One Punch

Someone punched my son today. I’m not going to over dramatise and call it a ‘king hit’ or a ‘cowards punch’ but nonetheless my son was hit by another human being.

A student in his class thought (wrongly according to witnesses) that my son had been throwing bits of eraser at him during a science lesson. After school, this child waited for my son and punched him. He was punched in the head and knocked to the ground. A friend who tried to intervene was punched in the face, also knocked to the ground with injuries to his mouth. Obviously, this was a pretty ugly situation, but the school handled it really well. Even though it happened after school, they gathered what information they could and let me know straight away so I could contact my child and make sure he was ok…. He was. We went home and iced his injuries to be left with a nasty bump on his head and, it looks like, a black eye by morning.

This is where the story turns. Once we were home my son’s phone took on a life of it’s own. Messages from his friends came in thick and fast. “Are you ok?” was met equally as often with “You took that punch like a boss!” (What ever that means… I must ask my boss tomorrow). It wasn’t long before his sore head faded and he was almost basking in his new celebrity status. As the texts went on his mates and various other acquaintances caught up in the frenzy started vowing retribution toward his attacker with messages like “next time I’ll fight for you” and “He better watch his back!”. I kept an eye on the messages coming in, but stayed out of it, curious to see where things went. Thankfully my son responded to his friends with calls to be calm… let the teachers handle it, doing something dumb will just make it worse. Phew.

For me, the aftermath of the punch was more worrying than the physical attack itself. Without my son’s cool head, things could have really turned nasty. This one event could very well have escalated and had the potential to go on indefinitely. This really worries me. We are in a place where our boys and young men’s first response to violence is to meet it with more violence. I don’t know how we combat this. All that we get from ‘an eye for an eye’ approach is a lot of people missing an eye. No real resolution, and a cycle of violence bound to repeat itself.

Recently I saw a statistic (admittedly I haven’t fact checked) that 13 women have been killed in the last 7 weeks by a current or former male partner. This pattern of violence in our boys becomes violence in our men. It’s something that needs much more discussion. We seem to be going around in circles and the situation stays the same. This isn’t new information. We just aren’t doing anything about it.

Before my current teaching role, I helped to establish a successful program for boys at my school. In this program we explicitly addressed male stereotypes and identified issues of significance for boys. We addressed violence and worked really hard to change this behaviour in the young men we worked with. We weren’t successful with every child, but we certainly had a lot of success. These programs are hard to maintain. Money becomes an issue and these programs are cut back and eventually seem to disappear altogether. Instead, we need to see these programs expand. Funding to offer these programs and explicitly target violence with boys from primary school and into high school are vital. If we want to reduce this type of horrible statistic we need to start supporting proactive rather than reactive approaches. I’m not holding my breath, but if nothing changes… nothing changes.