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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

I'm a similar age. Do school fights still happen? Circa 12-15 years old, these were a normal part of being a boy. There was even a spot outside the school where boys waited for other boys they wanted to fight. Several boys would be there on any given day. There were enough fights that everyone knew where everyone stood in the "rankings." Who you could beat and who you couldn't... says a lot considering how fast kids grow at that age.

I didn't go to a very violent school, and fights got rarer as age made them more serious. My parents also treated it as normal. They didn't encourage it, but it wasn't a major outrage. Schools too. A note to parents or somesuch minor penalty was the usual recourse.

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The Columbine happened in April 1999 and dominated the news cycle for a long time. It likely had a big impact on a generation of American kids. Kids that would otherwise have proceeded straight to a fistfight may have had second thoughts in case the person attacked showed up the next day with a rifle.

As for later years, schools took a zero-tolerance policy, so that would have cut down on it significantly. With social media use increasing towards the end of the 2000s, fights could have been reduced further because people did not want to end up as a punchline (no pun intended) on Worldstar or Vine.

This is probably the answer right here. Fighting now means you'll have video fight evidence gathered from multiple angles, backed up to the cloud, and then potentially used as a societal-attack on you and your family, potentially for years or into perpetuity.

good answer. cheers.

I’m a similar age and in comparison you went to an extremely violent school particularly if adults were treating it as normal!

I experienced way more violence in my late teens and early twenties thanks to drinking in dodgy towns.

Different culture, that is all.

If you read Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Fin, boys fighting, even if they just met seemed to be part of life.

> The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger was before him—a boy a shade larger than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an im-pressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too—well dressed on a week-day. This was simply astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes on—and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom’s vitals. The more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved—but only sidewise, in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time. Finally Tom said: “I can lick you!”

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/74/74-h/74-h.htm#c1

I'm not from that culture myself but I know people who are.

Fighting is one mechanism for establishing the social order of a group. So in the absence of some way of ranking people, people will eventually devolve to fist fights to determine who is boss.

Same age, grew up in the rural southern US and this was my experience in middle and high school. Lots of fighting. Everyone who wanted to "be somebody" was under pressure to participate in it. Winning meant advancing in social rank. At some point the school cracked down and the suspension for fighting was 10 days. After that it was lots of meeting people at such and such location after school or at some party on Friday night to settle things.

Definitely tapered off the last couple years of high school, but some of the rougher kids continued to engage it. Those kids pretty quickly got into serious enough trouble that they ended up in jail, expelled, on probation. That quieted things down a good bit.

I think the problem is now, school fights are handled by actual police, so there's very severe consequences, as in criminal records, not just a suspension. So its likely no tolerance policy removes these kids or ruins their lives.

Yeah, in the latter years of high school, I saw a number of fights end in handcuffs.

Zero-tolerance policies (suspension or expulsion are quick), Columbine (fear of revenge via a gun), and cellphones with cameras killed "for fun"/random school fights. School kids in general had way more leeway before the late 90s.

I'm 33 but grew up in a developing nation. This was common starting at around age 8. The boys fought pretty much every week. Exactly like you describe, there were rankings, within the class and in the larger grade.

This was common for other people who I met later that from developing nations. Not sure if this still happens anymore.

Probably lead.

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

[ EDIT for the downvoters: this isn't a joke or some snide remark. The lead hypothesis as the basis for the huge spike in violence in various societies, especially among teenagers and young adults, has huge amounts of evidence. Correlation is not causation, but we even have a plausible causal mechanism. ]

It probably depended on where you were. I attended grade school in the US in the 1990s and got into only one “fight” where punches were thrown. No teachers were around but there would have been punishment had it been reported.

Similar age group as you and also in the US. I can recall a single fight in school, and I honestly don't think any real punches thrown; it was more of a stand off with light hitting that died down quicker than it started.

Middle/High School in the mid-late 80's here.

Fights were not uncommon. I saw probably 8 or 10 inside school and a handful more after school at designated spots over 4 years in high school.

It was a suspension offense but no police or record was involved.

I won't go into details about my involvement in any school fights, but there were 2 incidents with tormentors at new schools that were quickly resolved and I lived in peace thereafter nor do I regret my actions. Besides I was like 8 and 11 years old at those times.

