by Alexandra Grose

Created on: April 22, 2008

I would love to say yes to this debate, but unfortunately I can't. In fact I use to say yes to this debate, until my children went to high school. A chat between my children and their friends, changed my thoughts on this issue. Even the children don't believe that fighting could ever be stamped out at school. They're the ones who need to be convinced that it's possible, before they'll try it for themselves.

How do you convince a child to walk away from a fight? If another child starts a fight, the second child will not want to be seen as weak and so that child will retaliate. Other children don't think about it and still others don't care. Some see it as perfectly logical to return a punch for a punch. Others have something to prove. They want to show how tough they are.

Fighting in school has always been. It will always be. There are some wonderful programs available, to access for use in this area, however the cost of implementing them world wide would just be too great. The apathy of some parents regarding issues such as these, means that there are certain elements in society, who would never bother to try and change the status quo.

A lot of problems stem from parents. A lot of parents just have too much going on in their own lives, to worry about whether their child gets into a fight at school. It's how some parents solve their own problems, by fighting. Children don't do as you say - they do as you do. They see punches being thrown at home and that's how they learn to deal with their own issues.

Other parents have the attitude of leaving the school to deal with it. It's the schools problem let them work it out, seems to be the attitude of some. They have too many of their own problems to worry about someone else's.

A lot is also just plain inherent in males. Boys fight! They alway have, they always will. Lads will throw a few punches and then get over it. They can be best friends, have a fight and once the punching is done, be best friends again. Girls are now getting into the fray. A sad fact is that females, more and more frequently are now also fighting in schools, unbecoming though that is.

Verbal abuse is another form of violence and is extremely difficult to monitor. How can you do something about a problem, when you can't even effectively monitor that problem? And then there's the monitoring itself. Teachers cannot be every where at once, to monitor the schools effectively.

Some teachers see what's going on and don't actually do anything about it. I have

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