the same period. According to a newly-published report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, countries such as Colombia, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan have seen more than 1,000 school-based attacks in the five-year observation period — representing military strategy in these areas.
Attacking education as military strategy
In Colombia, 140 teachers were killed and 1,086 received death threats from 2009 to 2013, according to the Colombian Ministry of Education. In addition, 305 teachers have been driven from their homes out of fear for their lives.
In Afghanistan, arson attacks, suicide bombings and explosives were responsible for over 1,100 school attacks tallied between 2009 and 2013. School staff are regularly threatened, kidnapped and killed.
In all, there were 9,600 attacks on education counted as part of the Global Committee to Protect Education from Attack’s report “Education Under Attack 2014.” This total does not reflect individuals’ attacks on schools, such as the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The reasons for the attacks vary from nation to nation, but they all serve the same goal of blocking access to education.
In the 2012 Annual Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations on Children and Armed Conflict, the secretary-general noted several areas of concern regarding the treatment of children on the battlefield, including the use of schools as bases of operations and as shields, the detention of children by security forces, the kidnapping of children for forced enlistment or for sex slavery and the impact of drone use on children.
Atrocities against the young
Of grave concern are reports of 66 cases of forced recruitment in Afghanistan of boys as young as eight years old, as well as reports of 47 children — also in Afghanistan — being pressed by the Taliban to manufacture explosive devices and to serve as suicide bombers. The Afghan National Police has reportedly been found responsible for 19 cases of underage recruitment in 2012, including the case of a 14-year-old boy seen in full police gear at a Kandahar police station.
Additional issues include the report of 578 children forcefully recruited in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in addition to another 154 children killed, 113 injured and 185 girls raped or subjected to sexual violence in 2012. About 178 children were maimed or killed in Iraq, and there were reported incidents of the bombing of five Benghazi schools that were used as polling stations.
Last November, a U.S. drone strike allegedly destroyed an Islamic school in Afghanistan, killing eight people, including three teachers. While American officials deny that the school was targeted or damaged, it is noted that the school bombing came just hours after the U.S. promised to stop drone strikes during the Taliban talks. The school was frequently used by Afghan refugees and militants affiliated with the Haqqani network. In 2012, the U.S. drone-bombed a girl’s high school in Pakistan suspected of housing militants.
Undermining the future
As stated by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, beyond the immediate danger being posed to innocent children and teachers, attacks on educational facilities serve to de-emphasize the importance of education in a region.
“In countries where attacks have persisted on a significant scale year after year – lengthy school closure has meant that hundreds of thousands of children have been denied access to education, sometimes for months or sometimes for years,” the GCPEA reported. “Attacks on education can … exact a psychological toll, in the short or long term, including distraction, distress and impaired ability to study or teach.
“Wider and long-term consequences for society include restricting development and – particularly in the case of attacks on higher education – hindering the emergence and strengthening of political plurality, accountable government and open democracy.”
In an attempt to promote the sanctity of education and safeguard students and teachers, the GCPEA proposed the Draft Lucens Guidelines to establish an accepted agreement toward expectations to protect schools and universities from military use.
Among the guidelines are calls to exclude any educational facility — in use or abandoned — from military use, as well as directions that security forces should not interfere in the school’s operations and that fighting should be focused away from educational facilities. The guidelines are currently being finalized in cooperation with the international community.
While not every militant group can be expected to pay heed to such recommendations, the drafting of these guidelines would be worthwhile if at least one did, sparing the lives and opening up access to education for affected student groups.
In times of crippling poverty and limited access to social and economic attainment, education is the key to empowering entire communities. As a critical human right, it is essential for safeguarding education, and its denial can lead future generations to more hunger, more pain and more fighting.
Watch this video from Save The Children USA of a young girl, Aya, as she speaks about the fighting, escaping Syria and being scared to start school for the first time.