The Violence of Children
The attack took place mid-morning around 9:20 a.m. while classes were actively in session.
Two male students, aged 14 and 15, walked onto the campus of the government-run school—which services more than 1,500 students—carrying concealed firearms. They managed to bypass security because only a single guard was monitoring multiple campus entrances.
The attack resulted in the deaths of three minor students and left 20 others injured. Out of the 20 injured, 15 sustained direct gunshot wounds (including one student who suffered a critical head injury), while the remaining 5 suffered injuries from the chaotic scramble to escape.
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a pioneering American psychiatrist who spent decades clinically evaluating juvenile murderers, revolutionized the field by showing that youth who kill almost always suffer from a combination of three distinct vulnerabilities: central nervous system damage (often from early childhood head trauma), severe physical or sexual abuse, and a psychiatric disorder (such as paranoia or bipolar disorder).
When a child lashes out with lethal force, they are almost always reflecting and magnifying the violence of the world around them.
Dr. Bruce Perry, a renowned child psychiatrist and expert on childhood trauma, explains that children raised in highly stressful or violent environments exist in a constant state of hyper-arousal:
“A traumatized child can sit in a classroom and perceive an innocent look from a classmate or a firm directive from a teacher as an existential threat. When the brain is locked in a state of survival, the capacity for abstract thought, empathy, and moral reasoning drops out. Violence becomes a primitive, defensive reflex to a world perceived as entirely hostile.”
— Dr. Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (2006)
When children face relentless humiliation without an emotional outlet, they often develop a profound psychological split. On the surface, they may appear compliant or invisible; underneath, a deeply resentful, violent fantasy life takes root as a way to reclaim power.
Filipino psychologist Fr. Jaime Bulatao, who extensively studied the concept of “split-level split-leveling” within the human psyche, noted that individuals trapped between conflicting internal values and external pressures can experience a sudden, explosive breakthrough of the shadow self:
“When the ego is suppressed heavily by an environment that offers no authentic validation, the suppressed hostility does not vanish. It rules the depths. When it finally breaches the surface, it does so with a raw, unchanneled, and destructive force that shocks even the person committing the act.”
— Fr. Jaime Bulatao,SJ, Phenomena and Their Interpretation (1992)
A child does not learn to value life in a vacuum. When a state or society normalizes violence as a legitimate tool for achieving order, resolving conflict, or maintaining power, children internalize that lesson.
If a society condones extrajudicial killings, state-sanctioned executions, or aggressive militarism, it teaches its youth a dangerous moral lesson: that some lives are disposable, and that violence is the ultimate broker of justice.
The legendary developmental psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura, famous for his “Bobo Doll” experiments on aggression, established that children learn violent behaviors through modeling. He later expanded this into the concept of moral disengagement, explaining how otherwise good people—including youth—can justify cruel acts:
“People do not ordinarily engage in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions. In this process of moral justification, detrimental conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as serving socially worthy or righteous purposes.”
— Dr. Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement (2016)
When the state tells a society that killing “bad people” is necessary to establish order, a marginalized or bullied child can easily distort that logic to justify eliminating their own perceived enemies or tormentors.
The Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl noted that when people are suddenly liberated from oppressive, tightly controlled systems—but lack a profound sense of responsibility or meaning—they can turn to destructive impulses.
“We who have come back… can tell you: the freedom was a beautiful dream, but when we woke up, it was different. Some stepped into a vacuum… they thought they could use their freedom completely ruthlessly. They became instigators, not just victims.”
— Dr. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
Frankl identified the “existential vacuum”—a total lack of meaning, often characterized by boredom and apathy—as a primary driver of youth aggression, addiction, and depression. When society fails to provide young people with a sense of purpose, fair opportunities, or a reliable Rule of Law, that vacuum is frequently filled by the intoxicating illusion of power that comes with holding a weapon.
Ultimately, child violence is a symptom of a larger systemic illness. To understand why a child becomes murderously violent, society must look into the mirror and examine the overt and covert violence it perpetuates every day.
If a society condones extrajudicial killings, state-sanctioned executions, or aggressive militarism, it teaches its youth a dangerous moral lesson: that some lives are disposable, and that violence is the ultimate broker of justice.
The legendary developmental psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura, famous for his “Bobo Doll” experiments on aggression, established that children learn violent behaviors through modeling. He later expanded this into the concept of moral disengagement, explaining how otherwise good people—including youth—can justify cruel acts:
“People do not ordinarily engage in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions. In this process of moral justification, detrimental conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as serving socially worthy or righteous purposes.” — Dr. Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement (2016)
Ultimately, child violence is a symptom of a larger systemic illness. To understand why a child becomes murderously violent, society must look into the mirror and examine the overt and covert violence it perpetuates every day.
A child is an angel, a fragile vessel sent into this world with a soul like unblemished wax. But he does not live in a vacuum. He watches. He listens. He feels with a sensitivity so raw, so terrifyingly acute, that it would drive a grown man mad. He walks through our streets and sees the state normalizing the shedding of blood in the name of “order.” He watches as we, the upright citizens, whisper our silent approval of extrajudicial executions, nodding along to the terrifying logic that says some human lives are merely chaff to be burned for the comfort of the wheat. He witnesses the cold, bureaucratic cruelty of the rich, the mockery of the powerful, and the slow, agonizing starvation of the poor.
He experiences what our modern, clever psychologists call “moral disengagement,” but what I call the death of the living soul. The child’s ego is crushed, his spirit is subjugated by the casual cruelties of his peers and the massive, crushing indifference of the world. A profound, terrible split occurs within him. On the surface, he bows his head; he complies. But in the pitch-black depths of his unguided heart, a furious, vengeful shadow takes root. He enters the existential vacuum—that terrifying abyss where nothing has meaning, where God is silent, and where life is cheapened by the very state that claims to protect it. And when he is entirely emptied of hope, the devil steps into the vacuum, offering him the ultimate, intoxicating illusion: that a piece of cold iron in his hand can make him a god.
Can we truly be surprised when the suppressed hostility finally breaches the surface with a savage, unchanneled fury? No, gentlemen! The murderous child is not an alien anomaly; he is our child. He is the terrifying, logical extension of our own secret malice, our own institutionalized brutality, our own worship of power over love. To truly understand the horror, society must pull back the curtain of its own hypocrisy, look into the mirror, and see that the blood on the child’s hands was drawn from the well of our own collective cruelty.
And yet… as we look out upon this bruised and broken world, our hearts are squeezed by a strange, aching sorrow that is not entirely devoid of light. We have built a world of chains, and we wonder why our children know only how to strike. The law will have its due, of course—the heavy, unbending gears of the State will turn, the iron doors will slam shut, and we will satisfy our craving for retribution. But as the dust settles over the quiet schoolyard, and the weeping of the mothers rises into the indifferent sky, a fragile, bittersweet truth remains. This terrible wound, this awful shedding of innocent blood, is the agonized cry of a soul begging us to remember our lost humanity. We are all bound together in a mysterious, golden chain of suffering and responsibility; we are all guilty before all, and I most of all. Perhaps, only when we finally learn to weep for the monster as deeply as we weep for the victim, will the first, trembling rays of a true resurrection begin to dawn upon our dark and wounded country.
Photo Credit: Inquirer.net