SCHOOL VIOLENCE IN HANOI, VIETNAM

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Student violence in Hanoi, Vietnam: should we be concerned? In March 2010, a short video clip of a fight between school girls was uploaded to the internet and immediately caught the public‟s attention The one-minute clip showed a scene of a girl being beaten, kicked and cursed by another girl while other students stood by and watched The perpetrator even grabbed the victim by the hair and dragged her along the road The victim just cried and made no attempt to resist or run away During the mêlée, a bystander joined in kicking the victim, and another made a joke about the victim‟s shirt One of the bystanders recorded the incident on her cell phone Picture 1: Tran Nhan Tong High-school student fight (snapshots taken from video clip) The clip started with the perpetrator pulling the victim‟s hair …and beating her while other students stood and watched The perpetrator pulled the victim along the road by the hair She kept cursing and warning the victim, „You must behave yourself at school!‟ while pulling her hair One of the female bystanders joined in beating the victim A male bystander then tried to stop her and the perpetrator from continuing the fight, but other girls shouted at him and demanded that he stay away When the boy stopped intervening, the female bystander also stopped beating the victim The perpetrator continued the beating Because some of the students appearing in the video clip were in school uniforms, it was not difficult for the police to find out who they were Save for the perpetrator who was a drop-out, all of the students, including both the victim and the bystanders, were 10th-grade students from Tran Nhan Tong High School It was then revealed by police1 that the videoed beating sprung from a trivial conflict between the victim and that one of the bystanders was her female classmate The victim and Source: “Lộ diện 10 học sinh clip „đánh hội đồng” http://vnexpress.net/gl/xahoi/2010/03/3ba19af5/ (Retrieved on 20th June 2012) the girl aggressor had previously disliked each other In the morning that day, the victim jostled against the latter girl when they were in school She then asked the victim to meet her at the park by their school in the afternoon to settle accounts When the victim went to the park, it turned out that not only that girl but also her friends were there, and then one of her friends severely beat her up, one videoed the beating, and the others watched The beating was only stopped when an elderly lady happened to notice it and intervened When arrested by the police, the perpetrator, the 16-year-old drop-out student appeared quite calm She complained to the police officers: „The beating was quite light There‟re much more serious beatings [between students] out there.‟ It was also the perpetrator who asked the student who recorded the video clip to upload it onto the internet The clip was quickly spread and received attention among not only high school students but also the adult public The latter were shocked by this video clip, and school violence immediately became a hot topic in Vietnam since then Mr Nguyen Hiep Thong, Chief of the Hanoi Department of Education and Training Secretariat, said: „I was deeply shocked when I watched this video clip It‟s unimaginable that students can fight like that.‟2 Mass media broadcast updated news on this incident for weeks An official television channel (VTV2) hosted a two-hour talk-show inviting teachers, students, and parents to discuss school violence in general and the incident in particular People nationwide, through various channels such as online forums, newspapers, and workshops, raised their voice to criticize the perpetrator for her savage attack, the bystanders for their Source: http://dantri.com.vn/c25/s25-383459/soc-voi-clip-nu-sinh-danh-dap-xe-ao-ban-trenpho.htm insensitivity, and also took to task the teachers of those students and the education system in Vietnam in general Despite social outcry against the recorded beating, another student fight video clip, this time at Le Quy Don High School, was spread on the internet just two weeks after the previous incident It was just as serious And shortly after this second video clip, another one was revealed, and then another The concern about school violence hence became increasingly pervasive among Vietnamese adults Why did these students treat each other so barbarously just over trivial conflicts? How come the bystanders calmly watched their friend get beaten up and even joked about it? Has violence become so common that students consider it as normal behaviour? Unfortunately, very few sociological studies on student violence have been conducted in Vietnam Hence, even though many conferences and workshops were organized and many articles analysing school violence were written after the Tran Nhan Tong High-school girl fight video clip went online, the problem was subject to subjective perspectives rather than being seen on the backdrop of reliable evidence, and consequently remained a controversial matter People blamed the schools, the schools blamed the families, who in turn blamed society When adults struggled to come to grips with the intensity and the cause of school violence, many other similar video clips continued to appear Consequently, people became worried not only about school violence but also about a new generation of violent youth On many online forums, adults advised each other to stay away from teenagers for their own safety Source: http://vtc.vn/2-242683/xa-hoi/kinh-hai-clip-nu-sinh-danh-ban-da-man-hon-vu-quynhanh.htm