Frame A:
At the beginning, the perpetrator told off the victim. Except for the girl in the white cardigan who kept staying very close the victim and sometimes touched her with a sympathetic expression, other onlookers just watched.
Frame B
After beating up the victim, the perpetrator posed for the video recording as requested by some onlookers. While some onlookers laughed and spoke gleefully, some others looked disappointed and seemed to sympathise with the victim.
However, no one stepped in.
Frame C
The perpetrator slapped the victim again. Some onlookers looked down, showing that they disagreed with the beating.
Frame D
At last, an onlooker, the girl wearing a white hat in Frame D, went in to separate the perpetrator and victim, telling the perpetrator that it was enough and she should stop beating.
Frame E
The perpetrator slapped the victim once more. After that, some onlookers told her to stop. The onlooker in white cardigan tried to push the victim away.
As shown in the pictures above, onlookers may be very passive in that they only watch the incident, or they may be active in that they may stimulate the fight or mediate it. The survey results show that the way student onlookers respond to a fight involving their peer depends somewhat on their relationship with him/her (Spearman correlation = .248). If they know the person, they may intervene, but if they do not, the possibility of intervention may be lessened.
Figure 18: Onlooker response to fight
50%
29.5%
40.6%
53.7%
9.4%
13.7%
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
No intervention Intervened immediately Intervened, after watching the fight for a
moment
No relation Friend
As shown in Figure 18, for incidents wherein onlookers and fighters do not know each other, half of the fighters reported that onlookers did not intervene to stop their fighting. On the contrary, there was no peer intervention in only 29.5% of the incidents where onlookers knew at least one of the fighters. In more than half of the incidents where onlookers knew at least one of the fighters, onlookers tried to stop the fight right after it started.
Interestingly, the rate of onlookers who only intervened after watching the fight for a moment among „friends‟ is slightly higher than among those who had no relation with fighters (20.3% and 18.7% respectively), as shown in figure 16.
Figure 18: At what point onlookers intervened in the fighting, by relationship with the fighter
79.7%
81.3%
20.3%
18.7%
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Intervened immediately Intervened after watching for a moment
No relation Friend
It seems that onlookers who knew at least one of fighters responded to the fight
somewhat more cautiously than those who did not know any of the fighters. This finding corresponds to the response of onlookers recorded in some video clips of student fights such as the one introduced above. As shown in these clips, most of the onlookers – even if they were friends of the victims – only tried to stop the beating after it had gone on for some time. The looks on their faces (see the above frame B for example) showed that they seemed to disagree with the beating, but they still let the fight run on for some time before trying to intervene.
Among those who did not intervene when seeing their peers embroiled in a clash, there are some common reasons for not intervening. It may be because they knew the ones being beaten up and believed that they deserved it. Otherwise, they didn‟t know the fighters and wanted to keep themselves out of trouble by doing nothing.
„Yes, I did [witness other students fighting]. But I did not stay around to see the whole fight. General speaking, students nowadays are very hot-tempered;
they are not afraid of being jailed so they readily inflict cuts on each other. We
had better not stay near their fight to avoid being accidentally cut.‟ (S114, girl, grade 11)
For those who intervened after a short while, one of the most common reasons was that fighters are well-known for being aggressive or being connected to some rascal types, so if onlookers want to mediate, they have to do so cautiously.
„You must understand. . . . If the one being beaten is our friend, and if we have a strong arm21, we will be able to intervene. We can even join and fight on his/her side. However, if we don‟t have a strong arm, we will not intervene.
We wait until the fight ends before helping him/her. Besides, it depends on the specific situation. If we have a strong arm, but at that point of time we are alone, then we are unable to do anything unless our sheet anchor is a powerful figure that the fighters already know well.‟ (Boy, grade 12, Academic performance: Average)
Third party
Third-party is a term developed in this study to indicate peers who follow a confrontation from its beginning to the end. As a third party, peers somewhat get involved in a confrontation, either by trying to avert it and reconcile the two sides or by encouraging the fight. The difference between a third party and an active onlooker is the degree of commitment and the duration of involvement. Active onlookers may play an important role in a violent confrontation as well as a third party in that they successfully stop it or, contrarily, stimulate a quarrel into a fight.
However, the role of onlookers is just by chance (i.e. they happen to witness the
21 Strong arm: he meant back-up, or sheet anchor
confrontation and hence try intervening) and/or only at the very point of time when the confrontation occurs. In the meantime, a third party is the one who has been following the conflict from beginning to end, which might last for days, weeks, or even months.
