Reducing School Violence Through the Right Martial Art

I think writing about this honestly matters more than writing it in a way that flatters what I teach.

Consistently reported as of the morning of 8 August 2026: according to government statements and media reports, nine people died — five school staff, one 12-year-old female student, the attacker's grandfather and grandmother, and the attacker himself. More than twenty were injured; the Ministry of Public Health stated that nine were in a critical condition (seven children and two adults). The weapon was a handgun legally registered to the grandfather and kept locked at home.

These figures were revised repeatedly during the day of the incident — injury counts reported ranged from 21 to 24 depending on the time of the briefing — and severely injured victims remain in hospital. I am therefore reporting what was stated as of the time given, not presenting a final figure.

Not concluded: the Royal Thai Police stated that no motive has been established. The Prime Minister offered a preliminary view that academic stress may have been involved. The Ministry of Education has issued no statement about bullying in this case. Classmates and a caller to a Thai television programme have said the attacker had been bullied, and several outlets report bullying as a factor under investigation — but that is not a finding.

What I will not write: the specific accounts circulating on social media about what happened the day before have not been confirmed by any official. I will not use them as evidence for anything.

And to any bullied young person reading this — what happened at Debsirin Nonthaburi is not your future. Millions of children in Thailand are bullied, and almost none of them end up there. Your pain is real and it deserves to be fixed, but it does not determine who you become. If things feel unbearable right now, 1323 is a free 24-hour mental health line in Thailand.

In primary school I attended a Chinese-Thai private school. It was a quiet community where fights essentially did not happen. I grew up in an environment where I never swore and almost never even heard swearing.

Then I changed schools.

The new school was also private, but it was all-boys, with students from kindergarten through Grade 9. I was bullied on my first day. Not because I did anything wrong, but because the way I spoke and carried myself was different. Words I thought of as obscene were ordinary conversation there. My politeness became a label announcing that I was not one of them.

What followed is something I still remember clearly — insults aimed at my parents, being slapped on the head, being challenged to fight. Something happened almost every day I went in.

So I did what every bullied child does: I redesigned my entire day around avoidance. At lunch I ate as fast as I could and found a quiet corner or the library, because walking across the yard or joining a game meant the bigger boys would find me. Ten minutes before the last bell I packed my bag, and the moment it rang I left. No waiting, no talking to anyone.

I did not hate that school. The teachers were excellent and I had good friends. My secondary years hold good memories mixed with ones I would rather forget. But I could not avoid the bullying.

Then came my son's generation.

He passed a fiercely competitive entrance exam into a government secondary school. We expected a strong academic environment. But a local-quota policy at the time admitted students without an academic filter, and the reality we met was that his generation was far harsher than mine.

In my day there was still a code of "settle it one on one." In his, group attacks were normal. Knives appeared. Guns appeared. Threats were made against both students and parents. That is a more dangerous environment than most parents realise.

That is one of the reasons I opened IMAC Dojo.

Over the years I have taught many students who came to me because they were being targeted. One case stays with me: a mother brought her son in and explained that a classmate had said he trained in taekwondo and wanted to try it out. Her son became the thing he tried it out on, and he was hurt.

That may not even meet most people's definition of bullying. It was "playing." But the effect on that boy — the pain and the loss of confidence — was identical.

I understand this because I lived it. And the sentence I hear most often from parents is: "They're kids, it'll pass."

Violence in schools climbs one step at a time.

Mocking → taunting in front of others → pushing or shoulder-checking → taking belongings or demanding money → physical assault → weapons.

Each step looks small next to the one above it, and that is precisely why it keeps climbing.

Bullies rarely choose targets at random. They test first with low-cost actions — a jibe, a shoulder, borrowing something and not returning it — and watch the response. If the target stays quiet, looks down and tells no one, what the bully learns is that the next time is free.

This is why the most common advice — "just ignore them, they'll get bored" — often fails. To someone running a test, no response does not read as "this person doesn't care." It reads as "this person has no cost."

The point at which adults should intervene is the bottom of the ladder, not the top.

I removed several figures that circulate widely in Thailand, because when I traced them I could not find a real source. What remains is what stands up.

An important caution: these figures cannot be compared across countries. Japan counts cases recognised and reported by schools; the United States measures the share of students who say they were bullied. Different units, different collection methods. Anyone lining those two numbers up to say which country is worse is comparing the wrong things.

