School Violence Alarmingly High

Vietnam: School violence alarmingly high

School violence remains an inextricable problem. Though teachers always threaten to expel fighting pupils from schools, they still cannot stop or ease the violence at schools.

The threat does not help prevent pupils from fighting. In school bags, naughty pupils sometimes carry knives, swords and water guns.

Pupils do not fight during lesson time, they fight after school time, therefore, teachers sometimes do not hear about fights.

Most of the fights were found as the “battle” of not only two individuals, in many cases, the ‘main actors’ in the fights were gangs and groups. There were a lot of reasons that led to fights, and sometimes, pupils fought for… nothing.

Recently, the HCM City People’s Court judged a case, in which two pupils in the same class stabbed each other. The pupil, who was the culprit in the case, was always bullied by the other. One day he hid a knife in his school bag and stabbed the other pupil. Before the court, when the victim was asked why he always bullied the friend, he said: “because his face looks hateful”.

Not only schoolboys, but schoolgirls also fight each other. A video clip which has been recorded recently showed the fight between two groups of 5-6 schoolgirls, which took place after the school time, and on the street. In mid September 2007, pupils of Q.T school witnessed the dogfight between three schoolgirls and one schoolboy with bricks, stones and pipes.

Analysts said that one of the reasons behind the increasingly high school violence is that it is now so easy to buy the tools for fighting. It takes me VND40-50,000 and 30 minutes only to get a fighting instrument. The tool which is being used by most of pupils in fights is a knife, 40-50 cm long, used for paper cutting. However, as they are expensive, pupils like using simple and cheaper ones. Bricks, stone, glasses and bottles all can become the instruments of violence in the hands of naughty pupils.

The...