Campus violence sparks concern
By Lu Chang (Shanghai Star)
Updated: 2004-10-17 09:58

Among the 37 students in Gao Mei's class in Nanhu Vocational High School in Shanghai, she remembers three gangs, each with its own name, such as the "Four Kings" or the "Cat Sisters".

These gangs argued over everything that happened in class, and outside there might even be serious fights between them.

Not every student belonged to a gang, but in Gao's class, nearly half of the students belonged to one or another.

"Some of the gangs have lots of members spread throughout several different schools," Gao said. "They believe in group loyalty and fights between the gangs, or extortion of money from other students, occur frequently."

The student gang members, easily recognized by their bizarre clothing and appearance, would line up by the school gates every day after class.

"Few ordinary middle and high schools are dealing with the same level of campus violence as the vocational schools are," said Guo Jusheng, an official with the Adolescent Protection Department of the Municipal Education Commission.

Vocational schools in China exist on two different levels and are open to those who fail high school entrance exams or are unable to get into a university.

Gao has been working at the school since 2000 and remembers small conflicts happening almost every day, but two occasions affected her especially deeply.

One was when a student cut his teacher with a knife during a cooking class, after the teacher had scolded him. On the other occasion, the father of a student and himself the head of a district criminal gang, rushed into the school with other men brandishing steel rods. They surrounded the son's teacher and interrogated him about a beating his son - a student gang-member - had received from one of his schoolmates.

Gao cynically described her own school, and all the other vocational schools that take such students, as "waste recycling stations". with the aim of the school being to turn the human "waste" into something useful.

As the gangs continually jockeyed for position within their schools, fights were unavoidable since they were the basic way of demonstrating strength.

Gao said the month of September, when new students enter vocational schools, was always a period of special anxiety for the teachers. "There were always a lot of fights between the different factions and the new students to establish a hierarchy. There were also fights between groups of higher and lower grade students, with the higher grade students attempting to control the new ones," Gao said.

In this complicated situation, teachers were required by the school to keep a close watch on the behaviour of the different gangs.

Intelligence work

Fortunately, teachers could usually obtain "intelligence" before serious clashes from "spies" in the various factions.

"Not every member of these gangs liked fights that might lead to serious wounds. Some of them had only joined the gangs to gain face, security and companionship. They would notify teachers of serious trouble in an attempt to forestall major violence," Gao said.

In order not to irritate problem students, teachers had to be very careful about the way they treated them, since they were often extremely proud and sensitive to humiliation.

"Teachers had to avoid causing them to lose face by haranguing them over their appalling behaviour and dismal performance. As long as the classes could be kept in good order, it was better to let them sleep in class," she said.

In order to improve the security situation in vocational schools, the Education Commission and schools have been thinking about ways to target the problem of violence.

"Vocational schools have established connections with district police offices to strengthen supervision over the school areas," said Guo (the commission official). "We have also brought in professional teachers who are experts on the topic of adolescent crime to talk to some of the student gang members."

He also noted that additional security guards should be trained and placed in the worst schools.

Because schools sought to keep their campuses calm and preserve their reputations, they sometimes needed to take "special" measures to deal with troublesome students.

The Nanhu Vocational School has been awarded the title of "model school", but according to regulations it would lose the right to this title if any serious incident occurred there. To get around the problem, whenever a student seriously injured another he would be forced to write an application to leave the school, which would then be back dated to a time before the incident occurred, according to Gao. "In this way the school evaded responsibility."

Guo denounced such practices, saying it was improper conduct because schools were only entitled to expel students who had been sentenced to imprisonment. "Dropouts might just cause more problems for the community after being dismissed from their schools. Nobody wants them," he said.

Recent research undertaken by neighbouring Zhejiang Province has revealed that nearly 90 per cent of primary and high school students have been threatened by campus violence. Zheng Quanquan, the researcher in charge of the survey, said that campus violence was defined to include not only physical but also verbal abuse, sexual harassment, bullying, theft and corporal punishment from teachers.

Lonely hearts

Yang Xiong, head of the Adolescent Studies Department at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science , said that in a survey conducted this year about 20 per cent of local middle and high school students admitted to having been bullied or robbed at least once.

He said the reason vocational schools had seen the most violence was that the students there had been judged failures by the educational selection system and were considered losers by the community.

"They need to find a way to compensate themselves for their lost pride. Therefore, they turn to violence in an attempt to prove themselves stronger and more powerful than others," Yang said.

Gao pointed out that about half of all gang members were from single-parent or broken families, with many of the remainder having abusive, irresponsible or negligent parents.

"The thing such students really need is more care and love," Yang said.

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