HRW Submits to UN on Education Safety

Human Rights Watch welcomes the opportunity to provide information to the Special Rapporteur on Education on safety as an element of the right to education and a precondition for its full realization, to inform her report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2025.

This submission provides examples and evidence-based recommendations based on Human Rights Watch's research to illustrate numerous ways in which children experience lack of safety and related human rights abuses in education settings.

1. Lack of safety on the journey to and from schools, including safe transportation

Many students experience sexual exploitation, harassment, and abuse while they are in transit to and from school, including those who attend evening or double-shift classes. The lack of safe and free or affordable transportation to access schools exposes many children to unsafe, potentially fatal, situations. Many students, especially in rural areas, have no choice but to walk long distances to school or take and pay for transportation to get to the closest school due to government failures to increase school availability.[1] In some countries, girls who are pregnant or parenting are excluded from day schools due to lack of accommodations, school practices, official policies, or regulations, and are thus forced to access evening classes, which can further expose them to unsafe situations.[2]

Human Rights Watch has found that students are exposed to various risks: harassment and sexual exploitation from commercial motorcycle or bus drivers who transport students to schools, as well as shopkeepers or other adults who come in contact with children along the way to school or within the community.[3] There are also risks of being harassed, robbed, or followed by assailants on night buses or in poorly lit areas close to schools.[4] These risks, including the perception of heightened risks of sexual violence on the journey to school, lead many families in rural, Indigenous or conflict-affected communities to pull girls from school, especially at the secondary level.[5]

The use of schools for military purposes, and the physical presence of soldiers in or around school perimeters or at checkpoints close to schools, also significantly increases the risk of sexual harassment and sexual violence against girls, and can deter attendance.[6]

The journey to school can also be especially dangerous for children with albinism, some of whom have faced extreme violence, including killings, abductions, and mutilations, connected to the myths around the magical powers of their body parts.[7] The fear of violence often means that families of children with albinism keep their children out of school. Human Rights Watch has documented some positive practices, led by community-based organizations, aimed at reducing stigma and facilitating access to education for children with disabilities, including sensitization workshops organized by a teacher on albinism, and efforts by neighbors of children with albinism to walk them to and from school to ensure their safety.[8]

We recommend that the Special Rapporteur urge all states to:

• Improve children's access to schools close to their communities, and adopt school transportation policies that take into account financial barriers and safety concerns for students who, when unavoidable, travel long distances to go to school. Such policies should be inclusive of, and include accommodations for, girls, Indigenous and rural children, children with disabilities, and children living in conflict-affected areas.
• Take concrete measures to end impunity for sexual violence committed by armed forces and armed groups, and end the military use of schools.
• Endorse the Safe Schools Declaration and thereby endorse and commit to use and bring into their domestic policy and operational frameworks the Guidelines on Protecting Schools from Military Use during Armed Conflict.
• Call on states with a significant population of people with albinism to ensure education strategies are inclusive of the needs of children with albinism, including through adequate consultation and meaningful participation of people with albinism in the design of any strategies that may affect them.

2. School violence, including physical and psychological violence, sexual violence, bullying

a. Corporal Punishment

As of 2024, some 137 countries have fully prohibited corporal punishment in schools, but this practice remains widespread in many countries and all regions.[9] Human Rights Watch research in various countries in Africa and the Middle East-including countries where corporal punishment is banned in policy or law, where partial bans are in place, as well as countries where corporal punishment is lawful-shows that the practice is often entrenched across education systems.[10] Schools frequently lack adequate monitoring and safe, clear, and confidential monitoring and reporting mechanisms to ensure bans are effectively implemented and respected.

Students interviewed by Human Rights Watch have experienced brutal forms of violence in schools, including being hit, slapped or whipped by teachers or school officials on the hands, feet, faces, buttocks and breasts, with electrical cables, rubber hoses, wooden or bamboo sticks, as well as being slammed into desks. Additionally, they have suffered humiliating and potentially dangerous practices, including teachers forcing students to kneel and walk on their knees with hands on their backs, cleaning toilets or latrines with bare hands, and standing outside classrooms in cold temperatures.[11]

Teachers told Human Rights Watch that they resort to corporal and other forms of punishment to exercise authority in overwhelmingly large classrooms, to exert discipline in students (partly due to the lack of training on positive discipline and class management), to inflict pain to ensure students pay attention in class, and to set an example to quell negative classroom behaviors.[12] Lack of accountability for teachers, school officials and other personnel who resort to corporal punishment is a structural problem, even when laws, regulations and policies are clear.[13]

