This week, a Scottish school-pupil who seriously injured his female teacher by picking her up and slamming her head-first onto a concrete floor has been given a community sentence. Kieran Matthew, who was 17 at the time when he attacked his victim, left his teacher unconscious in a pool of blood after throwing her to the floor “like a rag doll.” Following the attack, the court was told that Matthew sat down, put his feet up on the teacher’s desk and said: “The stupid cow deserved it.”
Matthew avoided time in custody due to his age and an early guilty plea. He has been placed under social work supervision for three years, given a one-year curfew and ordered to attend a mentoring course that includes anger management training. While I am not in favour of custodial sentences being handed out without due cause, especially when it comes to such young offenders, I will confess to being downright horrified that an offence this violent did not lead to some time in prison.
The incident highlights the risks faced by teachers, especially female teachers, in some settings. Matthew was teetering on the age of legal adulthood and inhabiting the body of a fully-grown man. There were times, when I was in mainstream school, that I became viscerally aware of the physical advantage that male pupils beyond a certain age had over me, a very small female weighing significantly less than 50 Kilos. We need to be frank about this. There was one occasion in which I was prevented from exiting my classroom by a 15 year-old boy, rendered helpless until I was rescued by a male maths teacher, who physically intervened and pulled the boy back by his collar. In my final year, in an incident that helped to precipitate my departure from the classroom, I was surrounded and harassed by a group of 16 year-old boys while I was on duty outside. When I confronted them the next day, backed up by their Head of Year and a member of SLT (both male), I tried to address the matter as directly and as frankly as I could. “Had I not been a teacher, had I not felt the fact that you were holding back because of that invisible line of authority, I would have been afraid of you,” I told them. The truth? I was already afraid of them. Why wouldn’t I be? They were much bigger and much stronger than I was, and they appeared to be showing me no respect. That, as any woman who has heard male footsteps approaching behind her on a dark night will tell you, is frightening. You’re a fool if you claim otherwise.
I was determined to educate them, to get the boys to see the error of their ways. “Do you want to become the sort of men that women are afraid of?” I asked them. Some of them, I am pleased to say, did hang their heads in shame at this point. These are the boys I have hope for. They didn’t think in the moment and they acted like yobs, but I don’t believe they were violent. But the ring-leader held my gaze and smirked. This was a boy who had apparently witnessed his father being violent towards his mother and had already started experimenting with this life-path for himself, so I’m afraid I held out little hope for the man he was destined to become.
What I cannot accept is the idea that vulnerable female teachers must empathise with violent offenders and that we must make allowances for their behaviour. Matthew, we are told, has ADHD and a “very low IQ”. I see no link between either of these facts and such violent behaviour, and would argue that it is a grotesque insult to anyone else who has these things in common with Matthew to suggest that there is a link. How very dare you. Matthew had previously shown significant aggression towards other pupils and according to his defence lawyer had “longstanding issues managing his emotions.” Dear God, what a ghastly euphemism. How often do we have to hear this? How often must women and girls be subjected to male violence, only to be told that we should understand the “difficulties” that men and boys have with “managing their emotions”? To quote a line attributed to Margaret Atwood, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Until the world stops making excuses for males who behave in this way, nothing will ever change.
The casual misogyny of the line uttered by Matthew after his attack is perhaps the most chilling part of the whole incident. “The stupid cow deserved it.” I would struggle to accept any performative “remorse” shown by a young man who is capable of doing what he did and behaving as he did so afterwards. Feet on the desk. Not my problem. She asked for it. And yes, he was a young man, not a “boy” as newspaper reports would have it. At 17 years old, Matthew was legally entitled to learn to drive a car, to apply for a private pilot’s license, to donate blood and to join the armed forces. He could choose his own doctor, work and be interviewed by the police without an appropriate adult present (although, given his reported low IQ, one may well have been appointed in his case). A care order could no longer be placed upon him. He was, according to the law at the time he committed this horrific offence, virtually an adult. At the time of sentencing, he was fully adult. So no, I will not call him “a boy”.
While most teachers will never face such a horrific physical assault during their working life, there is mounting evidence that violent assault in UK schools does go on and is becoming more common. A recent report from the Health and Safety Executive reported that hundreds of teachers are assaulted per year in the UK. This is one of the main reasons why I am so dismayed that Matthew’s sentence was not custodial. To me, the fact that the attack was on a teacher should be an aggravating factor, in the same way that assaulting a police officer is an offence in its own right. Assaulting someone in a position of authority and trust, whether it be a teacher, a nurse, a doctor or a police officer, should be seen by society as an assault on us all. As Matthew was told in court, his teacher “has dedicated her life to vulnerable school children such as you … You have robbed her of her career as she has been unable to go back to school due to panic attacks, nightmares and night terrors as a result of this assault.” Serious actions warrant serious consequences. If society places any value on education whatsoever, it needs to demonstrate that it can prioritise the safety and dignity of the people we ask to perform this role. Without that commitment, we may find the teacher’s side of the desk increasingly empty.
