by Corinne Gregory

Created on: August 03, 2009   Last Updated: August 05, 2009

Unless you've been living in a cave the last several months, you have no doubt been bombarded with the horrific images of the rashes of violent school-based incidents. Teens luring a cheerleader classmate to a home and beating her repeatedly while the video camera rolls; a teacher being assaulted in her classroom by students; a high-schooler throwing a metal chair at another in class knocking the victim unconscious; a 13-year middle schooler who admits that he planned to shoot up his school because he was being bullied.

Even more appalling than these animalistic acts themselves seems to be the general lack of outrage about them! A few choice oh my GOSH-es and we seem to be done for the day. The media is more interested in post-game quarterbacking, trying to decide if these children should be tried as juveniles or adults, or whether a well-known comedian's mother's book would be the answer to these ills, than it is in actually analyzing the root cause and investigating solutions.

What's WRONG with this picture?

We as a country spend billions of dollars annually on anti-bullying programs in our schools, yet the incidents not only continue, they appear to be getting worse in severity and frequency, and occur in increasingly-younger students. Today, our kids stand a one-in-four chance of becoming victims of some form of school-based violence before they reach high school. Students aged 12-18 have recently reported that 1/3rd of them have either been the victim of bullying, or have been the bully. NEWS FLASH: what we're doing isn't working!

So, the knee-jerk reaction is to play the blame game: it's YouTube, it's the Internet, it's broken homes, it's our global lifestyle. But, blaming isn't fixing. We have to accept that instead of trying to minimize or manage the existing problem of bullying and school-based violence, we have to focus on preventing it in the first place. Today's children are just not coming into school into life equipped with adequate social skills and character development that helps them understand that this kind of behavior is simply NOT OK. They are not taught to respect and value differences among people, in opinions, in actions. It's all about me! is the mantra of many of our youth today, and the behavior we see splattered all over the 'Net is the result.

People may argue that social skills education belongs in the home, not in the schools, and I'd be the first to agree. But, our schools have become a war zone,

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