This section attempts to identify what types of students are inclined to engage in violence. Three demographical attributes were examined: gender, age, and academic performance.
Gender
In other countries, boys account for the majority of both perpetrators and victims of bullying and violent attacks (Knoff 2007; Espelage and Holt 2001, Graham et.al.
2007). While boys are more likely to perpetrate physical attacks, girls are more likely to engage in less overt forms of confrontation such as social exclusion (Knoff 2007), which is bullying rather than violence. This is because during the teenage period, toughness and aggressiveness are considered as important criteria for boys to assert their social image while for girl it is appearance (Espelage and Holt 2001), so boys are more inclined to use violence than girls as a means to gain social status and peer acceptance. Consequently, physical fights happen significantly more often among boys than among girls.
It appears that the situation in the three sampled high school in Hanoi is not an exception. The rate of boys who have had violent confrontations with peers is nearly
three times the rate of girls (50% and 16.1% respectively). It appears to me over the course of my fieldwork that girls often avoid face-to-face confrontation with peers.
When in conflict with peers, girls tend to choose to ignore their opponents or socially isolate them, and/or spread bad stories about them. Different from girls, boys usually prefer to act definitively and promptly through a fight to deal with their peer conflicts, which (they think) may help them end the conflict at a given moment.
Figure 13: Percentage of students reporting their involvement in school violence by gender
16.1%
50.0%
0 10 20 30 40 50
Female Male
As shown in Figure 13, 16.1% of female respondents reported that they were involved in student violent confrontation in the last school year, while 50% of male respondents reported so. However, while girls are less likely to directly engage in student violence than boys, they are felt, by both the students themselves and teachers, to be the reason or instigation of boy fights. When asked if boys or girls are more likely to initiate a fight, an experienced civil defence officer responsible for the area in which my research site is located claimed that:
„Both boys and girls. Fights are normally started by girls. A girl wanted to borrow a mobile phone from her friend who refused, or a girl selected cake too slowly [from the cake selling lady] so the others had to wait in the queue
. . . then they quarrelled. After quarrelling, they told their boyfriend and incited him to beat up the other. Most conflicts start with girls; girls have more conflicts than boys. Then the girls incite the boys to fight. Sometimes girls fight too. But in general they just incite; it‟s boys who fight.‟ (Civil defence officer, male, 50 years old)
Most of my interviewees also claimed that there were more conflicts among girls than boys, and ascribed natural characteristics as the main reason for this gender difference.
„Boys are always more good-hearted than girls. The girls take notice of everything, even very minor details, and don‟t forget something that frustrated them. Once a girl takes a dislike to someone, they will tell bad stories about that person at any cost.‟ (S114, girl)
„Boys are tolerant. If we do something wrong to them [smile], we just need to say sorry and then everything‟s okay. Girls? If we have something with them, despite how many times we say sorry, we are put under a long period of trial in which they will watch and take notice of how we behave towards them and how we redeem our mistake. And if everything is okay after the trial the relationship may then return to normal.‟ (S105, girl)
In general, there are three common ways for students to deal with a peer conflict. In some cases, they may engage in confrontation, sometimes violently. Sometimes, they may simply ignore each other. In other cases, they still keep the relationship as if there was no disagreement between them even though they actually dislike the other. Boys tend to behave in the first two ways while girls generally prefer the last
one and then the second way. However, there is no common criterion to identify what type of conflicts will lead to what type of conflict solution.
Among those who use violence to resolve their conflicts, boys and girls are again different in the way they utilise violence. It was found over the course of my fieldwork that boys tend to use mainly physical attacks to resolve their peer conflicts; so boy fights often end quite quickly. In the meantime, girls tend to use various behaviours in a confrontation such as name-calling/cursing the other, destroying the other‟s clothing, and beating. Girl fights hence often last much longer than boy fights. Some of the girls even record their fight or let other students record it, while the boys do not. This phenomenon of recording represents one of various ways that girls tend to use to attack their opponent (i.e. they not only beat their opponent but also humiliate the person by recording the beating), and also shows that girl fights often last a relatively long time, at least long enough to be recorded.
In recent years, there have been many video clips of Vietnamese student fights uploaded to the internet, all of which are clips of girl fights. There has been no video clip of boy fights so far; even a picture of a boy fight is extremely rare. Recording the fight and then spreading the video clip seems to be a new fad among girls who choose to fight. This special phenomenon of school girls recording their fights will be discussed further at the end of this chapter.
In summary, boys are more likely to fight against their opponents than girls, and the way boys organize their violent confrontation is also different from the way girls do.
