Letter of the Day | ‘Grubbing’ as weaponry in high schools

THE EDITOR, Madam:

It is with great dismay as a parent of a new high-school student accepted into a prominent all boys school in Kingston, that I learnt that school administrators have permitted the promulgation of a ‘grubbing’ culture. That the practice of grubbing new, young, inexperienced grade-seven students is accepted wholesale and normalised is as shocking as it is dangerous. Grubbing is a form of bullying and at its very core is a weapon used to intimidate, frustrate, and use as a tool of entertainment against young innocent children.

I am a mother of a new high-school asthmatic child whose asthma attacks are partly triggered by stress, anxiety and trauma. Children have other health issues that are triggered by stress, including epilepsy and heart conditions. Parents do not expect that in addition to helping children navigate a new environment with new demands and challenges, they will need to teach them to defend themselves and ward off threats in the form of their peers who are scammers extorting them, physically hurting them, and ridiculing them.

Beyond the serious physical harm that grubbing can cause is the more detrimental psychological harm. Children are extremely fragile mentally and emotionally, as indicated by the numerous teens in the last several years who have committed suicide because of trauma in one form or another.

Parents, school administrators, and the Ministry of Education need to pay close attention to and implement measures to have grubbing in all its forms stopped. Parents should not be brainwashed into thinking that nothing is wrong with grubbing; it only takes one wrong move for a child to lose their life at the hands of another. Parents of children who grub other people’s children, need to tell them to desist from such behaviour. Not all parents are empathetic. Some parents will exact revenge, and somebody, somewhere, will feel something like what their child felt when grubbing was meted out.

School administrators need to implement measures to eradicate this monster. They cannot take a nonchalant approach to this. Grubbers in schools are bullies, and are likely to take the wrong path in their lives – they behave like gangs. Grubbers in schools perpetuate a violence culture in a society already drowning in it, and they must be stopped.

Those indulging in grubbing need to be very careful what you do to people’s pickney when hard-working people send dem pickney guh school. A word to the wise is sufficient.

KATE NOS-ELLY