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How Student Phones and Social Media Are Fueling Fights in Schools

How Student Phones and Social Media Are Fueling Fights in Schools at george magazine

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This is an increasingly familiar scene in schools: Students recording a friend walking down a hallway toward a classmate they have a quarrel with.

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The rest of this video clip has been intentionally blurred to obscure what comes next: Two ninth-grade girls meet, argue and then begin violently shoving and punching each other.

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A female teacher tries and fails to stop the brawl. Then she tries her next best option: stopping other students from recording the fight, sharing it and causing further aggression.

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Fights like these reflect a troubling national trend: Cellphones are stoking — and making it harder to stop — violence in schools from Massachusetts to California.

An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones

Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted.

He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones.

“It was like a stampede of videos,” said Mr. Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.”

But the pandemonium at Revere High School in Revere, Mass., was just beginning.

Within minutes, students in other parts of the building began receiving text messages about the lunchroom brawl. Suddenly, teachers said, dozens of riled-up teenagers started racing down hallways and careening down stairways with their phones to get to the fight.

To stop more people from flooding into the cafeteria, Revere High posted staff members in front of the lunchroom entrances and issued a “hold” order to keep students in their classrooms. Administrators called the police to help restore calm. The school said it ultimately suspended 17 students involved in the brawl.

Across the United States, technology centered on cellphones — in the form of text messages, videos and social media — has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning. The school fight videos then often spark new cycles of student cyberbullying, verbal aggression and violence.

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