Before we move on to why children feel the need to arm themselves at school, this is what you need to know:

Cape Town is on the verge of being declared the world’s most dangerous city.

This has a lot to do with gang violence which is out of control.

Attempts to rein it in in the form of a special task force has backfired and launched a small-scale civil war in the Cape Flats.

Let’s break it down with TimesLIVE.

Six anti-gang unit officers were shot during an operation in Philippi on June 12. The attack followed a 54-hour period in which 62 murder victims arrived in Cape Town mortuaries.

If the body count for the first four months of the year is maintained, it will make Cape Town — SA’s flag-bearer in attracting international tourists — the world’s most dangerous city ranked by the number of murders, with 3,900.

With that sobering thought in mind, let’s move on to another TimesLIVE article that covered a recent study by Fazia Parker of the University of South Africa.

The study looked into why most pupils who live in the Cape Flats have carried either a gun or a knife to school.

Parker interviewed pupils, aged 13 to 21, from three high schools in the Cape Flats. To protect the pupils, the names of the schools were not mentioned.

Out of 268 pupils interviewed, 74 admitted to having carried a gun or knife to school for various reasons. Knives, rather than guns, were the most carried weapons.

The main reason participants gave for carrying the weapons was that they felt unsafe at school – followed by feeling unsafe in the neighbourhood and that someone had threatened to hurt them.

Other reasons for the high school pupils’ possession of weapons was that they were carrying them for someone else, and lastly that they felt powerful with the weapon at hand.

Parker noted that it was easy for school-aged kids to get their hands on a gun.

One of the principals interviewed said gangs used school grounds as a “battlefield”, and sometimes it was because one pupil would somehow be involved with gangs.

“We have fences all around the school, but they manage to get in. This traumatises the learners, and no teaching gets done after that,” said the principal.

Another principal said most of the pupils did not know a life without violence.

33 of the kids that Parker interviewed admitted to having been in a gang, while 10 said that they were still members of a gang.

The cycle of violence in the home and at school perpetuates itself.

If we go back to those stats at the start of the story, the fact that kids now feel the need to arm themselves in order to go to school makes sense.

Terrifying times.

[source:timeslive&timeslive]