Ban smartphones from schools? If we’re truly concerned about safety, we’d ban kids from schools and let them keep their phones.
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025
OMG! Have you seen the FBI’s latest Crime in Schools report? “From 2020 to 2024, agencies reported 1,299,063 criminal incidents occurring at school locations… There were 1,504,310 offenses; 1,539,149 victims; and 1,250,077 known offenders associated with those incidents.”
And those are just the school crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, including for pandemic months in which many schools were shut down! Obviously, major media panics and draconian legislated bans are demanded.
The FBI report finds 652,000 kids victimized by assaults, 54,000 by sex offenses, over half a million by property crimes, and 300,000 by social crimes like drugs, porn, and weapons at school. School-associated violent death reports find some 150 children and teens were murdered at school during the period.
Predators? Some 188,000 children and teens were victimized by grownup criminals at school during 2020-2024. That’s one every 2 minutes! A child or teen is twice as likely to be victimized by an adult offender age 19 and older than by a young peer compared to the proportions of over-19 versus school-age youths at school.
And here’s one for anti-social-media crusader Jonathan Haidt, whose substack has been obsessed with pornography amid supposedly terrible “dangers” kids face online: 19,000 kids are exposed to porn at school, along with 244,000 to drugs and 50,000 to knives and guns. And these alarming numbers are certainly underreported.
A day spent on social media versus a day at an American school is like comparing a Sunday school picnic or Boy Scout campout to the Battle of Verdun. (A bad analogy, I admit; churches and Scouts have proven bad at protecting kids from predators.)
But you get the point. Teens spend relatively equivalent time on social media as at school, but nothing – nothing – bad happening on social media even remotely approaches the cataclysmic victimization toll on our kids of going to school.
State attorneys general’s court filings hyped by Haidt struggled to produce a half-dozen cases in which damage to children and teenagers was even arguably caused by social media. They had to dredge up a case of grownups well past teen ages buying bullets online later used to kill a couple of youths as somehow proving teens should be banned from social media.
Anti-social-media crusaders truly concerned about youth safety and mental health should reverse their campaigns to ban smartphones from schools. Let students keep their phones but ban kids from schools!
Removing tongue from cheek…
Okay, enough of my anti-school rant, largely senseless when put in perspective but still a thousand times more sensible than anti-social-media junk. Let us remember two things:
(a) This is the United States of America. We’ve got big problems – all ages, everywhere. In fact, kids are far, far safer in school than in any other venue to which anti-social-media crusaders would send them, such as streets, churches, youth programs, and especially, homes.
(b) Over 50 million children and teens and 3 million teachers and personnel attend 131,000 primary and secondary schools every weekday for 180 days a year. That’s well over 30 billion child-school-days during 2020-2024 even if we assume in-school attendance was partly shut down in 2020-21.
That is, according to the FBI’s figures, a student would have to attend school for 20,000 days, or over 50 years, before having even odds of being victimized by a crime of any kind; over a century before being victimized by violence; 300 years before being injured by violence at school; and 3,000 years before being at a school where any kind of shooting takes place.
During those same 5 years, over half a million children and youths were substantiated – not just reported, but substantiated – victims of physical and/or sexual violence inflicted by grownups in their homes. Some 2,000 school-agers age 5-17 were murdered at home during 2020-2024, a dozen times more than the 150 murdered at school. Of course, crime in both places is grossly underreported, so these are relative odds.
Overall, a child or youth is many times safer from gunfire, violence, and crime surrounded by peers at school than at home with adult family members, even after adjusting for the hours spent in each locale. And social media is by far the safest place of all.
Finally, is physical “safety” (especially when very low risks are hyped to promote panics) always paramount? Living a full life entails risks. That’s why I argue for full access by all ages to both outdoors and social media spaces.