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Bullying starts in earnest in middle school, in sixth and seventh grade, with verbal aggression, social shunning, pushing and shoving. It can get much worse in high school, up to and including homicide. And last week, 17-year-old Shazeb Andleeb of Harbor City was beaten to death at Narbonne High School by about 10 other youths as classmates looked on in horror. Teen murders are on the rise, defying a general downward trend in violent crime, according to FBI statistics.
KATHY SEAL and JAMES BLAIR talked with students and adult counselors about student-on-student meanness and outright violence. ROSS GREENMAN
14, eighth grade, Lincoln Middle School, Santa Monica All too often I am approached by kids who want to fight-it's as though these people are so angry, they practically come up and ask if they can hit you. It's going to take a lot more than a few detentions to turn down the heat. Meanness is like a fire that grows inside you.
Way too often the parents of delinquent children are either nonexistent or too caught up in their own issues to notice any potential problems.
Perhaps the biggest influence on us teens, though, as much as I hate to admit it, is media violence.
Whatever is shown on television is accepted subconsciously as OK. TV is like a model of reality, and what the characters of shows are doing, kids tend to do. It is double-sided, though, because the producers of shows often base their ideas on things that are popular in the "real" world. It's ironic that often the students with the least ability to handle a heavy movie like "Pulp Fiction" are among the first to see that movie. * CRYSTAL ZIRAK
17, senior,...