I don't think those "rougher" times were good and I'm glad there is less of that now. Still (and this might be personal bias), I can't help feeling like we lost something in the sense there is a fundamental underlying biological reality and people are shocked when they find out it actually exists underneath everything and people are more balanced if they learn this at an emotional level early.

I think these are the conditions we evolved under (constant threat of violence and need to deal with it) so even though it's not good and people got hurt and killed needlessly, we are somewhat adapted to that and changing the circumstances makes us a bit neurotic. Or something along those lines.

High school late 80s would have been the peak of the blood lead problem and the age where the aggressive behaviors are most evident.

I would suspect if one looked back in history to pre-industrial times, there were even more fights in that age group.

Without lead.

Same, late 80s/early 90s. I had one altercation in 2nd (?) grade where we mostly just pushed each other around and then wrestled on the ground. I can think of a couple times people got in each others faces in high school, but no knock-down-drag-out fights to speak of.

It's so weird that someone would say they didn't go to a violent school, but there were constant fights. Violence doesn't mean "weekly school shootings."

Maybe its a US thing? Grew up in the Soviet Block Countries, and fighting was very looked down on.

I did encounter some, but it was more like we as kids watched a lot of US media and thought this was how we needed to behave but were more “playing at it” than actually being vindictive.

My one fight in school was with the “toughest” kid in my age group (I was the nerdy outsider they were bonding over to defeat), we duked it out in the yard with half of the school watching, and didn’t get a clear winner. We both got tired and called it quits.

Both got reprimanded of course. Weirdly enough that was the most violence I’ve encountered in my life, period.

I blame video games. Aggressive teens got an outlet where they can establish rankings, troll, be dicks, or defend others, with zero parent supervision.

In my case, since it was done in computer cafes, it had its strong social aspect, with crowds cheering, gangs and clans. Counter Strike was more of a religion to us than anything. And it was so much fun that we didn’t really need “the real thing”.

Looked down on? Must've been a good school, or maybe even country.

Fights and bullying were extremely common in my schools (went to several), though they were the standard public ones (I'm not even sure there were private schools at the time). Late 90s to very early 00's.

I see nowadays it's much less common, as kids are all on smartphones, they've got no time for any physical activities. Silver linings, I guess. Kids still exclude the less "cool" ones, but at least no one (or fewer of them) gets spit on and beaten up.

I've seen kids get expelled for getting in fights, even off-campus on their own time. That kind of stuff simply isn't tolerated anymore.

I was in HS from 04-08. I can recall maybe one fight that teachers would break up a year. The people who got in them were not praised as tough guys, but idiots to be mocked.

Grew up in USSR and Israel. Nothing even close to it.

this was in raanana, early 90s.

netanya, 93-97 in worst high school of the city. those that were expelled from it, next stop was a cross between school and juvie.

fights were few and between. those that i remember had ethnic background.

Do you mean that the fighters were of an ethnic minority that apparently had a higher cultural acceptance of violence, or that the fights were ethnic conflicts?

it was "russians" vs "maroccans" (actually all of them jews). fights were between kids that were troublemakers anyway on either side of equation. usually as follow up to some slur like "dirty russian" and whatever could be thrown into other direction. but there were only like 2 or 3 of those fights over 4 years in school. rest of time it was quiet

Really?! I guess we got different samples. I don't recall many/any ethnic based stuff, olice intervention and I don't even know of anyone who went to juvie.. or even to court. I do know some kids who went to pnimiya over this kind of thing... but that was parents not authorities.

Same years, 5km apart, different experiences. ...Maybe just a different recollection of the experiences.

we probably misunderstood one each other - i though that you wrote that you had fights in raanana :) in general it was totally peaceful in netanya, no "testosterone measurements" with exception of couple of big fights that did get police involvement

I did. There were fights around that age, middle school. I just noted that repercussions were mild at the time. I definitely don't remember police involvement in kid affairs until high school, and even then it wasn't about violence.

I don't think it's that way anymore.

well, those couple of fights that i talk about, were massive. kids from other schools in city arrived in following days "to show presence". so there were some police. (i am describing high school, grades 9-12). but in daily life, there were no fights that I remember.

From what I've noticed, everyone's on their smartphones, too busy for physical activities of any kind.

They still do happen indeed, but the penalty can be much higher.

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