PANIC ALARMS FOR ALL YEAR 6 & 7'S

[DONNA2019]

As a mother with a 9 year old son and 11 year old daughter, I am very concerned about the increase in bullying and harassment amongst school children, either at school, walking to & from school, or on the bus.

How many of you are scared at the thought of your child being subjected to any type of abuse, alongside the potential threat of predators hanging around the school gates and within a short distance of your child's school? I know I am. My children's school had to increase the height of their metal fences around the school due to a man jumping over the fence and into the school grounds. My children also tell me that occasionally the pupils are warned of predators who have been hanging around near school.

Our children should be allowed to be children! What kind of society are we living in? I want to give pupils and parents peace of mind by setting up a UK Petition to ask the Government to provide all 10-11 year olds with a free panic alarm. One small simple device that will give your child the power to warn people that they are in need of help.

I'm a survivor of domestic abuse, and even to this day, the perpetrator is trying to use whatever tactics he can to silence me and my story. This is why I am so passionate about helping children in the UK, and parents, to give us all the opportunity to help protect our children.

I am currently looking for just 5 people to sign up by email to help get my UK Petition published. If this is of interest to you, please click on the link below. Let's collaborate together to help give our children peace of mind & the power to keep themselves safe. Thank you.

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/270225/sponsors/new?token=nQwc9oxqkzjl0WkhTb

The government can't even adequately fund schools, the NHS, social care, the emergency services. In what way do you think your idea is a good use of limited funds?

The alarms cost £5 on Amazon. Why not buy them yourself?

And it instantly gets lost, or left at home or gets set off in lessons straight after the assembly where they are handed out and pisses off teachers immensely.

More sensible advice is to walk home in groups and look out for each other.

This is a terrible idea. Quite apart from where the funding would come from, using the panic alarms in school would be a nightmare and also not very effective. There would be gazillions of false alarms with kids pressing their own or other people's alarms, plus the kids who genuinely are scared to report bullies probably still wouldn't use the alarm.

As for outside school, kids have a device to call for help - a phone.

There aren’t perverts outside every school or on every street corner. Making your preteens and teenagers scared isn’t the way to protect them. I receive LA alerts shared between schools about ‘man taking photo near Xschool’ or ‘man in van driving slowly’ - all pretty normal behaviour which has been portrayed to kids as threatening. I can tell you some absurd stories but a bit outing. Abduction is rare.

The actual risk is low, statistically.

Giving the children panic alarms will make them feel more at risk than is the case.

Things aren't worse either, there were creepy men around when I was at school, that's for sure! I think the difference is now its taken more seriously.

And finally, I remember panic alarms being mentioned at university, and at various other points. I have never, to my knowledge, known a girl or woman who actually carried one.

In the end, its a no from me.

I believe the children should be taught to follow their instincts, it's OK to not be 'polite' to people, and that in fact any adult approaching a school child to start conversation or ask a question is automatically dodgy. Any normal person asks an adult as they are more likely to know, and less likely to be nervous etc.

The leaflets to all secondary school children entering year 7 here, which say that children must always be polite to adults, do not help in this respect. When we got one I said to dh, this info is all good, but zero info about creepy strangers is unhelpful. I didn't know whether they left it out as didn't want to scare, or didn't want to be contraversial (namalt) or, as its something that mainly happens to girls they thought it irrelevant, or a man wrote it and didn't think of it at all.

How ridiculous.

I can kind of understand where you're coming from but surely they would just constantly set each other's alarms off in class and/or lose it instantly.

Schools certainly do need to address the alarming rise of boy-on-girl sexual assaults in schools (they can start by naming the problem and not calling them 'peer-on-peer') but I'm not sure this is the answer.

What a ridiculous idea. And they are not predators on every corner.
I mean this kindly but I think your efforts would be better sense accessing decent therapy.

Terrible idea.
Most abuse of children is from someone they know/trust not a stranger lurking outside the school gates.
And you really think a child is going to set of their alarm when someone bullies them? How about if someone says something nasty? The poor teachers will be deafened by alarms going off constantly.

Dumbest idea I have heard in a long while. If you want your child to have a pointless alarm to sit at the bottom o their schoolbag then go and buy one.

Also won't the alarms make the children more anxious and, well, alarmed 😆

Stupidest idea I've heard today, sorry that is just going to increase their anxiety and worry massively.

How often are 10 and 11 year olds alone to the point of not being able to use their voice call for help? This would make children feel more scared not less. It was make them feel conscious of threat all the time. That would be crap for their mental health and their development.

I left school in 1999. It was (still is) a girls school and frequently we would be told to be careful because we attracted a lot of flashers, it was usually in two particular places by our school. So this is not a new thing.

My eldest is going into year right and has had some trouble from a few kids because she's different and an easy target, also very small for her age. I dealt with this going through her head of year. Easy. She also has a phone.

It's not great, the things which happen. But it's not new and kids are in an even better place right now to get help because they have phones. The time my friend and I were followed by a man as year sevens walking home, I had to make a reverse charge call from a payphone and no one at home picked up. Luckily a car of sixth formers stopped because they had seen the creepy dudes behaviour.

It's better to teach kids what they can do already, whether with their phones or using a payphone or even just encouraging then to walk home in groups