Picture 2: Adults advised each other to avoid confronting teens (Comment translated: ‘Do not stare, not glance, you had better not look at teens since teens may confront you even if you just look at them Look them straight in the eyes, you’ll die.’)4 The study to follow is an attempt to outline a clearer view of school violence in Vietnam: how prevalent and serious it is, how it happens, what kind of student is most likely to engage in violence, and how the community (families, schools, peers, and other stakeholders) respond to violent student behaviour This study also analyses the social factors that unwittingly encourage violent behaviours among high school students in Vietnam, focusing on the two most influential institutions with regard to teenagers – family and school To understand these issues in greater depth, three public high schools in Hanoi were chosen as study sites One school is a prestigious school (coded as „S1‟ in this study) whose students are well-behaved and are high academic achievers One school (coded as „S3) is popularly ascribed among Hanoians, students and adults, as having a long history of school violence and low academic performance Another school Source: http://vozforums.com/showthread.php?t=2787097&page=2 (coded as „S3) is ranked in between the first two regarding both the conduct of students and their academic performance An eight-month period of fieldwork was first conducted at S3 to observe all the dynamics of school violence from beginning to end, and also its social context: both the social factors that breed and facilitate school violence and the factors that restrain students from resorting to violence During the fieldwork, several in-depth interviews with students, teachers, the parents of students and policemen were carried out to gain deeper insight into school violence Lastly, a questionnaire survey was conducted at all three schools to collect more general and statistical information on the status of school violence and its relationship to the designated social factors Before clarifying the scope of this particular study, another question needs to be answered: How does school violence occur in other countries? Understanding that school violence happens in other countries would help to define the scope of this study and shed light on the issue of school violence in Vietnam Without such a comparison, it is impossible to determine whether school violence in Vietnam is normal or abnormal, and which of the aspects of school violence found in this study are common and which ones are culturally specific The next part will provide an overview of how school violence has happened in some other countries; then presents the reasons for why this study needs to be done, what purposes this study serve; and introduces the scope of this study Overview of school violence in other countries While there a r e many studies on school violence and school bullying in Western countries, the number of studies on school violence conducted in Asia is quite limited There are some articles on school violence here and there; however, systematic investigation as the one Zhang and Messer (1994) did in China is quite rare Therefore, the picture of school violence outside Vietnam hereafter is mainly based on facts on school violence in Western countries In the Western world, there are two directions of study: studying school violence, and studying school bullying If school violence is a key research focus in the United States (Akiba et al 2000), researchers in European countries look at school bullying instead It is noteworthy that even though school violence and bullying are somewhat different in nature, they are not clearly differentiated in most existing studies, leading some researchers to include bullying in their studies of school violence (e.g Akiba et.al 2000) Sometimes the two terms “violence” and “bullying” are used interchangeably (e.g in Benbenishty and Astor 2008) For these two reasons, researching only literature on school violence would be not be enough to understand the issue of school violence Without reviewing literature on school bullying, our understanding of school violence risked being lopsided from the American point of view, and many important findings on school violence reflected in the study on school bullying could be overlooked This section therefore reviews both school bullying and violence Since these two types of aggressive behaviour are quite different in nature, hence they are studied separately School bullying Generally, school bullying springs from the desire for social status and power on the part of those who bully As a 7th-grade student reported, „Students bully so they can be a part of a group and they it so the group will respect them more‟ (Espelage and Asidao 2001: 54) In bullying episodes, boys account for the majority of both perpetrators and victims (Knoff 2007; Espelage and Holt 2001, Graham et.al 2007) Gender also accounts for different types of bullying engaged in: while boys are more likely to engage in physical attacks, girls tend to use relational attacks such as social exclusion (Knoff 2007) Espelage and Holt (2001) explained that during the teenage period, toughness and aggressiveness are considered by boys as important criteria for social status, as appearance is for girls Hence, boys tend to engage in violent types of bullying as a means to gain social status and peer acceptance The power inequality between perpetrators and victims is a distinctive feature of bullying, making it somewhat different from school violence Based on Dan Olweus‟s study of bullying, Esplage and Asidao (2001) generalise the portrait of a bully as follows: „The typical bully is usually characterized by having a positive attitude toward violence, impulsivity, a strong need to dominate others, and little empathy for victims They are average or slightly below average in popularity, are surrounded by a small groups of peers, and are usually physically stronger than their victims (if male) They are usually motivated by a need for power, are rewarded by their aggression with both positive and negative attention from peers and teachers, and are more likely to grow up in hostile family environment.