School Violence:
Why are Violent Incidents at Schools Still on the Rise?

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April 2001

by Dr. Sameh Ragheb, clinical psychiatrist, is a guest writer for the NJ Family Policy Council.

The recent series of school violence incidents has sparked a self-questioning in our society. No doubt, the “why?” in each of these incidents is as unique as each of the individuals involved. One can’t help but ponder the possibility of the presence of common elements underlying these incidents – incidents that were until the past few years unheard of in the public arena. We can choose to look at these child perpetrators and attempt to find their faults, or we can accept that the characteristics of the children that a society produces are intimately related to the characteristics of the society itself. Of course the children who are involved in these acts are not a representative sample of the youth of our society. However, they are a warning bell to the extremes of behavior that is being spawned in our society.

Violence on school premises no doubt existed before all this, and some element of contagion effect is probably playing a role as it often does in teenage behavior. But, something has changed. A boundary of what one can and cannot do at school has been tragically breached. Viewed that way, so many other boundaries of what can and cannot do at school have also changed. No longer can one learn values and morals at school. In fact, the questioning of society’s traditional values and morals has become more vogue at school. You can’t pray or talk about God at school, but you can and are encouraged to question traditional values. This is being done with 13 – 18 year-olds, not just in college where such debate may be more developmentally appropriate. For instance, you still can’t have sex at school but you can learn how to have “safe sex”.

Many argue it’s not the school’s role to teach morals and values. Many would say, parents have the largest role in this, and therefore parenting has come under scrutiny. From a purely quantitative perspective, if we measure parenting by time spent with parent and child interacting together, it would seem that there is a lot less parenting going on these days. As a result of the changing family structure, more and more there is often only one parent around. The reasons are many; job obligations, divorce, abandonment, or neglect. (For some reason absence by death is qualitatively different in its effect). There is also the increasing “physically present” but “otherwise occupied” parent – the parent who is coping with so many more factors vying for their attention. To make matters worse, when the parents are there, they are competing against so much; TV, Internet, and video games. Study after study shows this is how kids spend most of their free time.

If we look at the peer culture today, we find it a very demanding and “unaccepting” place to be for many kids. At all school levels kids suffer as a result of the culture of intolerance, teasing, “dissing”, etc. Only recently has there been an attempt to address this culture; where value is placed on competing for popularity, where such popularity is often gained by counter-culture attitudes and behaviors, and where popularity devalues academic work and interpersonal acceptance, while instead valuing dominance by one over another. In this culture the desperate assert their value by violence. Is it a coincidence then, that they choose to do it at school against their schoolmates?

Since the basic level of interaction between parent and child has been drastically altered, and the basic core values in school culture have been drastically altered, where does that leave kids? A likely answer is at the mercy of the popular media and the peer culture – hardly desirable sources of moral upbringing. Society has to choose what expectations to present to our kids. Society also has to understand what message is desired and what message is actually communicated. Our kids will rise or sink to the expectations that we communicate and hold both ourselves and them accountable to.

April 2001.

 

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