BY LIAM KEITH

In 2024, public violence seems to be rising everywhere, even in public schools. Violence among adolescents has frequently made public spaces place age limits upon their requirements. Worlds of Fun is one such place. The theme park had to put a rule in place where children 15 and under need a chaperone after 4:00 pm. This was due to an increase of fights and violent disputes at the theme park. Now imagine over 1,500 people between ages 14-18 in one building. 

Schools are host to many disputes, arguments and friendly disagreements, but the outlier is fights. Student fights are not welcomed by teachers, administrators, and other support staff, yet there doesn’t seem to be a solid solution to prevent them. The discourse about these fights aren’t necessarily about the grotesque nature of the fight but more about the eye witness accounts of those that saw and whether or not there was a video of it. Students can’t be bothered to participate in school assemblies or other spouts of school spirit, but they will flock to a fight as if they’ve never seen one before. What can you do though? Violence isn’t gross anymore. It is constantly glorified in multiple forms of media, and the audience of this media is only getting younger.

The glorification of violence can be traced back to ancient Rome, where gladiators would fight deadly animals and other human foe of the same stature. In fact,  the only comparison I could draw for this is gladiators. Issues are never settled and fights almost always result in another altercation whether on school grounds or not. The attention drawn from the spectators amplifies the emotions of the students engaged in the fight. There isn’t a solution for any of this without taking some sort of damage. You can get suspended and even face jail time if you do fight, but take a hit to your character if you don’t. If you don’t fight you’ll have to defend yourself from allegations of being scared or a wuss. To adolescents they’ll gravitate to who shows the most strength because they find their strength in others. According to Amy Nemmentz, who wrote “School violence: Social bond theory and physical fights” adolescents are not worried about long-term consequences; they don’t want to be labeled or turned away by their peers because of the situation.

I interviewed first year teacher, Noah Graham, about his feelings on the rising violence in schools. When asked about the quantity of fights he has seen, he told me that there were around three immediately outside of his door, and he’s seen multiple others. His procedure for the fights is to block off view of it to his students or other students, and he prepares to intervene if necessary. While answering questions he brought up that a lot of the fights he has seen were videoed by the spectators. So I asked what he did, He said,” [I tell them] to just delete them.” 

The fight video craze highlights another issue with spectatorship. If you go onto twitter or instagram and look up in the search, school fights, there are various pages dedicated to posting videos of various fights at school, in neighborhoods, in stores. The reoccurring thing in all of these videos is there are people under the age of 18 fighting. Part of the draw of these videos is that adolescents display a form of aggression that professional fighters display, because their fighting with their reputation amongst the school on the line. Well actually nothing is really on the line, except for their image amongst peers. Whoever is engaged in the fight doesn’t win, there definitely is someone who looks better in the fight. All of that is out of their control and basing your image off of opinion and perception of others is silly

There is this theory that school violence is mostly caused by students who aren’t connected to the staff, or their peers. It is called the social bond theory. In the studies they’ve found a correlation between these two and that it is more likely someone with no connection to the school is going to commit a violent act than someone who is connected. I tried to find what Graham’s method was towards students to get them more involved and he said, “Well I lucked out being the speech and debate teacher, as in students know they miss the opportunity to letter in the program.” He can only do so much and you really can’t force involvement on students, you have to appeal to these students. Hypothetically even if part of a program or group, those things have to be worth more than their anger.

The scariest part of school fights isn’t seeing the violence, but what it could lead to. At this point in the interview I wanted to give Mr. Graham the opportunity to provide perspective on this. I asked if he ever worried about fighting snowballing into something sinister and he said, “ here and there, depending on the kid I don’t think they’re that aggressive.” 

As a student at Truman, I just would like to clarify that I believe our administration is doing the best they can for prevention. It’s more than likely fights in school are because of external issues that can only be prevented off of school grounds. Maybe social media apps need to start getting heavy on the age requirements. I like the idea of parents limiting screen time and being involved as much as possible. More pressure from the parents on their students’ involvement into their schools would also really help.