Violence In Schools Essay, Research Paper

April 20th 1999. I sat in front of the television with tears of anger and horror burning at the back of my eyes. At that moment, I felt like my heart had been clutched in an invisible fist. On the screen, I watched frantic and horrified people trying to understand what had happened. From what I understood, two high school students had gone on a killing spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They murdered 14 students, a teacher and seriously wounded 23 others before shooting themselves. The assailants, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both 18 years of age, had planned this for one whole year. They had planned to take “revenge” on everyone. Revenge for what? What provoked these boys enough to turn them into vicious, cold-blooded killers? No one knows for sure. But one major factor or cause for this was discrimination. Yes, discrimination against them in their school. Today, taking the shootings in Littleton as an example, I’m going to tell you that discrimination and out-casting of students in high schools is a major cause of violence.

Let me first tell you the forms in which discrimination exists in schools. Students are judged in terms of their personality. The way they walk, they way they talk and the clothes they wear. Then there is racial, ethnic and social discrimination. Students belonging to upper class families do not normally associate with those belonging to lower or middle class families. Other students do not want to be seen with someone wearing clothes that are not “in”. These are just a few examples, but basically, students tend to discriminate others for any visible differences, be it race, ethnicity, status or dress code.

What do you think are the feelings that arise due to this phenomenon? The feelings of superiority and inferiority. The students who think they are superior, abuse and harass other students regularly. Take the act of hazing for example. If you think hazing happens only on college campuses and in military barracks, think again. In recent years, high school students across the world have joined in these rituals. The students that are hazed are freshmen and sophomores or the ones who have been deemed as “nerds”. For example in Minnesota, Edina High School has a hazing ritual called “Tapefest,” where students are tied to trees with duct tape while seniors pelt them with pickles, mustard, and raw eggs. How do you think the students who were hazed felt? They felt angry, enraged, humiliated. These students then go out and buy guns. Now they have reason, motivation and the means. All they need now is opportunity.

Cliques based on status have existed for decades. Teenagers learn very early that as they grow up, they are supposed to learn how to make others envy, even resent them, and Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Nike and Tommy Hilfiger are there just to do that. Amid this class intolerance, there is social intolerance. Too many of today’s teenagers are learning that words like “nigger” and “faggot” are acceptable weapons to keep others in their place.

New York psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman says “all kids need to belong, and if they can’t belong in a positive way at the school, they’ll find a way to belong to a marginal group like a cult or a gang.”

The cast-outs find self-worth by hating an enemy. As individuals, the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were vulnerable, taunted by the other groups in school as “geeks and nerds”. Out of feelings of inferiority grew ceremonies, sacred rituals and symbols of counterfeit power-the swastikas and trench coats. They cultivate what Yeats, a poet and dramatist, condemned as “an intellectual hatred.” Newsweek quotes a classmate saying that the two walked the halls with their heads down, because if they looked up they’d get thrown into lockers and get called a “fag”. Time reports that they were routinely physically threatened and taunted as “dirtbags” and “inbreeds”.

The Columbine High School shootings can be seen as implicating not only the killers’ own sick, twisted minds, but a school culture which humiliated and tormented them in ways that are all too familiar to us. Don’t think that these kind of things only happen in the United States just because of my example. Although it is true that there have been many more incidents in the US, there have also been cases like these in India and Pakistan as well, but because of limited media coverage they are left unnoticed. After writing a column on the shooting for the web-site slashdot.org, journalist Jon Katz was shocked to receive a deluge of jarring testimonials. As one correspondent put it “I was much like those kids when I was in school -weird, cast-out, not much liked?I used to imagine bringing weaponry to school and making them who made my life miserable beg for mercy.”

These are people expressing their empathy for Harris and Klebold. How many Harris’s and Klebolds do you know? Have you ever harassed or humiliated someone in your school or college? Next time when you make fun of someone think twice about it. Oh sure you might say that it cannot happen here, but push someone far enough and you’ll never know what they’ll end up doing. This kind of behavior is a social stigma and its teenagers worldwide, like you and me, who started it and we should be ones to end it.

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