The differences between boys are girls however are not only about their frequency or way of resort to violence, but also about the meaning of violence. For boys, violence mainly means a tool to achieve something, where for girl the resort to
violence can be linked to expression of intimacy. Girls are less likely than boys to fight against those they hate, but they are more likely than boys to ask their friends (mostly their boy-friends) to fight for them. As found over the course of my fieldwork, girls tend to ask their friends to take part in their violent confrontation or even fight for them and consider that participation as an evidence of true love/friendship. They also consider it as a signal of their power. This difference, interestingly, shows how boys and girls in my research sites are different in assessing themselves. Whereas boys tend to assert themselves by what they do (i.e.
if they win over their opponent), girls tend to assert themselves by what the others do for them (e.g. if their friends/boyfriend take part in a fight for them).
The differences between boy fights and girl fights (quick vs. drawn out; intensive physical violence vs. various violent behaviours; no recording vs. recording) moreover suggest that girl fights tend to be planned while boy fights tend to be sudden reactions. However, the difference is not great, as shown in figure 11.
Figure 14: Percentage of students reporting their preparation for their most recent fight by gender
52%
28%
6.4%
9.6%
48%
26%
8.0%
10%
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
No, it was a sudden clash No, I was unexpectedly attacked Yes, I did some preparation Yes, I studied my opponent then made a plan
Girl Boy
As presented in figure 14, in total, the rate of girl respondents who had prepared for
their last violent clash with a peer is higher than that the rate among boys (18% and 16% respectively). Concurrently, the rate of girl respondents who did not prepare for their most recent violent clash is lower than the rate of boy respondents (48% and 52% respectively). The rate of girls who did not prepare due to the attack being sudden is also slightly lower than the rate among boys (26% and 28% respectively).
This difference supports the notion that girls tend to prepare more for an attack on their opponent than boys do.
There is also a notable difference between the findings of qualitative and quantitative methods on the comparative ratio between the rate of boy and girl involvement in violence. While the survey shows that boys fight more frequently than girls do, respondents interviewed in-depth tended to affirm that girls fight as much as boys do.
„Girls fight a lot, even more than boys. Such as the accidental murder near our school entrance gate. . . . That incident started with two girls in our school.
Girls have conflicts with each other and then ask boys to fight for them. That incident, I think, was not an accident. They did it with intent, such as the incident on Thanh Nien Road. A group of boys wanted to fight another group but they could not find where their opponents were so they drove around and around. When they got to Thanh Nien Road, they happened to see two boys on a motorbike who looked unpleasant to them, then they inflicted cuts on the two boys. I think you should not only study student violence at our school; you should examine this matter at other schools as well. There are a lot of student fights in other schools. You should also search on the internet. Just visit
YouTube and type „nu sinh danh nhau‟ and you‟ll find a lot of things.‟ (S108, boy, grade 12).
This difference may be partly due to memory. People tend to exaggerate events that strike them. Girls, according to Vietnamese traditional norms, should behave in a soothing and good-natured manner, so a girl fight may be more striking and impressive than a boy fight. Then, the teens themselves are inclined to overemphasize the occurrence of a girl fight despite the fact that it is actually less common than boy fights.
Age
There is a difference in attitude towards violence between young violence users (i.e.
10th-grade students) and their older counterparts (i.e. 11th- and 12th-grade students) as found over the course of my fieldwork and especially in in-depth interviews. The 10th-grade violence users often held that violence was a „proper‟ way to handle peer conflict and that their opponent „deserved‟ the violence inflicted on them.
Differently, 11th-grade and especially 12th-grade violence users often showed a somewhat cautious attitude when talking about the violence they were involved in.
They tended to feel violence was an unavoidable solution which they did not like but one that they must use for certain reasons. Some 12th-grade violence users said violence was an impulsive and boyish reaction.
Data collected via the questionnaire survey is consistent with that found from qualitative methods. Up to 33.8% of 11th-grade students reported they were involved in student violence in the last school year (i.e. when they were in the 10th grade),
while only 28.6% of students in grade 12 reported their involvement in violence in the last school year, as shown in figure 15.
Figure 15: Percentage of students reporting their involvement in school violence by school grade
33.8%
28.6%
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Grade 11 Grade 12
As explained by the students, there are three main reasons why students in higher grades are less likely to commit violence. Firstly, their social status at school is already defined so that they do not need to use violence to assert their power/position. Secondly, they are more grown up and consequently more aware of the potential consequences of fighting. Thirdly and more importantly, the higher the grade the closer they are to the high school final and university entrance exams which are of vital importance to them. Therefore, they need to concentrate on their study and preparation for the coming exams.
