Before the new school year started, female students were already fighting.

On August 22, due to personal conflicts and challenges on social networks, an 11th grade female student in Thanh Mien beat and cursed her classmate right in the classroom. On August 26, also due to personal conflicts, two female middle school students in Thanh Ha made an appointment to meet at the commune stadium to "talk" and got into a "gang fight". Fortunately, in both incidents, no student was seriously injured. However, from the recorded videos, seeing the female students cursing and fighting in a hooligan and aggressive manner, many people were very upset, scared, and even haunted.

In the Thanh Ha incident, a 7th grade female student was beaten by 3 female students. If they were just a little less lucky and the incident did not stop soon, the consequences could have been more serious; school violence can lead to the crime of intentional infliction of injury.

The problem of school violence and student violence has been a painful and complicated issue for many years and is becoming increasingly serious. According to a report by the Ministry of Education and Training, in the 2022-2023 school year, there were 1,250 cases of school violence nationwide with 3,478 students violating. The main causes of school violence are personal conflicts (accounting for 40.9%), students not being educated in life skills (38.5%) and being influenced by a violent environment (17.6%). Notably, there has been an increase in online violence in recent years. A 2020 study by the Institute of Educational Research showed that the rate of students being bullied online increased from 12% in 2016 to 18% in 2020... The increase in school violence has led to many negative consequences for education and student psychology. The most serious consequence is the high rate of teenage suicide.

In Hai Duong, understanding how to handle incidents of students fighting, it is felt that many places, for fear of affecting the achievements, reputation, image of the locality, school, unit or using the excuse of wanting to "protect" the students, tend to not want the incidents to be widely reported. Some places try to downplay the nature of the incidents and aim for reconciliation, apology, settlement between the parties... and that's it. For families, when there is a fight between children, parents often have the mentality of protecting their children by default. Some even know that their children are wrong but still try to reduce the blame for their children, blaming the other party...

The above phenomena show that the problem of violence among students does not seem to have received the proper attention and care. If adults still have the mentality of avoiding and being afraid to mention and confront this problem, it will be difficult to have drastic and thorough solutions... Practice has proven that any act of covering up when children commit mistakes will create children who are dependent, rely on power, and are not aware of their wrongdoings. In the long run, the behavior of those children will have a negative impact on families. That is why violations of the law and juvenile crimes are increasing.

There are many different reasons leading to violence among students. Prevention of violent acts needs to be focused on with specific solutions and actions. Right from the beginning of the school year, schools need to organize communication activities, equip knowledge and skills to raise awareness and understanding of violence among students. Families also need to increase supervision and management of their children to promptly orient them away from violent trends in society and on the internet; support early resolution when children have conflicts with friends; equip them with knowledge and skills so that they do not cause and avoid being victims of violence...

Along with that, sanctions to handle cases of students with violent behavior also need to be more strict. When violent incidents occur inside or outside of school, they need to be handled decisively and strictly so that the offending students and other students can reflect on and correct themselves. Korea - a country that is alarming about school violence - has many preventive measures worth considering, such as students who bully at school will have their disciplinary records kept until they apply for university admission; doubling the mandatory retention period for disciplinary records for students with serious bullying behavior to 4 years so that these cases will be disadvantaged when recruiting...

When families, schools and the whole society join hands, have the right awareness, and really get involved to synchronously and drastically implement early and remote preventive measures; handle each case strictly and with enough deterrence, then the problem of school violence will be pushed back.