‟ (Pp 53-54) Knoff (2007) added that some present bullies were bullied in the past While a few of them are socially rejected students, many others are considered popular On the contrary, bullying victims are normally less accepted and more rejected than other students Besides, victims are normally weaker than bullies, and/or dare not to oppose bullying acts (Olweus1993, Espelage and Asidao 2001) As an 8th-grade student explained: „They are nerdy If you got someone who you know who will fight, and you have someone who won‟t anything, who would you pick on?‟ (Cited in Esplage and Asidao 2001: 55) But being weak is not the only criteria for the victim to be chosen Normally bullied victims are students who look or behave somewhat differently from others, no matter whether the difference is negative or positive For example, they may be viewed as too fat, or too thin; they may be thought to be too smart, or they have clothes that strike others as too beautiful (Espelage and Asidao 2001) Although some of the victims try to resist the bullying, they often fail Espelage and Asidao (2001: 57) found that victims often face bullying with resignation: „The victims tend to accept their situation and desire to just survive school every day.‟ Commonly, victims tend to tolerate being bullied instead of calling adults for help, because they feel embarrassed, and more importantly, they not confide in adults (Olweus 1993) „In fact, most children believe that telling an adult will result in retribution by the bully‟ (DeRossie 2007: 259) 10 The rule is that „if someone does something wrong to his/her peer, s/he deserves to be beaten‟ and „if s/he violates this rule (i.e resists the punishment), s/he will be punished more severely‟ This seems accepted not only by the perpetrator who is angry with victim but also by bystanders who are alien to the conflict This is one important reason why onlookers not intervene if the person being beaten did not hold to the rule Moreover, as some students told me, onlookers even join in the fight to beat the victim if s/he tries to resist the perpetrators „They [victims] dare not [fight back against the perpetrators] Did you see many bystanders around? If that girl [the victim in a video clip that the interviewee was talking about] had fought back against the perpetrators, bystanders might join in and the beating would be much worse, so she had better stand up to the beating [rather than trying to resist it].‟ (Boy, grade 12, academic performance: good) This norm, or at least knowledge of this norm, seems to be so widespread and powerful that even the victim accepts it Some of them might not accept that they „deserve the beating‟ but, being aware of this norm, all of them accept the beating once it occurs That may be an important reason for why they did not resist it, or even try to run away or call for help Specifically, if they run away, the perpetrators may arrange another beating and the next time it will be much more serious Being well aware of this, the victim would rather accept being beaten and then everything will be solved and ended „Running away is even worse [than staying to stand the beating] The next time they catch you, they will beat you more viciously It is better to stand up to the beating Besides, if you let them beat you in school, the beating may be endurable If you try to escape, and you are outside school grounds when 211 they catch you, the beating will be heavy.‟ (Boy, Youth League committee member, grade 11, academic performance: good) All these things together, namely the way perpetrators „administer‟ their beating, the way victims accept the beating, and the way onlookers respond to it, provide evidence that violence has become a shared system of norms and values among high school students in Hanoi Hence, students in different roles in a violent confrontation (namely a perpetrator, a victim, or an onlooker) have an „agreement‟ regarding how things should be done Thanks to this acceptance of the same norms, violent confrontations among high school students appear to be „co-ordinated‟ between all of the parties so that the beating from beginning to end takes place unimpeded, which allows the recording to be done In addition, a noteworthy incident showed up in a recently recorded girl fight: an old woman went by when the perpetrators were taking a short rest The perpetrators greeted that woman in a very polite manner When she left, the perpetrators continued beating and insulting the victims with foul language Onlookers casually kept watching the beating or playing games in their hand-phone This incident supports Wolfgang‟s hypothesis on the subculture of violence, claiming that the subculture only operates within its community Members of this subculture of violence only apply their shared norms and values in their dealings with one another, while they still behave in a conventional way towards people who are not members of their subculture Even though many aspects