I used to believe the widely repeated claim that Thai children are bullied at the second-highest rate in the world after Japan. When I traced it, I found no international study behind it, and the comparative data that does exist places Japan among the lower-ranking countries, not the highest. So I no longer use it. This problem is serious enough without inflation.

Every time something like this happens, attention turns to video games and video clips.

Asst. Prof. Dr. Jittra Dusadeemetha of Srinakharinwirot University commented directly on this case on 8 August 2026, saying that research clearly indicates games are not a primary factor and do not significantly drive violent incidents; that they can serve as an outlet for stress; and that if they act as a trigger at all, they rank among the last factors, not the starting point.

Academically, the American Psychological Association revised its own resolution in 2020 to state explicitly that it should not be misinterpreted or misused by attributing violence, such as mass shootings, to violent video game use. The APA still recognises a small link to aggression, while stating that evidence is insufficient to establish a causal link to violence or criminal behaviour.

Christopher Ferguson has proposed the Catalyst Model, arguing that violent media supplies a template of style rather than a cause — a perpetrator already intent on harm might learn a method from a drama, but the act would have occurred regardless. I find that perspective useful, though it is fair to say it remains one research group's proposal rather than the field's settled conclusion.

What obscures society's view is reaching for the easiest culprit while overlooking the harder but genuinely fixable ones: structural violence inside schools, and access to weapons.

The research I have long relied on is Grayson and Stein (1981), published in the Journal of Communication. They filmed 60 pedestrians in New York and asked inmates convicted of assault to rate how "easy" each person appeared as a target. Twenty people were rated as easy targets by a majority of raters, with striking agreement.

The deciding factor was not size or gender but movement quality — stride length that was unusually long or short, inconsistent weight transfer, lifting the feet rather than swinging the legs, and moving the limbs on the same side together rather than alternating. In summary: movement that looks out of sync with itself.

I want to state this study's limits plainly, because it is heavily overstated in the self-defence industry. The effective sample was tiny, it covered one city, and it is more than forty years old. Crucially, it measures perceived vulnerability, not who actually gets attacked. Nobody in the study was assaulted, and nothing in it proves that changing how you walk reduces real risk. As for the "seven seconds" figure repeated all over the internet — it does not appear in the original paper at all. I used to quote it. I no longer do.

What can be said carefully is that later work using different methods, such as Gunns and colleagues (2002), confirms that movement information alone produces consistent judgements of vulnerability. The phenomenon is real, even though we cannot yet prove that gait training prevents assault.

In my classes the principle still comes first: before teaching a single punch or kick, we teach standing upright and holding eye contact.

Here I will say what most martial arts schools do not.

What research has not confirmed: there is no good evidence that training in martial arts makes a child less likely to be bullied. Most studies measure the practitioner's aggression, not their victimisation, and the findings conflict. The most recent review of longitudinal evidence concluded that effects on aggression show no consistent direction — some studies found reductions, others found increases. Anyone who tells you research proves that training stops bullying is claiming more than the evidence supports.

What can reasonably be said: supervised sparring exposes the body to high-arousal states repeatedly in a safe setting. That is conceptually similar to the principle of graded stress inoculation, and it is a plausible hypothesis. But I will not tell you it measurably rewires your child's nervous system, because no martial arts research demonstrates that.

What I see every term: a child who freezes the first time someone touches them in class, and who three months later is breathing normally with someone standing closer than their comfort zone used to allow. Their walk changes. Their stance changes. How they answer someone speaking harshly to them changes. That is my teaching experience, not a research finding — and I think you deserve to know which is which.

What has stronger evidence: the programmes with randomised-trial evidence of actually reducing assault are Empowerment Self-Defence programmes, which emphasise situational awareness, verbal refusal and boundary-setting more than fighting technique alone. That is why, in my dojo, we teach those three things alongside punches and kicks.

Since 2012, Japan has required budo (武道) as part of compulsory physical education in the first two years of junior high school, with each school choosing whether to teach judo, kendo or sumo — not all three. Karate, aikido, kyudo and others are now permitted options as well.

