Our daughter is a student protester at Emerson. The police went too far.

Our daughter has participated in several of the protests and has done shifts at the encampment. She wasn’t there the night the police cleared the tents. But we spent the night on the phone, hearing her shaky mix of shock, fear, relief, and worry for her friends and their parents, surely having their own night of deep emotions.

We are human rights researchers, and we have seen all of this before: the riot gear of police clashing with the bare arms of demonstrators during protests around the world; the pepper gas sprayed to silence chanting; the trashing of people’s belongings without cause. We have gotten calls in the middle of the night from colleagues, activists, and journalists documenting the violence. This was the first time we’d ever gotten a call like this from our daughter. The call hits differently when it comes from your child.

Let’s take a moment to lay out what we know about the protests. We know that student protests on campuses across the country have provoked anger, frustration, and even derision. We acknowledge the right of colleges to protect the safety of their students and the need to ensure that their campuses continue to function. But there’s a serious problem with what happened on Wednesday night in the streets of Boston. There are clear rules, both internationally and at the federal and state levels in the United States, about the amount of force or violence police are allowed to exert to keep order. That level is always as little as humanly possible.

There is a reason for that. The police are first and foremost peacekeepers under the law. They are tools society can wield to cope with the tensions that arise and inevitably boil over when human beings live together. In a functioning democracy, the police should not arbitrate differences with batons; that’s the role of civic debate. Police may not mete out punishment on wrongdoers with pepper spray; consequences for lawbreaking should be left to the courts and judges.

There are videos and witnesses to show that police threw students to the ground and created an unsafe atmosphere of generalized chaos. These steps are at the very least an unnecessary escalation of conflict, at worst extrajudicial punishment.

We are dismayed to hear that officers required medical attention, but our experience researching and reporting on protests has shown us that police officers are much more likely to be injured after they themselves have escalated a situation. We were not there that night. We can’t know the details of what any confrontation between a police officer and a student looked and felt like. But our experience tells us that more often than not, police officers can engage protesters constructively and use no physical force.

Demonstrations can be disruptive. Tempers run high, police officers can get scared and feel angry. But all jobs have a risk profile. Much as you shouldn’t be a surgeon if you faint at the sight of blood, you shouldn’t be a police officer if you cannot control your temper in front of the people you are paid to keep safe. We have deep compassion for the injured police officers as human beings. We have less tolerance for a type of policing that relies on force first.

Deploying police at all against a demonstration is particularly vexing in the case of colleges, which are institutions based on the freedom of speech and thought, and also some of the most important forums for reasoned discussion in any society. If a university cannot itself engage on difficult subjects like human rights atrocities carried out during war, or even on daily life issues, like how to balance free speech and freedom of movement across campus, and it resorts to allowing the police to attack its own students, then, frankly, its leadership has run out of the ideas that one expects from such an institution. Mediation, debate, shared responsibility, and building a culture of accountability — these are all proven alternatives to engaging protesters with force, well documented in academic and human rights research.

Clearly, we’re at a crossroads here. Campuses are in turmoil, at Emerson, Harvard, Columbia, Yale — the list goes on. Emerson’s move to allow in the police is a betrayal of its motto: “Expression is necessary for evolution.” The students aren’t backing down. We need better tools to mediate the older generation’s anger with a younger generation’s demands. So many conflicts have seemed intractable, until they weren’t. From South Africa to Colombia, societies have learned that rather than engage in perpetual conflict and punishment, it is better to focus on de-escalating violence and talking to those we disagree with. It is disturbing to see that the reaction of university presidents across America has been to resort to law enforcement rather than to foster dialogue.

Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of democracy and the only safe route toward trust-building and sustainable peace. When we send our children to college, we hope for them to learn this and to learn to exercise this freedom with care and responsibility. The students at Emerson and everywhere else are doing just that. If they infringe college rules or disobey regulations, their college administrations have plenty of options before resorting to police enforcement.

We have always been proud of our child. Since she was little, we have tried to teach her that any amount of privilege brings with it an obligation to stand up against bullies, to speak out for what you believe to be right. We don’t always agree with her opinions, but we know that this is always what she tries to do: stand on the side of peace, freedom, and justice. When she was growing up, we consistently said to her what so many parents say to their children: Use your words, don’t push, don’t hit. That’s exactly what our daughter and thousands in her generation are doing: using their words, their reason, their creativity, to deal with the problems they see in a world that, let’s be honest, is more theirs than ours.

Marianne Mollmann is the director of regional programs at the Fund for Global Human Rights. She previously held positions at Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. Eduardo Gonzalez Cueva is a human rights expert who has supported the work of truth and reconciliation commissions in over 20 countries.