Back Print Page Email Page

Teachers may receive disclosures about violence in the home from students, but may have limited information on how to support these young people.The following guidelines are offered to enhance your ability and confidence to respond in ways that help students when disclosures occur.

Let the student know the limits of confidentiality
Inform students when you cannot keep confirmation confidential (e.g., if someone is being abused; if someone plans to harm self or others).

Allow student to tell his/her story
It usually helps young people to talk with a trusted adult about the violence or troubling events in their lives.

Do not pressure the student to talk.
It is important to remember that your role is not to gather evidence or to investigate the situation.Your role is to listen and to acknowledge the feelings the student is sharing.

Reassure the student
If students disclose a troubling incident at home directly to you, reassure them by validating their feelings (e.g., sounds like that was scary for you.Are you ok?).Depending on the situation, it may also be helpful to let them know that you are glad they told you, that the violence is not their fault, and that no should be hurt.

Older students may ask you to not say anything to anyone about what they have told you.It is important for you to let them know if you need to tell people who can help them and others to be safe.

Inform the student of what you are going to do.
Students are likely to feel relived but vulnerable following a disclosure. The troubling situation they are dealing with may also have left them feeling powerless. Letting students know what steps you are taking and when you will talk to them can decrease their anxiety.

Support the student in making choices whenever possible.
Students do not have control of the troubling situation. You can increase their sense of control by offering them choices. For example, some students will want time away from their class after making a disclosure and may prefer to sit in the library.Others may wish to re-join their class. Whenever possible, support students’ sense of what they need at this time.

Do not criticize or speak negatively about the batterer.
Young people often have confused or mixed feelings about the batterer. They may hate the abuse but like the fun times they also share with the abusive parent. Children and adolescents can feel very angry at and loyal to a parent at the same time. If you criticize the offending parent, feelings of loyalty and protectiveness toward the parent may cause the youth to feel that he/she cannot talk about the abuse.

Do not make commitments to the student that you cannot honor.

• Sometimes teachers are so moved by a student’s situation and want so much to protect and reassure the youth, they make statements that they cannot follow through on. Examples include comments such as:
  
  
• • I will keep you safe
  • I won’t let him hurt your mother anymore
  • I won’t tell anyone what you told me.
  
  
• While clearly well intended, such commitments can diminish a student’s trust in others when he/she discovers the statements are untrue.This may cause a young person to believe that no one can help and it is not worth telling anyone about the upsetting things happening at home.

What can teachers do?

Learn about violence in relationships, how it impacts students, and school-based prevention.

For example:

• Seek out professional development on topics such as children exposed to domestic violence, bullying, dating violence and school-based prevention.

Continually work to develop school practices that are inclusive and promote students’ sense of belonging and availability for learning.

For example:

• Model inclusiveness
• Provide sports activities for all students, not only for the few who make the school teams.
• Address cool-kid, cliques, or gangs that abuse and silence others (e.g., separate classes or lunch hours, cross peer mentors/tutors).
• Develop strategies to engage and foster connections (e.g. academic, social, athletic) for all students to the school.

Make helping create a safe school in and out of your classroom a priority.

For example:

• Consistently enforce and bring to life a school code of conduct that defines and promotes respectful behavior and provides an explicit norm against violence.
• Establish peer mediation programs in which students learn to use conflict resolution skills in the halls and in the schoolyard.
• Model respectful strategies for classroom management.

Help plan and/or support special violence awareness events for students. These events name and define violence, as well as increase awareness about different types of violence and its impact on victims.

For example:

• Plan assemblies featuring guest speakers whose lives have been touched by violence.
• Organize a violence prevention fair.
• Schedule theatre productions focused on violence prevention and debriefing sessions with older student facilitators.

Learn to effectively teach anti-violence curriculum, and/or effectively integrate anti-violence lessons into existing subject matter, without taking away from core academic learning.

For example:

• Plan a math lesson on gathering, graphing and interpreting data that uses results of student surveys on bullying.
• Use the topic of dating violence for an English writing assignment to practice the five paragraph essay.

Develop strategies for coping with the stress associated with learning about students’ exposure to violence and with being exposed to incidents of student violence.

For example:

•  Find opportunities to professionally and confidentially debrief.
• Develop supportive work environments that promote a balance between work and home.
• Identify and celebrate successes.