Cyprus’s Commissioner for the Protection of Children’s Rights on Monday condemned a parliamentary party’s statement linking school violence to migration, saying remarks of this kind “raise serious issues of hate speech”, after a pupil was recently beaten by classmates at a school.
The party, which she did not name, said in a statement dated 4 November that the consequences of irregular migration in schools were evident and that “their culture” posed a threat. “They cannot be integrated into our society,” it said.
The commissioner said such language went beyond condemning a specific act of violence. It attributed shared cultural traits to a highly diverse group of people from different countries, languages and religions, and presented that invented single culture as a threat to the host society, she said. Linking one incident to migration as a whole shifted responsibility from specific people to an entire group, fostering collective guilt, social stigma and xenophobia.
She said statements of this kind went beyond the limits of criticising migration policy, particularly when they claimed categorically that children with a migrant background could not be integrated. Exploiting school violence for political ends through generalisations was to be condemned, she said, and parties and public figures had a greater responsibility to condemn violence without legitimising stigma and exclusion.
A migrant background is not the same as irregular migration, the commissioner said. Children with such backgrounds include those with one Cypriot parent or from mixed families, children of parents who live and work legally in Cyprus, including foreign investors, as well as asylum seekers, refugees and unaccompanied children. Even a child with no legal residence status is still a child, she said, and their rights cannot depend on their origin or status.
No child can be held responsible for what other children do because they share a characteristic with them, she said. Dividing children into ‘ours’ and ‘others’ introduces a logic of selective protection that runs counter to the principle of non-discrimination in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The commissioner unreservedly condemned violence between children, which she said was becoming increasingly frequent. Protecting the child who was attacked, fully investigating the incident and taking measures to prevent a repeat were non-negotiable priorities, she said.
School violence figures
The commissioner cited the annual report of the Safe School Team, which recorded 510 incidents of violence at 98 schools in the 2024-2025 school year, just 13.19 per cent of all schools. They included cases involving children of native origin.
The same year, 53 racist incidents were recorded, with national or ethnic origin cited as the basis for targeting in 14. The report also noted, citing the Education Ministry’s annual review of its anti-racism policy, that colour and nationality were the two most common grounds for racist behaviour.
These findings showed that debate on the causes of violence must rest on documented evidence, not on generalisations that assign collective responsibility to groups of children in a stereotypical way, she said.
Prevention
The state already has established procedures for dealing with violence inside and outside schools, the commissioner said, and they must be activated immediately and applied effectively. Children who suffer violence must be protected and supported, she said, and those who commit it must receive support and guidance while taking responsibility for their actions.
Prevention must be the first priority, she said, calling for systematic investment in early identification of risks and coordinated action by schools, families, communities and the relevant services. The media could also play an essential role, she said, through responsible reporting and by avoiding stereotypes and stigmatising generalisations.
School violence was a complex phenomenon requiring a systemic, multi-level and interdisciplinary response, with early intervention and individual support, she said.