It was found in my field study that a „third party‟ is a common component of student conflicts in Hanoi. The survey also supports this finding. Up to 73% of respondents reported that when they had a conflict with other students, they sought advice and support from their friends. However, whether the intervention of a third party is negative (stimulating the conflict) or positive (averting a violent response) varies from case to case, depending on (1) who the third party is (i.e. whether or not s/he prefers a violent solution); (2) the relationship between the third party and the students in conflict (close friends often try to avert violence while normal peers often stimulate it, as found in my fieldwork); (3) how the third party judges the situation (sometimes students believe that only violence can solve the problem, such as when dealing with an aggressive bully).
Sheet anchor
This is a very interesting and special component of student violence in Hanoi even though a sheet anchor may not be present in student clash.
Sheet anchor is a term used in this study to denote a person whose support may help decide victory or defeat. The involvement of sheet anchor may be direct (i.e. they directly join in the confrontation) or indirect (i.e. a student may use the name of his/her sheet anchor to threaten his/her opponent and stifle him/her from fighting back). A sheet anchor is different from a gang. A student is only supported by a
gang in his/her clash only if s/he is a member of that gang. A sheet anchor is not a gang member; it may be a friend, or even a friend of a friend. The family is sometimes considered as the sheet anchor if it is powerful and unconditionally supportive of the student. In general, a student is recognized as having a sheet anchor when s/he has a relationship with powerful people who can provide an effective backup for his/her violent confrontation.
„I used to be his friend. Some members of his family are professional criminals. He himself is quite dangerous . . . [a little hesitant] . . . I myself dared not to maintain a close friendship with him. Yet I must admit that thanks to him I got through high school peacefully even though student violence was quite common in my school. For example, I would slap one of my classmates in a hot quarrel. She was a formidable foe. Just because I was his friend and she knew that, she did not beat me back. Otherwise, I would have been severely beaten by her and her group.‟ (Girl, 12th grade, academic performance: good).
In some cases, a sheet anchor just plays a symbolic role. Students who have a sheet anchor can rely on his/her reputation to protect themselves from attack by others, such as in the above situation. In other cases, the students mobilise the power of their sheet anchor and resolve their conflict with violence. The murder case near the Nguyen Trai High School entrance gate is another example of a sheet anchor‟s involvement in a student fight: two school girls had conflict with each other; one of them had a friend who had some delinquent friends. At the time the clash occurred, the girl stayed at home and asked her friend to fight with her opponent for her. The
friend and her gang then attacked the wrong students, killing one and injuring the other.
5. Summary
This chapter aims to outline an anatomy of student violence by showing the prevalence and seriousness of school violence, discovering the way the students have recourse to violence as a tool to deal with peer conflicts, identifying students inclined to use violence, and investigating the specific roles of each party in a violent episode.
The results show that violence is quite rampant among high school students in the sampled schools in Hanoi. Compared with the rate of violent victimisation in schools in other countries, the prevalence of student violence in Hanoi high schools appears above the normal range.
In general, findings on the nature of student violence in Hanoi are consistent with findings from other countries. Girls have more conflicts than boys but boys fight more than girls. Violence is more common among junior students than senior students (13–15 years old in comparison with 16–18 years old as borne out in studies conducted in other countries, grade 10 in comparison with grade 11 in this study). Those with a higher academic performance are less likely to engage in violence. Verbal violence is more common than the more serious types of violence such as physical fighting and fights using weapons.
Besides features similar to its counterpart in other countries, there are some distinctive features of student violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi, as follows:
1. Even though girls fight less than boys, their involvement in violence (i.e.
using various forms of violence rather than physical fighting only, inciting boys to fight against those they dislike) indicates that girls absorb the subculture of violence as well as boys.
2. Violence is used to deal with various conflicts. Bullying accounts for less than one third of the violent confrontation reported. This finding supports the idea that violence is being used as a common tool by many high school students in Hanoi and is not an extreme reaction against suppression or isolation. It is not a tool mainly used by bullies, as found in other studies.
3. Student violence in high schools in Hanoi appears to be generally rational, manifested in the way students organise and prepare for it.
4. The roles of peers in a violent student confrontation in Hanoi are quite complicated. Peers can play the role of onlooker, third party, or sheet anchor.
Depending on the intervention of peers, a student conflict can be peacefully mediated or, on the contrary, stimulated into a violent confrontation.
5. Because of the involvement of peers, some violent confrontations between high school students in Hanoi bring in up to a dozen fighters or even more, suggesting the presence of a collective mode in students‟ resorting to violence.
In general, the findings of this study indicate that school violence in the sampled high schools in Hanoi, Vietnam, has developed out of normal range, with regard to both its prevalence and level of seriousness. It is found in this study that school violence in the sampled high schools in Hanoi has become a social problem that is complex and systematic, not simply a way for students to deal with their conflicts, and not simply bullying as in other countries. School violence is likely to be envisioned as what Wolfgang (1966) called a subculture of violence.