Research by Dr. Ryo Uchida and the National Association of Victims of Judo Accidents documented 114 school judo deaths in Japan between 1983 and 2010, the great majority occurring in club activities rather than compulsory PE classes. A 2012 Ministry of Education report identified judo as the club sport with the highest number of fatalities.

But the most important part is the part that usually gets left out: after 2012 the numbers fell dramatically. Research published in 2021 found sixteen fatal head-trauma cases in judo between 2005 and 2011, and one between 2012 and 2016. The change followed head-injury guidance from the All Japan Judo Federation and the safety scrutiny that accompanied the curriculum rollout.

That is the real lesson here, and it is not "judo is dangerous." The cause was never the art itself but an authoritarian "win at all costs" culture in which coaches used corporal punishment that became bullying disguised as training. When safety systems were taken seriously, the numbers changed within a few years.

I repeat this to every parent who speaks with me before enrolling their child: if a school promises your child will beat everyone, or uses public humiliation as motivation, do not send them there.

The right question is not "which art is best" but "at what range is my child's problem happening?"

Still at arm's length — mocked, challenged in front of others, but not yet grabbed. Full-contact karate such as Shinkyokushin trains the body to keep functioning when adrenaline spikes, and its belt and kyu system provides the measurable short-term goals that matter so much to teenagers.

Grabbed by the collar, pushed off balance, or pinned against a wall — judo addresses this most directly. But to be clear: this is not about learning to throw people. Throwing someone onto concrete can cause catastrophic injury and can make your child the party at fault legally. What actually gets used is ukemi (safe falling, useful every day even with no conflict at all), grip breaking, and newaza — because on the ground the deciding variable shifts from strength and weight to position and angle, one of the few contexts where a smaller person has a systematic advantage.

In confined spaces — corridors, bathrooms, between desks, usually with someone closing distance before you can react. Wing Chun uses centreline theory, which requires no room to swing, and chi sao, which trains responses through touch rather than waiting for sight.

No single art covers every range. They complement each other.

If you are weighing karate against taekwondo for a child, we compare the two in a separate article.

No martial art reliably defeats a weapon. An instructor who tells you their training lets a child disarm an attacker is selling false confidence that can get a child killed. When a knife or gun is involved, the correct choice is to give the attacker everything they demand, leave as fast as possible, and tell an adult immediately.

Repeated extortion and injury are the same category — signals that the ladder has climbed beyond what training can fix in time. Those require adult intervention, not more skills from the child.

Numbers worth knowing in Thailand

• 191 — emergencies in progress, or weapons involved
• 1300 — Social Assistance Centre, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security; free, 24 hours, for children who are harmed or abused
• 1323 — Department of Mental Health hotline; sleeplessness, anxiety, school refusal, thoughts of self-harm
• MOE Safety Center — the Ministry of Education's system for reporting unsafe conditions in schools

Escalation order with a school: homeroom teacher → year head or discipline office → deputy director for student affairs → director → MOE Safety Center → 1300. The governing principle is that verbal reports disappear and documented ones do not. Every submission should carry a date and the name of who received it. A timestamped chat message counts. And the parent should submit it, not the child.

On firearms, plainly: the Small Arms Survey estimated in 2017 that Thailand had around 10.3 million civilian-held firearms — roughly 6.2 million registered, the remainder an estimate of unregistered weapons — the highest in ASEAN both in absolute terms and per capita. At Debsirin Nonthaburi the weapon was a legally registered family firearm. Securing weapons out of children's reach is not only a legal matter but a responsibility in every household that keeps one.

The tragedy at Debsirin Nonthaburi is still under investigation, and I will not claim to know its cause. What I can speak to is what I have seen my whole life: the ladder of violence in Thai schools is real, it begins at steps so small nobody counts them, and adults usually intervene once it has climbed too high to fix easily.

Martial arts are not the only answer and should never be sold as one. They must come with schools that genuinely listen, families that do not silence their children, systems that act when informed, and homes that secure their weapons.

But within what they can do, I stand by it — from thirty years of experience, both as the child who hid in the library at lunchtime and as the teacher who watches children like that walk into the dojo every term.

I opened IMAC Dojo not to teach children to fight anyone, but so that they never have to stand on the first step of that ladder at all.

This article is for general understanding and is not medical, legal or psychological advice. Details of the incident are as of 8 August 2026, are subject to ongoing investigation, and may be revised.