Schools tackle rising violence

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Schools in Australia are taking a stand against bullying and violence as police warn about growing gang problem.

SYDNEY // Teachers in Australia are taking a stand against bullying and violence as police warn about a growing youth gang problem. The warning comes as schools battle to protect their students from armed gang members, with some classes practising going into "security lockdown" - an emergency procedure to keep children safe when there is a threat of attack inside the grounds. In response to sexual assaults and muggings of pupils, Andrew Stopps, the head of music at the Australian International Performing Arts High School in Sydney, founded the School Angels, an anti-bullying programme and web-based support network that brings together victims, education authorities, councils and police. Mr Stopps said the time had come to take action. "There is a gang culture developing in Australia and they are taking their inspiration from the American gangs. They use the same hand signs, the same language; they wear the same clothes." Mr Stopps, who has been a teacher for 20 years, said the bullying problem was getting worse. "They use the internet to talk to other gang members in the United States and they are using the internet themselves to create almost a bragging rights page of 'look who we've attacked' or 'look who we've mugged'. They'll videotape it, they'll upload it. It's their trophy. They're horrendous and they're full of hatred. It is bad and it is getting worse." In April, a gang rampaged through a school in western Sydney, attacking staff and students with machetes and knives. A New South Wales Police spokesman said teenage and gang violence was a growing problem and said it was working with education authorities to ensure that schools remained safe. The spokesman said they had no official figures on teenage violence but said gang-related activity and the influence of violent US street culture was being taken seriously. Detectives have been monitoring an increase in the number of threats of violence posted on the internet by groups that use names such as the Crazy Little Coconuts, the Gee40 or FBI - Full-Blooded Islander. They have uploaded videos showing off guns, knives and bundles of money on various social networking sites, including bebo.com and YouTube, although many have been taken down by site administrators. Senior police officers have insisted that parents should take more responsibility for the actions of their children. Natalie Camporeale, 14, was attacked on her way home from the Australian International Performing Arts High School. "I was on a bus and I had an old lady sitting next to me and then she got off the bus and a stop or two later this group of boys got on. Then two of them grabbed me from behind and then the one sitting next to me starting putting his hand up my skirt and touching me. "I was freaking out. I was telling them to stop. I was just so scared. I couldn't look at them. I was just crying and my mum rang in between and they told me if I told anything to my mum they'd kill me." Natalie, who dreams of becoming a professional singer, now has trouble sleeping and is having counselling. Other classmates have also suffered at the hands of roaming gangs. "They held a knife to our stomachs and said they had a gun," said Nick, 15, another student at the school. He said he was walking to a train station with two classmates when they were mugged by about a dozen teenagers. Their mobile phones and money were stolen, although he said they got off lightly. "They would have killed us if they had wanted to." One of his friends is still too afraid to return to school. "They were having fun," he said. Rob White, a professor at the University of Tasmania, has studied youth gangs and is alarmed by what he has found. "The most disturbing finding for me was the level of youth violence and let's forget about youth gangs as being the key problem. I think the real problem is the level of violence among young people." "We've done school surveys as well as interviews with young people and the key thing that keeps coming up time and time again is the amount of fights and in many cases the fights escalate into almost lethal, or in some cases, lethal episodes of violence." Mr White said research shows that both gang members and ordinary teenagers were heavily involved in violence - as perpetrators, as victims and as observers. Gang members have been found to engage in more street fights, to use weapons more often, and to be injured to a greater extent and more frequently than their non-gang counterparts, he said. While Lebanese, Asian and Pacific Islander teenagers from migrant families are often blamed for the violence, researchers believe that the problems affect all parts of Australian society regardless of ethnicity or race. Mr White said groups responsible for robberies and assaults are more likely to be loose affiliations of teenagers from a similar background rather than organised gangs. One former gang member, who wanted to remain anonymous, said extreme brutality went with the territory. "When you're in a gang you're going to be the toughest and the baddest people in your city, so they lose their brain, they lose their mind and things happen that, of course, everyone regrets," he said. pmercer@thenational.ae

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