Quote:
Originally Posted by
DaTeacha 
| Violence seems to feed on itself. From my experience in schools, it seems that fighting among the kids gets to be a mentality or attitude thing. If you have a couple of fights in a relatively short time, it becomes rampant - the kids decide that it's the only way to solve problems, and besides that it's exciting see. Therefore everyone decides to fight about stuff - even ridiculous little things - instead of solving their problems in some other way. Girls are terrible about it. They take offense at what someone said that someone else told them about what a third or 4th or 5th party said that may have been able to be less than flattering about the original girl and the next thing you know you've got this huge drama thing going on. Mix this with a violence prone cultural segment and you will have problems.
When I was in the inner city schools during the late 60's and early 70's, it seemed that the violence came in waves, followed by periods of relative calm, then another fight or incident would start it again. I won't regale you with the stories, but let's just say the direction of the violence was proportional to the balance of the races. I saw white on black violence, but because the schools I was in were heavily populated by black kids, there was more black on white violence. Either way, it was never one on one, but a group finding an individual and thumping on him or her. In that way it was eerily similar to the flash/smash mob thing - sheer force of numbers and a few leaders to get things stirred up and you have an instant problem. |
I hear ya Teach. I started junior high school the first year they started forced busing in my district. What that means is they took tough ghetto youths and shipped them to fairly affluent neighborhood schools. The thinking was that exposing the ghetto kids to a softer style would soften their edges. Quite the opposite happened. I learned REAL fast that I had to defend myself quickly and decisively. I learned to not take a punch and not return one. I also learned that there is no shame in running away. Learned also that just because a kid came up and punched me it was not always an act of violence and hate.....sometimes it was their way of seeing if you were OK to be friends with! Punch them back and stand there and next thing ya know you could be good friends. Took me a while to learn that one.