of the fight recording can be explained by Wolfgang‟s proposals on the subculture of violence, two questions remain: Why only girls 212 record or let others record their fight while boys not? And, why the perpetrators this when it is obvious that the video clip is powerful evidence against them? About the reason why all recorded fights are fights among girls, none of them fights among boys, the students explain that boys not record their fights because their fights aim at problem-solving only and are quite serious, so there is no need to record In the meantime, fighting for some girls is not only a problem-solving issue but a performance indicator and/or an assertion of themselves Therefore, some of them want to record their fight to show off their social position „There‟s no clip of a boy fight Only girls keep becoming incensed over trifles Boys just want to resolve their issues definitively, and that‟s the end of it They have no need to record If any boy fights were recorded, you would see that they are much more serious.‟ (Boy, grade 12, academic performance: average) However, it appears that the main reason why only girl fights are recorded is that such fights often occur in a much broader time frame than boy fights Girl fights usually consist of not only the physical aggression but also other forms of violence such as quarrelling which often occurs before fighting, allowing enough time for a bystander to think of recording More importantly, girl fights are normally less serious than boy fights so the students (perpetrators and/or bystanders) tend to think that it will be no problem if they record the fight In fact, in all the clips of girl fights, no weapon was used The perpetrators only used physical power to bully their victims 213 Besides, humiliating actions in girl fight such as tearing the victim‟s clothes off are a factor that makes girl fights interesting for their peers to watch This component of girl fights, which students find interesting, in turn raises a „demand‟ for the recording of girl fights „Only girls record their fighting It is for them not only the fight but also a performance Boys fight to fight, so boy fights often break up very quickly Everything happens in a short time so there is no way to record And no one thinks of recording Moreover, boy fights are the same everywhere, nothing new or interesting to record Girl fights are often interesting [laugh]… You know, sometimes they even tear the other‟s clothes, so it‟s very interesting to watch.‟ (Boy, 12th Grader, academic performance: average) In summary, this study found that violence is accepted and commonly resorted to among high school students, both boys and girls, in Hanoi There are a set of shared values and norms on violence as well as a shared knowledge of what and how things should be done in a violent confrontation among them, indicating the existence of a subculture of violence Yet, further research is needed on a larger and more representative sample of high school students to conclusively confirm The signals found in this study are powerful enough to think of the existence of subculture of violence It should be noted that, once violence develops beyond the scope of individual choice to be transformed into subculture, its existence will be more durable and stronger 214 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION By now (2013), when I nearly finish my study, it appears that violence is not a subculture of youth It appears that violence belongs to the mainstream culture: the young uses it, the middle-age uses it, and the elderly also uses it Men use violence to solve their conflict, and so women News on seriously violent confrontations among people from different populations appears on mass media daily If one reads Vietnamese newspapers daily, one might come to a view that Vietnam nowadays is a quite violent country Is violence a part of Vietnamese culture instead of a subculture of youth? This study is unable to answer this newly raised question In fact, there has been quite a few studies on violence, especially violence as a pattern of conflict resolve, in Vietnam Most of studies on violence in Vietnam are about domestic violence Therefore, whether or not violence is a part of mainstream culture in Vietnam is an unanswered matter Besides, news on violent incidences among adults has just boomed for recent few years When I started this study in 2007, five years ago, a major part of news on interpersonal violence in Vietnam had been news on school violence However, only until 2010 school violence started to greatly attract public concern thanks to the spread of the video clip of Tran Nhan Tong high school girl fight Since then, school violence became a hot topic in Vietnam, strengthened by regular news on school violence nation-wide It was this intensive news coverage on school violence that made me think of the existence of a subculture of violence among students and inspired me to conduct this research on school violence 215 This study attempts to bring this phenomenon to light by exploring the process by which school violence originates and how this phenomenon operates among high school students in Hanoi This study also aims at providing a reliable and insightful explanation for the onset and development of this phenomenon among Hanoian high school students, applying Edwin H Sutherland‟s differential association theory and Travis Hirschi‟s social control theory To better understand how society conditions individuals so that they resort to violence, this study examined violence in high schools instead of middle school, given