Death in a Harbor City School: The Roots of Violent Bullying : YOUTH OPINION

Bullying starts in earnest in middle school, in sixth and seventh grade, with verbal aggression, social shunning, pushing and shoving. It can get much worse in high school, up to and including homicide. And last week, 17-year-old Shazeb Andleeb of Harbor City was beaten to death at Narbonne High School by about 10 other youths as classmates looked on in horror. Teen murders are on the rise, defying a general downward trend in violent crime, according to FBI statistics.

KATHY SEAL and JAMES BLAIR talked with students and adult counselors about student-on-student meanness and outright violence. ROSS GREENMAN

14, eighth grade, Lincoln Middle School, Santa Monica

All too often I am approached by kids who want to fight--it’s as though these people are so angry, they practically come up and ask if they can hit you. It’s going to take a lot more than a few detentions to turn down the heat. Meanness is like a fire that grows inside you.

Way too often the parents of delinquent children are either nonexistent or too caught up in their own issues to notice any potential problems.

Perhaps the biggest influence on us teens, though, as much as I hate to admit it, is media violence.

Whatever is shown on television is accepted subconsciously as OK. TV is like a model of reality, and what the characters of shows are doing, kids tend to do. It is double-sided, though, because the producers of shows often base their ideas on things that are popular in the “real” world. It’s ironic that often the students with the least ability to handle a heavy movie like “Pulp Fiction” are among the first to see that movie.

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CRYSTAL ZIRAK

17, senior, Jordan High School

Long Beach

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When I first entered Jordan, I knew a lot of people from junior high so I was comfortable. In my sophomore year, people started getting tense; that’s when a lot of the racial tension was going on outside of the school and it was also brought into the school.

Kids started getting rowdy and fighting. When I would see a fight break out, I couldn’t believe people would sit there and beat each other like a dog on the street.

The teachers got together and brainstormed; students got involved as well. They recruited students from all different ethnicities, juniors and seniors, boys and girls. They brought us together during the summer.

The group is called Peace 90805. We went to a workshop that lasted about four days. We [students] made most of the decisions, being that we had to walk on this campus and deal with all this stuff everyday.

When stuff pops up and a Peace 90805 member is around, we mediate, try to calm people down and try to prevent a problem. I think it works pretty well because we’ve got a lot of influential people in our group--people that other students would look up to. older students, [who younger peers] look at as role models because they want to fit in.

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SHERRY MAKKAR

14, eighth grade, Palms Middle School

Los Angeles

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Kids are mean to each other not because they want to be mean but because their peers encourage them to shun a certain person for their appearance, ethnic backgrounds or other distinctive qualities. And where do their peers get these ideas of what a person should look like or behave? From the media and the stereotypes they stress in everything from which shoes to wear to hair styles.

Some students are mean to each other so they can feel big. They get a kick out of putting somebody down, usually in front of their friends.

A person might have looked at them funny, talked to his woman or her man, copied their clothing style or the other person just was getting more attention. Trivial reason to be mean and even fight with someone? Not in the eighth grade.

The Adult View

RICH MILLS

School psychologist; consultant specializing in conflict resolution and peer counseling for the Los Angeles Unified School District

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Some estimate that as many as 20% of us are victims of bullies sometime. Even though it begins in elementary school, it takes different forms and goes on all the way through our whole lives. We can even call domestic violence bullying.

Students, in many ways, are mirrors of adult functioning. All this racism, calling each other names, especially at the elementary level, do they know what they mean? No. They’re getting them from adults.

Let’s understand something, too, that children know how to use their underdog position. They know the power of threatening and of carrying weapons to school and of writing graffiti and making threats to adults. In a sense, it makes them feel good to threaten people who normally would be more powerful than they.

I think there are episodes that overwhelm all of us, but, no, I don’t think we’re overwhelmed [by violence in the schools]. I think we’re making a lot of progress. I think it’s an issue that is making everyone say we’ve got to do something as a group. This might just be the thing that pulls us together rather than pulls us apart.

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ALAN KAKASSY

Teacher, peer counseling program sponsor, Granada Hills High School

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No. 1, it’s really important for the public to understand that the core group of kids on most campuses are still very positive and struggling to be assertive without resorting to uncontrolled rage or anger.

No student today can be seen apart from the context of their life, not just in school studying, but in their community and family. I know this is old sociology but, unfortunately it’s still relevant: With the increase in divorce and single parent families, more and more kids are basically on their own to raise themselves.

The media has to take its share of responsibility in creating a precondition that violence is almost acceptable. As students come to me at the high school level, they’ve already experienced I don’t know how many hours of murders and mayhem through television. The increase in video game violence doesn’t make it any easier.

Unfortunately, there’s an image of someone who tries to be more peaceful or talks about a nonviolent approach as somehow weak or prey for predatory people--often, at the high-school level, gang members.

The message of saying “we care” is very important. There are structured programs like Impact, which promotes developing trusting relationships. The program is now being threatened in Congress.

This is the least cost-effective approach I could think of. The ultimate result is that there will be more potential for students to feel like there’s no one to talk to and to act out their anger instead of finding a place to vent it in a constructive fashion.