24 Feb 14 | Europe and Central Asia, Greece, News and features
Students protesting outside the offices of Piraeus Public Prosecutor (Image: Nikolas Georgiou/Demotix)
Between 200 – 250 students last week staged a demonstration outside the offices of the Piraeus’ Public Prosecutor against police interference in school protests, following high school students being taken in for police questioning.
Joined by the Secondary Teacher Union of Piraeus and the Parent Association of Keratsini the students shouted slogans like “we won’t be terrorised” and “money for education”. The protest came after students were interrogated by police over an occupation of Keratsini’s 2nd High School in October, in protest at the murder of rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a member of the far right Golden Dawn.
Students were asked about their own and their teachers’ political preferences, especially those who had been striking against public job cuts and forced transfers. There were also media reports that students were questioned about their parents’ voting preferences. A high school student who participated in the protest said they were asked “to give as many names as possible”, adding that they were threatened with having a criminal record if they refused.
Greek police has said it was obliged to conduct an investigation into the matter. It did so on the basis of a legislative act from 2000 punishing by imprisonment attempted occupations or disruption of the “smooth functioning” of a school. The act remained inactive until 2011 when school protests against government plans on privatisation of education, prompted a Supreme Court order for investigations in schools.
Maria Delli, board member of the Parent Federation in Attica District told Index on Censorship: “It is not an unprecedented incident, we have been experiencing police interference and student profiling in recent years. The government is trying to criminalise the common struggles of students and teachers for education. Students complain about the obvious: Not having teachers, not having heating infrastructures and having to pay for their books during the economic crisis.” She added that there was no damage to the school.
Nikos Peritoyannis, president of Parent Association of Keratsini commented to Index on Censorship: “It is a positive outcome. It can be definitely seen as a result of the pressure from the protest actions undertaken by students, teachers and other social groups. However, it does not mean that similar cases will cease to exist. As the struggle against the privatization of education goes on, the government will have to intensify monitoring and suppressing policies.”
On Monday 20 February, Piraeus’ Public Prosecutor finally decided to temporarily withdraw the case as there was no criminal offence for which to prosecute the students. Apart from the incident in Keratsini, Athens’ Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) has also issued a document informing police stations to conduct meetings with school directors in order to disclose “any immediate problems schools are facing”. On 13 February, a similar document reached the director of a kindergarden in New Psychiko, Athens. There was public outcry from teachers’ associations in the media.
This article was posted on 24 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
30 Nov 10 | Uncategorized
When somebody used the word “class” I cringed and thought to myself: “I wish they wouldn’t do that.”
The speaker was one of the students occupying a hall at University College London, and we were talking about why they were doing it. My reaction, I can see on reflection, was entirely misguided — a symptom of a problem the students are complaining about.
Why shouldn’t they talk about class? It may not play well with the mainstream press, who will mock the idea of students identifying with working people, but what does the mainstream press know? What century are they in? Far, far more of today’s students actually have something in common with working people than when Paul Dacre (Daily Mail) or Tony Gallagher (Daily Telegraph) or Alan Rusbridger (Guardian) were undergraduates.
When a student from a working-class background penetrates third level education it is no longer the exciting, laudable, affirming exception. It hasn’t been for years and years and years. But you wouldn’t know that from the national papers, which for the most part continue to exist in a ludicrous Brideshead timewarp.
Which makes you wonder about the question the students are asking; how can they get their message across in the mainstream press? How can they persuade reporters to take them seriously, and to drop all that drivel about spoiled brats and window breakers?
Then there is the problem of protest. In the modern mode, there is no such thing as legitimate protest, unless it is so dainty and polite that it qualifies more as an exercise in collective etiquette than an expression of anger. Go ahead and protest, we say, but don’t get in anybody’s way for as much as a minute, and on no account give offence.
These students are angry, and I’m happy to say, on the basis of a couple of hours’ observation, they are well aware that being polite is not an end in itself. They are serious and thoughtful and there are things they want, and they appear to know that conforming to the mainstream rulebook will get them nowhere.