that high school students are more capable of calculating the cost and assumed benefit of getting involved in violence – both illegal and dangerous – than are middle school students In order to attain these aims, this study applied a mixed-method approach First, a period of eight months was first spent observing participants in a high school in Hanoi where school violence is prevalent to obtain insight into the operation of school violence in relation to the social environment Next, semi-structured interviews were conducted with different stakeholders – namely violence perpetrators, victims, bystanders, teachers, parents, school superintendents, and policeman – in order to gain a better understanding of school violence and the social factors that facilitate it or stifle it from different points of view Lastly, a survey was taken in three high schools in Hanoi from which the data provides a reliable and general description of school violence and its association with specified social factors extracted from the differential association theory and the social control theory 216 It was found in this study that most student confrontations in the investigated schools in Hanoi is actually violence, not bullying, as in schools in other countries This was reviewed in Chapter Moreover, results show that violence has been perpetrated quite rampantly among high school students in Hanoi, as borne out by the high rate of students who were victims of violent attacks by peers and a high rate of student involvement in violent confrontations with peers in the year prior to the survey, as reported by the survey respondents Compared to school violence in the US, school violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi is not only rampant but also quite serious The rate of clashes where a weapon is used is quite high, and so is the rate of clashes that result in serious physical consequences, including injury and death In addition, whereas the portrait of seriously violent attackers in schools in other countries is the „quiet, isolated, and withdrawn student‟ (Jordan 2002) or the student who „experienced chronic severe rejection and bullying by peers‟ (DeRosier 2007), this study found no distinctive traits of violence users (albeit that they are often students of average or below average level of academic performance) And the reasons for resorting to violence are varied (not only bullying or rejection); most commonly it is sparked by a trivial conflict In addition, most students involved in school violence reported that they did not regret their involvement in violence These facts taken together indicate that violence has become a common tool to solve peer conflicts by high school students in the sampled schools in Hanoi, rather than a tool used by a special group such as isolated/rejected students or delinquent students The results of this study, accordingly, contribute an evidence-based warning that, different from the „culture of fear‟ found in the US – an overreaction – the current 217 public fear of school violence in Vietnam is reasonable, and that an intervention programme should be designed and operated soon to constrain the spread of school violence and lessen its consequences Besides, one of the most notable findings of this study on the nature of school violence is that acts of school violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, is more akin to a social event rather than simply being an action or reaction It involves the participation of different parties in addition to the two students in conflict In addition to input from onlookers in most of student violence episodes in any other countries, student violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, often involves third parties who follow the confrontation from its genesis as a simple conflict to the point where violence is committed Further, a sheet-anchor whose power plays a determinant role in deciding who will win the game (even though his intervention is sometimes indirect such as simply using his name) is used to threaten the opponent In addition, there are three prominent trends in the development of school violence that emerge from this study The first one is the existence and operation of imaginary violence, created by dramatized rumours about violent incidents between students This imaginary violence plays a very important role in the spread of actual violence: students take action in response to this imaginary violence such as possessing a weapon in school to protect themselves, and interpreting teasing from peers as an invitation to fight More importantly, this imaginary violence also contributes to the reticence of school authority figures to handle student violence, which in turns gives students the impression that they have free rein to resort to violence 218 Consequently, violence seems developed enough to have escalated from an individual response to peer conflict into what Wolfgang (1969) called a subculture of violence It should be noted that once a subculture of violence is formed, violence will become more stable and durable than a passing social phenomenon Besides, another prominent trend of school violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi to be noted is the operation of a network of violence Network of violence is the term used in this study to indicate the direct involvement of a friend or a group of friends of the students in conflict in the violent confrontation Whereas high school students in other countries often fight against their opponent on their own, high school students in Hanoi sometimes call their