Last week the lives of two Queensland families were ruined. One 12-year-old boy stabbed another, who died, in a playground before school started. One was buried over the weekend, and the other was refused bail when he was charged with murder. Both families are devastated. The school is in shock. It was a Catholic school. This has nothing to do with the intimacy of violence.
Fifty years ago a lot of teenage boys carried knives not as weapons but as tools. We all used pocket knives, to sharpen pencils, open tins and carve initials into desk tops. But they were a status object, too. They didn't get used in school fights, because disputes were sorted with fists — using a knife was not 'manly', and a boy's own mates would get stuck into him for being a coward if he pulled one.
Boys of the early '60s were far more likely to be scared of authority (headmasters with canes, dads with fists, police with boots and a lavish discretion on how to use them). Most boys looked down on 'crooks', and only a crim would use a knife. But 20 years ago, there was a lot of violence among the schoolkids my daughter mixed with, only we weren't aware of it: the media weren't running the issue, and parents weren't being alerted to it.
Why do schoolchildren use knives? As one year 12 student remarked online to Melbourne's The Herald Sun, 'in most schools kids don't bring knives or weapons to be seen as cool, but to scare off bullies. Lots of bullying goes on where one smartass in a pack of mates wants to make everyone laugh.' This group bullying, he said, wasn't picked up and managed by teachers.
Kids don't do their private jockeying for position under adult supervision. Research into playground behaviours and language among boys shows that the 'culture' of childhood hasn't changed much in 50 years: boys still work at their pecking order in the mob, pick cliques, and pitilessly dump on outsiders.
It's a tough boy's world and no amount of equality rhetoric makes any difference to the time-honoured put-downs and rambunctious activities that come with the hierarchical challenges which have been part of western, masculine society since we started noticing it.
Violence among children isn't new. Armed violence isn't either. On 14 September last year, Melbourne's The Age ran police statistics documenting a 45 per cent