Koper - Despite encouraging police statistics that show fewer cases of violence among the young last year, it seems that the reality is quite different, the newspaper Primorske Novice says on Wednesday, pointing to recent cases of students displaying weapons at school.

"If violent behaviour and handling weapons used to be reserved mainly for adults, now it has spread among teens like a virus and became a way for them to express their anxiety, frustrations."

Recently, a student at a primary school in the Primorska region threatened his classmate with a boxcutter, and another secondary school student showed off an airsoft gun. Nobody knows what students will do to express their distress tomorrow and both these cases should be considered a red alarm, the paper says.

"While violence was usually associated with men, now girls, female students have become violent as well. How will the society curb this if children, when faced with forced abstinence from digital devices are prepared to attack even their parents?"

After all generations have been living in changed conditions for almost two years, the young have been affected the most. Home schooling drastically changed their everyday lives, as school is a buffer from many of them and an important source of support and aid.

Children were also in distress when they needed to return to school.

Under pressure were also children whose parents were stressed out because of a job loss or illness, and children whose parents are separated and maintaining contact became complicated as well as children who live in poverty, the paper says under the headline Distress of the Youth Gives Birth to Violence.