He walks into the schoolyard with the swagger of a gunslinger. As he makes his way to the homeroom, he checks to make sure his weapon is concealed. Survival, not education, is his priority at CC Sweeting Senior High School.
“Man, you have to protect yourself,” Mark, 15, says. “When you come to high school you learn that quickly. Anything can happen and you have to be prepared.”
Mark’s weapon of choice is a box cutter. “You have to prove yourself everyday, so I carry a box cutter,” he adds. “It’s for protection and it’s how I make it in school. But other ‘fellas’ carry guns and things. That’s just how it is.”
In this atmosphere of aggression, violence has become the ultimate test among teenagers at government-run schools οΎ– fueled by a macho kids’ culture. “It’s about your dignity,” Mark explains. “Everyone wants to be respected. Nobody wants to look like a punk. That’s why you have these internal wars in high schools.”
Fear has always stalked the schoolyard, but now it’s spreading with the devastating impact of a bush fire, according to a former RM Bailey High student.
Derek remembers the 1990s gang-related turf wars that erupted between rival schools. “Fights never really happened in school back then,” the 1996 graduate says. “It was more like one school taking on another. We had different gangs in every school. Anybody who didn’t go to our school was the enemy [and] we took them out. That is why you always used to hear about this school warring against that school. It was mainly the gangs.”
Like most of his male school pals, Derek was pressured into being a part of a gang during his high school days.
“It was just something you had to do,” he says. “All of your friends were telling you to join. Whether or not you were in it or not, some n***** from another school was [going to bother] you anyway. The gang made sure no one messed with you because they knew how to retaliate.”
Now it’s classmate against classmate with girls joining the boys in these rumbles in the blackboard jungles.
“A boy or girl could just look at someone the wrong way and get cut up,” Philip, who is a grade 12 student at S C McPherson High says. “You could wear the wrong colours and get cut up or just be smart and get cut up. These girls fight as well as the boys nowadays. Sometimes they even fight with the boys. And it’s all because we listen to what our friends tell us,” he adds. “One time in the hallway a boy stepped on my shoe. I couldn’t let something like that slide. Not with my friends saying, ‘[Boy] you’ll let him do that.’ I had to show them I was a man so I attacked him.”
Being smart can also get you “cut”. In a desperate bid to fit in, Philip decided to ‘dumb down’ and act like a thug.
“I had to bring out the thug in me and let people know that I wasn’t a punk,” the tenth-grader says. “I used to get straight A’s in primary school but that had to stop when I reached high school because I wanted to survive.”
Education just leads to confrontation in this mixed-up juvenile world where dumb is smart and smart is dumb.
“The public schools are a disaster, no ifs ands or buts,” says world-renowned psychiatrist Dr David Allen. “What I’m concerned about is that a lot of our academically stimulated males said to me, ‘Doc when we come to school we have to take our shirt out of our pants, we have to speak broken English, and many times we have to fail an exam to identify with the gang guys.”
Dr Allen believes it’s time to break this gang culture by getting tough on the thugs that use fear as a weapon.
“The way forward is to make our schools safe and I think the government is trying to do that,” says Dr Allen. “Secondly we have to grab school truancy. There is a direct correlation between school truancy, delinquency and pre-crime.”
* The names mentioned in this story have been changed to protect identities.
By: JASMIN BONIMY, The Nassau Guardian