Human Rights Watch notes that while all students may be exposed to physical violence in schools, students who are often excluded or marginalized within education systems-including children with disabilities and refugee children-may be at higher risk of violence practiced with impunity due to the additional barriers to reporting those students face.[14]

b. Compulsory Pregnancy Testing

Compulsory pregnancy testing amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,[15] and a serious infringement of girls' rights to privacy, dignity, equality, and autonomy. When applied in schools to expel girls, it is a breach of girls' right to education. In some countries, school officials use harmful means to identify pregnant girls in schools, and sometimes stigmatize and publicly shame them, and make many girls feel unsafe. Across various African countries, school officials routinely subject girls to forced pregnancy testing as a disciplinary measure and permanently expel those who are pregnant. Some national policy frameworks authorize school officials to conduct mandatory pregnancy tests on girls.[16] School officials regularly subject girls to compulsory urine pregnancy tests in schools, may physically examine students by touching their abdomens, or take female students to nearby clinics to get checked by nurses or health practitioners.[17]

c. School-Related Sexual Violence

The global prevalence of school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is unknown, but school-related sexual violence (SRSV), including online and tech-enabled sexual violence, is widespread and reported in most countries where data is available.[18] Children often experience SRSV with no recourse to remedies or justice applied at the school level to end abuses and impunity. In many contexts, perpetrators, including teachers, school staff, bus drivers, and others connected to schools, commit sexual violence with impunity.[19]

Girls often face significant financial barriers to stay in school that, coupled with entrenched gender-based discrimination, increase their risk of sexual exploitation and coercion in schools. In contexts where girls disproportionately experience SRSV, Human Rights Watch has found a link between government failures to guarantee core aspects of the right to education, including the right to free primary education and access to secondary education and the obligation to remove all direct and indirect costs, and SRSV.[20] Girls often told Human Rights Watch that teachers, school directors, bus or motorbike drivers, shopkeepers and other men in their communities offer them money for fees, transport, menstrual pads or phone credit in exchange for sex.[21]

In contexts where Human Rights Watch has conducted research on SRSV, students are often not believed when they report abuses, especially those who are young. Some students, overwhelmingly girls, have frequently been blamed for SRSV perpetrated by teachers or peers. Many have faced stigma and harassment as a result of reporting, sometimes resulting in dropping out of school, a need to change schools, and retraumatization.[22]

Human Rights Watch has found that underreporting is linked to various factors, including: impunity within schools and within education systems; a focus on protecting teachers or school officials over the best interests and welfare of students; lack of adequate safe and confidential reporting mechanisms, including trained personnel who are able to support students who report; lack of adequate and reliable data gathering, including nationally reliable databases that are monitored and actioned; lack of official and binding teacher codes of conduct; and lack of adequately resourced national policies and school-level legally binding frameworks to ensure students are protected from school-related sexual violence.[23]

Even when adequate clear binding protocols and reporting mechanisms or national government databases are in place, there may still be barriers to implement these. In Ecuador, Human Rights Watch found that education staff do not follow through on binding protocols, including due to lack of knowledge of protocols, prioritization of school reputation over protection of students, and a shortage of school psychologists and counselors who are responsible for responding to abuses.[24]

Survivors of school-related sexual violence who pursue cases against perpetrators often face long judicial-and often retraumatizing-processes, which may result in their isolation and stigma, dropping out of school entirely or enduring serious financial or psychosocial barriers that impact their ability to stay in school. Human Rights Watch has found that reparations for SRSV often do not include measures to recover education loss, or measures to compensate a survivor for the long-term impact of changing schools, school districts, provinces, or even countries, as a result of SRSV.[25]

Access to comprehensive sexuality education is crucial in supporting government efforts to tackle and prevent SRGBV, including SRSV, yet many countries curtail or severely limit students' access to curricula on sexuality and reproductive health.[26]

d. Multiple Forms of Violence and Bullying Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Students

Governments violate LGBT students' right to education when they fail to adopt measures and frameworks to protect them from physical and psychological violence, bullying, harassment, and other forms of discrimination in schools.

LGBT students' right to education is also curtailed when teachers and curricula do not include information on sexual orientation and gender identity, which is relevant to their development, or when they take discriminatory actions against LGBT people.[27] In some contexts, rigid gender norms are enacted through education policies-such as strict school uniform rules-and enforced by teachers and other school staff who scold students for deviating from those norms in their attire or behavior.[28]

We recommend that the Special Rapporteur urge all states to:

• Fully ensure the right to free and compulsory primary education and to take immediate steps to ensure free secondary education in national frameworks and practice; and reiterate that this core obligation includes the removal of all direct and indirect fees.
• Ban corporal punishment in schools, with no exceptions.
• Ban compulsory pregnancy testing in education institutions.
• Adopt human rights compliant policies that support pregnancy management in schools and protect the rights of students who are pregnant or parenting.
• Recognize the widespread nature of SRGBV in education systems, end impunity for SRSV, and adopt adequately resourced national policies to tackle and prevent it.
• Ensure reparations for SRGBV cases factor in the costs and social and emotional impact on a survivor's education, including education loss.
• Implement as a mandatory part of the national curriculum in primary and secondary schools comprehensive sexuality education that meets international standards and is scientifically accurate, rights-based, and age-and-stage appropriate.
• Adopt legislation that prohibits discrimination, including bullying, on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.