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by Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham

Schools seem to be the highlight in newspapers this past week. We read numerous articles on the Gampaha incident where apparently 200 boys from one school jumped into their neighbouring co-ed school.

Then there was the harassment of the principal of Hartley College, Point Pedro, and thirdly, we heard of the probe into a 'leading boys school' in Colombo that had hired foreign strippers for a get-together. Are these seemingly disparate incidents in some way connected? Do they comment on our society's general attitude towards violence and women?

I cannot overstate the fact that the incident in Gampaha, where boys from the Gampaha Bandaranayake Madya Maha Vidyalaya (BMMV) stormed into Thaksila Vidyalaya, greatly disturbed me. Many women's organizations and individuals have expressed concern over such large-scale violence. News articles stated that the principal was a woman, and that several female students had been attacked. We would say that these kinds of incidents do not usually happen in schools. When have boys attacked girls in this manner? Is this entirely new? Or is it really part of a continuum of the violence against women?

One reason for the violence was a supposed love affair. There have even been suggestions that a female student and her affairs with boys from both schools had sparked off such violence. Blame it on the woman of course. It is impossible to believe, especially since silence and mystery surrounds this love affair, that 200 boys would storm into a school, injure its females students, and vandalize the premises over a broken heart. Another reason is suggested, and perhaps is far more plausible.

This is that the principal of Thaksila had made a formal complaint to the principal of the BMMV about his students' harassment of the Thaksila girls. Such complaints are no doubt unusual. We need to only remind ourselves of the instances of harassment women face on the streets, in the homes, and at work to realize that what happened to the girls at Thaksila happens to many of us frequently. How many times a day do women put up with rude comments from men? How often do cars honk and flash their lights at women walking down the streets, and at women drivers? How often do women take the packed buses to work to be touched and groped by numerous men? The numbers are countless, and men who are perpetrators of such harassment are from all ages across classes.

How do women respond? We keep quiet, we glare back and walk on. Very few of us have the courage or energy to protest. We have been raised to accept such violence silently, even with a sense of shame. We are made to believe that it was what we were wearing, or where we were that was to blame.

We have only to think of our cultural icons such as Sita, Draupadi and Vihara Maha Devi to realize that women in our culture are conditioned to be silent sufferers.

The Thaksila girls then acted differently, they complained to their principal, and she carried forth a further complaint to the principal of the boys' school.

The principal named that which women bear silently as harassment, and as something that needed to be stopped. Is the violence that ensued then a result of wounded male ego, pride, and even more retaliation against a displacement of male power?

There is also a third reason suggested for the violence at Gampaha. We are told that there had been a series of fights between the boys of the two schools that had finally erupted in mass-scale violence. The boys at BMMV knew that if they broke into Thaksila they would face serious repercussions, and yet this did not deter them. Why not?

The last two decades of war and terrorism have militarized our society to accept violence as a day to day part of life. The streets are deserted at night, especially of women. Numerous checkpoints have discouraged women from even driving alone once it is dark. Women have learnt to accept a subordinate and secluded role in society for their own safety. Boys/Men have, as a result, become used to accepting violence as part of life.

Many of the students who had been involved in this fracas do not remember a time before war as their childhood was placed against the backdrop of not only the separatist war, but also the JVP violence of the '80s. A result is that masculinity has come to signify violence and machismo.

If you do not retaliate then you are labelled a woman. In Gampaha, boys from one school had scorned boys from the other as being womanly (ganni vage) for not retaliating strongly and violently. Then is the attack on Thaksila an assertion of masculinity?

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