MEDIA RELEASE
2025-10-24
SUMMARY: The Labour Party of South Africa (Labour Party) has expressed outrage over the escalating cases of bullying in schools, following viral footage of a violent incident at Milnerton High School. The Party condemns the failures of existing laws and frameworks.
The Labour Party is outraged by the overall bullying that has escalated in schools, partly as a result of the recent social media posts showing the bullying and sheer assault of a young student in Milnerton High School in Cape Town.
“This is unacceptable”, said interim President Joseph Mathunjwa.
“It is heartbreaking but also makes one angry”, he said. “We send our children to school to get an education, but they come home with torn clothes and bruises they don’t want to talk about”, he added.
Earlier this year, The Department of Basic Education (DBE) reported that about 548 cases of bullying had been recorded in the span of just three (3) months.
In response to the bullying in schools a National School Safety Framework (NSSF) was developed by the DBE. This framework is intended to be a guideline to identify and address all kinds of violence in schools including bullying.
“This is another paper-based intervention that will fall in the same box as PEPUDA [the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act], the [South African] Schools Act and other legal frameworks”, said Mathunjwa. “But why do we still hear and see bullying in schools if these legal frameworks exist”, he asked.
Like with any legal framework it requires the intended users and enforcers to be adequately trained on it, and the implementation of the measures entrenched to be consistently applied without fear or favour.Consistency in implementation and enforcement will create a culture. In this instance, consistency in implementation and enforcement will ensure values, accountability and respect in schools and ultimately in our society is restored.
“The social fabric in our country is on its last thread, if that. Corruption and the lack of respect for one another is becoming a norm that we now see in our children too”, noted Mathunjwa.
Dr Alicia Porter of the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP) has noted that the statistics surrounding violence in schools are sobering and that it goes far beyond dealing with just bruises.
“Violence is multifaceted and many socio-economic factors like domestic issues, crime in communities, unemployment, poverty and more contribute” said Mathunjwa.
In a country that has a history of deep violence, effects of which still linger and form part of the realities of many today, as South Africa the culture of violence cannot be carried over into this generation and the next.
Schools are not expected to mirror prisons; the Labour Party believes that the crisis of bullying in schools is because of broader contributing factors including how the country itself is governed.
“If the government does not see this as a crisis requiring urgent attention and results-driven interventions, we will lose a generation to violence having a people with no moral compass – then we all would have lost ubuntu”, Mathunjwa concluded.
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