friend (or friends) to fight with them, or even for them More particularly, friend(s) of the student in conflict sometimes, in turn, bring in their own friend(s), enlarging the network of violence and making the size of a violent confrontation bigger This existence of a network of violence is also an indicator for the dissemination of violence characterising high school students in the sampled schools in Hanoi which makes an act of violence seem trivial, simply a matter of lending assistance to a peer Briefly, school violence in the investigated high schools in the sampled schools in Hanoi can be described by three adjectives: rampant, serious, and recycling Why is this happening? Results show that the demographical portrayal of students involved in student violence in Hanoi is quite similar to its counterpart in the US, suggesting that demographical factors are not the root of the high prevalence and seriousness of school violence Instead, it is more appropriate to highlight social 219 factors that cause this difference in the prevalence and seriousness of violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi, Vietnam It is found in this study that parents frequently not know about their child‟s involvement in school violence, or if they know, they don‟t care And if they care, they not know how to handle it properly so that their child is convinced to avoid using violence in future In addition, authority figures in school often avoid dealing with school violence whenever they can Such does not encourage violence, but it leaves the door open for violence to occur among students This finding suggests that intervention programmes to reduce school violence should pay great attention to tackling this neglect on the part of authority figures and improve the disciplinary environment through which violence is to be constrained The finding on parental response to student involvement in violence also has a great policy implication: intervention programmes to reduce school violence should be school-based This study contributes additional evidence that delinquent students are often from families with poor parenting It is very likely that, as found in my fieldwork, parents of violent students will cooperate well with teachers to handle their child‟s involvement in violence Although parents may want to so, most of them not know how to handle it or are unable to Outreach to the family therefore seems costly and ineffective, not to mention the potential risks for social workers when visiting delinquent students at home Regarding the impact of social factors on student recourse to violence, it is interesting that while the bond to the family is found negatively associated with student involvement in violence, the bond to the school has no such effect This 220 means if a student wants to use violence to solve a conflict with a schoolmate, s/he will, no matter how closely bonded the student is to his/her school The reason for this unusual finding is, perhaps, that school violence has become so prevalent that it neutralizes the restraining effect of school bonds Besides, the role of family is different from that of school in controlling the conduct of students and their association with delinquent peers For example, while involvement in family activities reduces the amount of time teens may have to spend with friends, involvement in school activities increases the time spent with peers When measuring the association between the elements of social bonds and student involvement in violence, this study comes up with two significant remarks Firstly, the restraining effect of each element of the social bond appears heavily dependent on the cultural context, as discussed in Chapter This study, in line with Hoffman 2002, calls for more attention to the effect of the specific cultural context when analysing a social matter and its relation to other social factors Besides, it suggests that researchers should not expect blanket advocacy of the restraining effect of a social bond element on an individual‟s deviancy, since the effect of each element may vary from one culture to another Secondly, it was found in this study that bonds to a social institution exert a specific and differential control effect on an individual‟s deviancy Particularly, the family bond was found significantly related to student involvement in violence while the school bond was not This tends to suggest that instead of examining a general „social bond‟ as is commonly done in existing studies, the social bond should be examined in relation to a specific social institution, such as family bond or school bond 221 The findings of this study only support Hirschi‟s argument on the restraining effect of family bond on student‟s deviancy and lend no support to the proposed association between the school bond and student‟s deviance This study generally supports Sutherland‟s arguments on how deviance in the form of violence is learnt and spread Both having violent friends and witnessing student violence are documented as being positively associated with student involvement in violence As a supplement to Sutherland‟s differential association theory, this study further finds that violence, as probably other sorts of deviance, is not a static experience, and the process in which violence is learnt and spread is two-way in that once violence is learnt, it in turn stimulates this process by joining the source distributing violent patterns However, it was found over the course of my fieldwork that whether a student‟s involvement in violence ends up as a one-off experience or otherwise, it