The Macedonian police on Tuesday began applying the previously announced measures, aimed to increase the security of elementary and high school students, by deploying police officers in the vicinity of every school to thoroughly search the students. Numerous parents protested the treatment of their children as if they were the main perpetrators of crime in the country.

The measure follows the recent tragic events in neighboring Serbia, where 18 people, mostly children, lost their lives in shocking armed attacks carried out by teenage boys. It is also part of a wider Government response to public concerns on the security in Macedonian schools,  including the creation of crisis expert groups in every municipality (the municipalities are responsible for elementary and high schools) tasked with monitoring the situation in the schools and communicating with all concerned with the process, tightening of the security measures in the schools, and protocols on the use of mobile phones, among others.

” The police is where it should be – among the citizens. The students are safe and the police operate in its full capacity to guarantee the peace and security of all our citizens” the Ministry of Interior statement reads.

The experts, on the other hand, do not share the MI optimism. They agree that the regular police searches and the tension created by them will leave permanent consequences on the children’s mental health.

“This seems to me as a ‘fast food’ measure, to offer a short-term relief to much deeper problems. If we really want to make our lives easier and safer, we should come up with more essential, more long-term, and perhaps harder-to-apply solutions. I say harder because they’ll ask for much larger engagement and attentiveness by all concerned parties: the institutions, the creators of the curriculum, the teachers, and the parents”, Ivana Stankovska, Master of Clinical Psychology, told Republika.

The measures directly applied to the children should be last on the list, MA Stankovska added, since the children only manifest the problems that the grown-ups created.