They have tried that. A whole lot of them politely voted Liberal Democrat last May, very often on the strength of that notorious pledge about tuition fees. Are they now supposed to wait five years for the opportunity to put that right by not voting Lib Dem?
No. Because it won’t put it right. It would mean the Liberal Democrats had five years in power based on a lie, and were free to use it to mock and damage the people who voted for them. Remember, no party fought the last election on a programme of cuts, not even the Conservatives.
I know British people are supposed to be polite, but it is taking good manners a little too far to suggest that the first-time voters of 2010 have to sit back and watch a government that lied to them slowly dismember their university system.
The Dacre-Rusbridger-me-Blair-Cameron generation is the sub-prime, casino, PFI, never-never generation. It has no right to heap its debts and failures on its children, and it will only get away with it if those children fall for its outdated ideas of class and good behaviour. I hope they don’t.
The occupiers are tweeting at @UCLOccupation, emailing at ucloccupation[at]gmail[dot]com and blogging at http://ucloccupation.wordpress.com/
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follow him on twitter at @BrianCathcart
14 Nov 10 | Uncategorized
Reading and watching the coverage of last Wednesday’s education protest reminded me of something that can be depressing for a journalist: modern news journalism is a weird and skew-eyed way of describing the world.
By common consent only a small minority of marchers took part in the violence at Millbank tower; indeed in the predictable language of some papers they “hijacked” the event. Yet their rowdiness and violence was the story. The coverage was not about the experience of the tens of thousands, but about what a couple of hundred did. It was about the most dramatic, extreme events and nothing else.
Those are the rules of journalism, of course. Prince Charles once drew attention to the strangeness of it: there’s a frenzy when a plane crashes, but nobody reports the 999,999 planes that land safely. How could it be otherwise? When a dog bites a man, after all, it’s just not worth telling people.
For years I have been teaching journalism students two things which often sit together uncomfortably: that journalism is mostly about news — men biting dogs and planes that crash — and that it is about describing the world as it is, about bearing witness to truth. But how true was the march coverage when it concentrated on the activities of the minority?
This isn’t merely abstract. I recall a story from the early days of the troubles in Northern Ireland. An executive at Ulster Television answered a phone in the newsroom one day to hear a voice say: “Where are the cameras? We’re ready for the riot.”
“Huh?’ said the baffled executive. And the voice said: “We’re all here. We’ll start throwing stones as soon as the cameras arrive.”
The TV man gathered his thoughts and said: “I’m sorry but that’s not the way it works. We won’t be sending any cameras. Goodbye.”
If your rule is that you must report the most dramatic, if the competitive imperative is to accentuate the lurid and extreme, then you are vulnerable to manipulation, to the staged riot or the media event, and your news agenda soon ceases to have much to do with reality.
The student who breaks away from the march and kicks the window pane will always have the headlines because he wants to, whether he is an extremist or just unusually upset about education cuts. With the help of journalists, he can fabricate a distinct reality.
Journalism seems to be trapped. It can’t start dealing in peaceful marchers and ignoring stone-throwers. It can’t report the planes that land safely because you wouldn’t read, watch, listen to or buy that, and neither would I. So it is stuck out there thumbing a lift from the hijacker.
I liked Michael White’s piece about the march, and I liked the way the Guardian put it on the front — though like all the other papers they led the page on the trouble. White seemed to escape the trap; he wrote about what the many did more than about the few, and he produced something that resembled what I guess most marchers experienced.
Elsewhere, few papers that I saw made much of an effort to reflect the many. And of course if there had been no trouble the coverage would have been so different: it would have been much shorter and less prominent, and almost certainly bland and snide — “students find excuse to skip lectures” and so on. And it would have been illustrated with pictures of pretty young women with placards.
So if you are a student or lecturer, or anyone else with something to complain about (which must be a lot of people these days), what do you do?
Evil triumphs when the good stay silent, they say, so that is not an option. So take your pick: act responsibly and be ignored or patronised, or be “hijacked” and so condemned or travestied. Either way, unless you are very lucky, nobody will pay much attention to your real message, because the news rules don’t seem to allow it.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