starts a recycling process depending on how s/he is bonded to conventional society, especially family This finds supports both the differential association theory and the social control theory However, it should be noted that this study does not aim at establishing a causal model to explain student violence based on these theories, which may be considered as a limitation of this study This is because, as explained in Chapter 1, there has been no sociological study on school violence in Vietnam so far This study, as the first attempt to bring the matter of school violence in Vietnam to light, may therefore be likened to paving the way for this research theme Accordingly, its primary aim is at discovering the nature and prominent patterns of school violence and exploring how school violence is nurtured and conditioned by social factors 222 Based on evidence provided in this study, future research may establish a causal model to explain school violence Additionally, there are some interesting matters that this study does not address, mostly because they are beyond the aims and scope of this study, and future research on this topic may well focus on them First is whether or not the bond to a violent family increases the chances of a student getting involvement in violence As suggested by the social control theory, the bond to family helps reduce student deviancy, including violence Actually even deviant parents may want their child to be good person However, as suggested by the differential association theory, attachment to violent family members tends to induce a student to learn violent patterns and definitions favourable to violence In this matter, which theory better explains a student‟s involvement in violence? Moreover, even though this study highlights the significant effect of the cultural context, the role of the cultural context is not clearly defined and measured in this study (again, because this is beyond the aim and scope of this study) Future research may investigate school violence in both urban schools and rural schools, for example, to clarify the role of different cultural contexts in conditioning the development of student violence and also the relation between student violence and its social predictors Besides, even though this study discussed the meaning of violence to students here and there, actually discovering the meaning of violence to students was not one of the main research objectives I started this study with a simple concept of violence Violence, to me, is just a tool, among many different tools, to deal with conflict 223 However, over the course of my research, I found that violence is not a conduct It often contains and implies complex social meanings To most students who proactively resort to violence to deal with peer conflict, violence means justice They suffer from unfair treatment, and they resort to violence as an attempt to establish equilibrium between them and the ones who make them suffered Why students resort to violence instead of another solution? There are many specific answers, but one key answer that underlies most of these specific answers is that students at my research sites, particularly those who often use violence, not trust authorities and social justice They not trust that their parents and teachers or policemen can give them a fair and adequate solution for their conflict with their peers, so they have to rely on their own power Violence, interestingly, sometimes mean intimacy and solidarity Students take part in a fight against someone with whom they have no conflict to show their care for someone or to assert their membership of a group Students, especially girls, who have their friend fought for them consider violence as an evidence of love/care, and they are proud of it Why could they be proud of such a dangerous and harmful action as violence? The answer more or less implies a social anomie where traditional norms and values are being challenged and new norms and values are emerging This is to say that there are still new things to discover about school violence in Vietnam: what it actually means to those who use it, those who bear it; and other stakeholders Last but not least, further research should also be conducted to examine how social bonds are challenged by rapid social changes in Vietnam, and how individuals -student, parent, and teacher - vacillate between traditions and new cultures to construct their self and define their way of life This direction of the 224 research is of great importance for the understanding of not only why school violence is generated but also how daily interactions and personal choice of action are determined in such a changing society as Vietnam after Đổi Mới How broader legal environment - including legislature, executive bodies, and justice – contributes to the spread of violence and affects individual choice of such illegal solution as violence over other legitimate alternatives is also one of the important questions for future study 225 ... is mainly based on facts on school violence in Western countries In the Western world, there are two directions of study: studying school violence, and studying school bullying If school violence. .. of school violence Without reviewing literature on school bullying, our understanding of school violence risked being lopsided from the American point of view, and many important findings on school. .. is intentional in some serious school violence incidents such as the school shooting at Virginia Tech, and earlier at Columbine High School. 8 Another difference between school violence and school