EdTalk | Will my child be safe at university?
- Although students are young adults by the time they go to university abroad, this will be the question in many parents’ minds long before they leave the parental nest and the relative safety of Hong Kong
News of mass shootings in the United States or rising knife crime in the United Kingdom can be alarming but the perceptions that they create and the fear that they engender can be disproportionate to the actual risks involved.
I have always found it difficult to talk to students about this topic and dispense some common-sense advice without creating a rather dark picture. How do you tell a young person (or their parent) without frightening and alarming them?
One challenge here is the fact that Hong Kong is so safe for young people that our children are rather ‘green’ and have not developed many of the precautionary behaviours of their overseas peers.
Safe from what?
We don’t always specify what we mean by safety. Is it safety from: physical assault; sexual assault; mugging, theft or burglary; racism and verbal abuse or online trolling?
The above are probably in a rough order of severity for most people and it is worth noting the relative incidence of each type, where reliable statistics are available (e.g. sources indicate that less than a quarter of cases of sexual harassment are reported). These ‘types’ also indicate that some of the advice given needs to be gender-specific.