„Only grade-10 students are so aggressive. They want to assert themselves, to identify where their position in the school is. However, they usually confine their fighting among grade-10 peers; they dare not pick a quarrel with students in higher grades. We [grade-12 students] don‟t care about them. If they are nice we will make friends with them; if not, we just ignore them. In fact, we usually associate with students of the same grade. Some
grade-10 students are really pugnacious. I find this very boyish. Fights cause more harm than good. I used to fight when I was in grade 10. Now, if I have a conflict, I will talk things out.‟ (Boy, grade 11, academic performance:
good)
„[Fights happen most frequently in] grade 10. Grade-12 students have gotten to know each other quite well. Besides, once in grade 12, everyone has to concentrate on study for the coming university entrance exams.‟ (Boy, grade 12, academic performance: average)
It is true that the university entrance exams as well as high school finals create a stressful atmosphere for 12th-grade students, even those who are not studious. Not only violence but also other school misdemeanours are recorded at a lower frequency among grade 12 and grade 11 students, as remarked by the school superintendent in my research site.
The finding of this study is generally consistent with findings in other studies in that older students (i.e. 16–18 years old) are less likely to engage in violence than younger students (i.e. 13–15 years old). This suggests that the state of high school violence in the sampled schools in Hanoi, even though is quite serious and rampant, seems partly to reflect a phenomenon of the teenage years rather than being the beginnings of professional violence exacerbated by stigmatization and labelling. If not, the violence involvement rate should not decrease as the students grow up, which did not happen in my research sites. Stigmatization and labelling, in addition, actually happened in my research site, however, these processes were not strong enough to push a student into a career of violence.
Academic performance
Academic results in Vietnam are assessed according to a 10-point scale and classified into five categories:
- Excellent: from 8.0 to 10.0 - Good: from 6.5 to 7.9 - Average: from 5.0 to 6.4 - Below average: from 3.5 to 4.9 - Weak: Below 3.5
Students whose Total Academic Results (TAR) for the whole school year are below average or weak must repeat their year. However, the rate of students who have to repeat their year is usually very low. For example, School S3, where student academic performance is weakest among the three sampled schools, has 1,312 students. Only four students had weak TAR, with 102 below average (about 8%) in the semester prior to this survey.
Regarding academic performance, the largest proportion of students involved in violence was recorded among those whose TAR were average, as shown in table 2:
Table 3: Rate of students involved in violence by academic performance Involvement in School Violence
Yes No Total
Below Average 33.3% 66.7% 100%
Average 60.4% 39.6% 100%
Good 31.4% 68.6% 100%
Excellent 17.6% 82.4% 100%
There is a statistically significant association between academic performance and student involvement in violence (Chi-square = 56.2, df = 3). As shown in table 2 above, the higher the academic results obtained by students, the less likely they were
to be involved in school violence. Whereas 60.4% of students whose academic results were average were involved in school violence, only 31.4% of good students and 17.6% of excellent ones were so.
In summary, it is found that the typical portrait of a high school student inclined to be involved in student violence is a boy in grade 10 with an average or below- average academic performance. This finding on the demography of students who are violence users is consistent with findings in other studies on school violence and school bullying as reviewed in Chapter 1, suggesting that the reasons why violence is exceptionally serious and rampant in the sampled high schools in Hanoi is not a matter of student demography but of the social contexts which allow its spread.
4.2. Violence user’s attitude towards violence
Other studies often examine the student‟s attitude towards violence via assumptions such as, „If someone makes me angry, I‟ll beat them up,‟ or „In some special situations violence is acceptable.‟ This approach is good in that it directly addresses the student‟s attitude towards violence. However, these studies investigated normal students and asked about a situation in which some students never found themselves.
Hence, even if these students show a supportive attitude towards violence, it is unsure that they will resort to violence or not if they are provoked.
This study targets students who already used violence, and examines their attitude towards violence via an assumption, „If you could live your life over again, would you take part in such a clash?‟ Since the students already experienced violent confrontation and are able to fully calculate the cost and supposed benefits of that
violence, their answer may reflect better to what extent they are committed to violence as a solution.
There were five options in answer to this question: (1) No, I would not; (2) Yes, no way to avoid it because I was attacked; (3) Yes, it is the only way to resolve our matter; (4) Yes, for the sake of friendship; and (5) I am not sure if I would or not. As shown in figure 14, less than one-third of respondents say that they would not engage in violence if they could live their over life again, while up to 37.1% would.
About 25% of respondents are not sure if they would or not, and 7.4% left the question unanswered.
Figure 16: Percentage of students reporting the possibility of taking part in their last clash if they could live their life again
30.9%
20%
13.1%
4%
24.6%
7.4%
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
No Yes, no way to advoid it
Yes, it's the only way
Yes, for friendship's
sake
Not sure Missing
As shown in Figure 16 above, results suggest that most students do not regret being involved in a violent confrontation. It also implies that the cost the students have to pay for their violent conduct (such as school punishment and the disapproval of people around them regarding violent conduct) is not enough to keep them from getting involved in violence. The low rate of respondents who regret their involvement in violence – less than one third – indicates that violence seems to be a
so commonplace as a way of dealing with peer conflicts among high school students in Hanoi that most violence users are not burdened by a sense of guilt.