It’s dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate which of the two evils is more egre­gious—the in­creas­ing cas­es of school vi­o­lence or the de­light that young peo­ple seem to be get­ting out of these in­ci­dents when in po­si­tions to quell them.

Since the re­open­ing of schools last month, there’s been a flood of such cas­es and a no­table rise in fights be­tween school girls for that mat­ter.

The fact that the coun­try is so ex­posed to it, is in it­self a trav­es­ty, giv­en that the means by which these mat­ters are be­ing made pub­lic are by those who see op­por­tu­ni­ties to in­crease their so­cial me­dia en­gage­ments by film­ing the fights in­stead of stop­ping them.

The cas­es are of­ten the same—at least two peo­ple in­volved in fist fight­ing sur­round­ed by a mob of school­child­ren ei­ther egging them on or cel­e­brat­ing each punch.

For­tu­nate­ly, the old adage of ‘what is fun for school chil­dren is death for cock­roach’ hasn’t been man­i­fest­ed as yet, but we fear that from what we are see­ing we may not be too far from the very worst if ef­forts to crush these fights are not quick­ly ac­cel­er­at­ed.

Just days ago, a video emerge of sev­er­al stu­dents beat­ing one boy so bad­ly that it in­clud­ed kicks and stamps to his head be­fore leav­ing him alone on the grass where the das­tard­ly act hap­pened.

As it goes with ru­mours, the word cir­cu­lat­ing was that the boy had un­for­tu­nate­ly died in hos­pi­tal from his in­juries.

The sat­is­fac­tion we got to learn that re­ports of his death were not true, did lit­tle to al­lay our deep con­cerns that we’re on the wrong tra­jec­to­ry of these out­comes.

We are well aware that school fights are noth­ing new. A school, af­ter all, is just a mi­cro-so­ci­ety ex­ist­ing in a big­ger one and these things are ex­pect­ed to trick­le down from time to time.

But where there is law­less­ness in any form and fash­ion, there ought to be law en­forcers and con­se­quences to quick­ly fol­low.

The videos and so­cial me­dia op­por­tu­ni­ties may well be a cat­a­lyst to a dis­agree­ment turn­ing in­to all-out vi­o­lence, as a stu­dent who knows he or she is al­ready be­ing filmed, may feel the added pres­sure to be cap­tured a vic­tor rather than be­ing la­belled by ir­re­spon­si­ble peers, a los­er.

With cam­eras record­ing, the op­por­tu­ni­ty to walk away can be­come a less­er op­tion to those with­out the men­tal for­ti­tude to seek to dif­fuse the sit­u­a­tion, even at the cost of be­ing mocked as a cow­ard.

But these videos them­selves can and should be used as the first forms of ev­i­dence when seek­ing to ad­dress those who spurred these fights on in­stead of quelling them.

Every­one in­volved can be held to some de­gree of ac­count­abil­i­ty.

We are pleased that the Po­lice Ser­vice is work­ing with the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry and Na­tion­al Par­ent & Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion to crack down on these acts with more pa­trols and oth­er ini­tia­tives.

It is im­por­tant that they work to­geth­er for the same out­come and that the planned ap­proach­es are clear, mea­sur­able and come with set dead­lines.

It will take good col­lab­o­ra­tion from all in­volved with con­tin­ued ac­tion to spot the po­ten­tial of these acts de­vel­op­ing and stop­ping them from the root.

We trust that their ef­forts re­sult in a quick ces­sa­tion of school vi­o­lence first­ly and that the psy­cho­log­i­cal in­puts by the au­thor­i­ties with­in the schools help to elim­i­nate them al­to­geth­er be­fore an un­want­ed case of phys­i­cal abuse trag­i­cal­ly turns in­to an act of homi­cide.