Daily Times

The school shooting in Peshawar has generated great public concern and fostered a widespread impression that schools are unsafe for many students. Many of the school safety and security measures and strategies deployed in response to the school shooting have little research support and have been widely criticised as unsound practices. Threat assessment should be identified as a strategy for violence prevention that merits further input from the responsible authorities. Sadly, the rising violence requires an overview of the need for schools to develop crisis response plans to prepare for and mitigate such rare events.

The Army Public School (APS) shooting in Peshawar has altered the patina of seclusion and safety that once characterised primary and secondary education. Callous and brutal, the APS tragedy seems to make no sense. However, intelligence reports are beginning to show patterns that provide clues for understanding both the revenge factors motivating the shooting event and the characteristics of schools that are and were under threat.

The recent school shooting appears to have had a wide-ranging impact on schools and colleges across the country. The capital administration and development division in Islamabad has constituted a security monitoring team for schools and colleges regarding necessary measurements of security. Many schools have expanded their emergency communication systems using multiple notification routes, such as text, e-mail and phone alerts. Other initiatives in place or under consideration include the use of school lockdowns, placing sniper watchmen and increasing security personnel. However, these responses may not be consistent with the actual threat to members of the education community and it may have detrimental consequences for life in school campuses. Instead of making students feel safer about their surroundings, these new policies may, in fact, make students more fearful and less engaged in their school campuses. It is unclear whether the trend in school shootings will continue to increase, level off, or decline, but clearly support for the students and their families on the effects of school shootings is warranted.

While school campuses are relatively safe environments, the promise of safety and security on campus was shattered by Pakistani Taliban gunmen on December 16, 2014. Taliban men, dressed as Frontier Constabulary (FC) personnel, shot 132 students and nine faculty members, before they were killed by army commandos. They demonstrated narcissism, a lack of empathy, lack of conscience and sadistic behaviour. The assailants’ significant psychological disturbances and fixation on perverted religious beliefs are critical to understanding how they were able to act out their murderous rage. Out of the tragedy, there have emerged many issues that challenge the role of intelligence agencies within the country including the development of threat assessment teams, the potential conflict between the role of the National Disaster Management Authority and National Counter Terrorism Authority in crisis prevention and management.

Time may prove wrong otherwise but the knee-jerk reaction shown by the military appears an emotional overreaction to the school shooting, bringing their grief in line with the public anger. What some analysts have called the construction of “moral panic” is an inflated sense of alarm over a long standing threatening trend. Covert strategic military operations in the backdrop of political headlines may have been a reasonable option. It has multiplied their public sympathy but declared revenge on militants without robust public protection strategies will initiate further hostility by the Taliban, who have already brought this war to the doorstep of the innocent common man. It is unclear though if revenge through capital punishment for convicted militants can sufficiently distinguish and deter other imminent violence from the Taliban.

Media hype and exaggeration may distract the pain and anger from the grief, though some commentators believe that horrifying incidents — such as the one on September 22, 2013 when Taliban killed at least 80 people in a church in Peshawar in one of the worst attacks on Christians, the one on January 10, 2013 when militant bombers targeted the Hazara Shia Muslim minority in the city of Quetta, killing 120 at a snooker hall, the one on May 28, 2010 when gunmen attacked two mosques of the minority Ahmedi sect in Lahore, killing more than 80 people, and the one on October 18, 2007 when a twin bomb attack on a rally for Benazir Bhutto in Karachi left at least 130 dead — simply strengthen the strong feelings of resentment against the Taliban. The senseless school shooting in Peshawar has triggered a national conversation about the culture of violence. It is worth noting, too, that more mundane forms of physical violence and non-gun related violence plagues the country but finding the blood of more than 130 innocent children in their school uniforms — such as this horrific mass killing at the APS in Peshawar — remains a significant issue.

Psychiatrists should offer the opportunity for intervention efforts related to post traumatic stress disorder following this undeniable trauma, capitalising on the natural environment and reduced stigma to leverage recovery. Such programmes can be divided into different phases: crisis intervention, early intervention and selective interventions for longer-term recovery. Although the best practices for crisis intervention have been developed and rolled out nationally, interventions for early and longer-term recovery should be disseminated in a piecemeal fashion without the benefit of organised training and funding. Dissemination should typically occur community wide or in APS Peshawar where violence exposure occurred. Evaluations of programme effectiveness will require focusing on the longer-term recovery interventions, and those that contain cognitive behaviour elements have been the best tested to date.

It is important to emphasise that concern is not limited to schools. The Peshawar tragedy is referred to as a school shooting but it is better described as a shooting that took place in a school. It is also relevant to consider the hundreds of multiple casualty shootings that occur in communities throughout Pakistan every year. Few of them may occur in schools but none of them are at par with the carnage seen in the auditorium of the school in Peshawar. The sickening attack was ordered by Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah who previously demanded the death of the 17-year-old teenage education campaigner Malala Yousafzai. Taliban gunmen stormed into the school in broad daylight, killing and wounding scores. The youngest victim was five-year-old Khola Altaf, shot dead on her second day at school. The Taliban symbolise death and fear yet children are safer in schools than in almost any other place, including, for some, their own homes.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com