What Is Driving School Violence in the Philippines, and How Can It Be Stopped?

Two school shootings in the Philippines within eight weeks have turned a once distant fear into a national concern. The attacks in Tacloban in July and Zamboanga in August were followed by bomb threats, a stabbing and the recovery of firearms on other campuses.

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What effect could the past years of normalising violence from the highest pulpit in the country, through language, through the so-called war on drugs, through reportedly tens of thousands of killings on the ground and the widespread impunity… what effect could it have had on our culture as Filipinos?

School shootings have historically been rare in the country, although gun violence is not uncommon and the Philippines has one of South-east Asia’s highest gun-ownership rates. The Department of Education responded by planning nationwide active-shooter drills for Aug. 25. Psychologists warned that the exercises could further traumatize children, and the department cancelled them.

Psychologists, sociologists and lawmakers describe several vulnerabilities converging at once: violence has become more familiar, Filipino adolescents spend much of their lives online, and too few adults can identify children who are isolated or distressed. Online extremist networks have learned to exploit those gaps.

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Instead of stopping the culture of violence, it seeped deeper and has now even entered our schools.

Senator Risa Hontiveros led hearings on the shootings and so-called nihilistic violent extremism. She also questioned whether the legacy of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war had affected the country’s culture. Duterte faces trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague over alleged crimes against humanity linked to thousands of killings during his 2016-2022 anti-drug campaign.

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It’s not a direct causal factor of any kind of aggressive behaviour.

Sociologist Filomin Gutierrez of the University of the Philippines Diliman said the drug war may have helped create a broader backdrop in which violence appears to solve problems. Psychologist Peejay Bengwasan, however, cautioned against treating it as a direct cause of the shootings. He said repeated exposure to a political climate that appears to glorify violence could make aggressive behavior seem more normal. The shortage of support is stark: the Philippines has more than 45,000 schools but fewer than 1,000 counsellors.

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increases your chances to become more aggressive or to see aggressive acts or tendencies as more normalised