Why the Fight Culture at School Keeps Growing and What Adults Can Do About It
The first fight I ever broke up happened on a Thursday, in the narrow hallway between the music room and the cafeteria. Two boys, both seventh graders, had been bouncing off each other all week—locker bumps, loud comments, that particular kind of buzzing tension that fills a hallway before it snaps. When it snapped, it was over a pencil. One boy said the other one took it, and the other said he didn’t, and then there was shoving, and then there was a fist, and then—this is the part that stuck with me—there was a circle.
It formed in about eight seconds. Kids came from nowhere. Some were just trying to see, some were chanting “ooooh” in that rhythmic way that makes your stomach drop, and a few had their phones up, arms extended over the heads of the kids in front of them like they were filming a concert. I pushed through and separated the two, and for a second, I thought it was over. Then a voice from the back yelled, “Jump him, dude!” And the entire crowd took one collective step forward.
That’s when I understood that the fight wasn’t the two boys throwing punches. The fight was the circle around them.
We call it fighting culture, or jumping culture, and for the last two years I’ve watched it grow in ways that discipline slips and suspensions don’t seem to touch. The school responded the usual way. The two boys got three-day suspensions. The kids who recorded the videos also got consequences, because our district has a rule about filming fights—something about “promoting violence.” But the kid who yelled “jump him” got nothing, because he never touched anyone. And the thirty-plus students who formed the circle and surged forward, who turned a small scuffle into a spectacle, they went back to class like nothing happened.
And that’s the gap. We’re treating fighting like it’s the problem, but fighting culture is the problem, and those are not the same thing.
A few days after the hallway incident, I brought it up during advisory, not as a lecture but as a conversation. I asked the kids what they were thinking when the circle closed in. At first, nobody wanted to talk. Then a girl in the back—she’s a quiet student, never in trouble—said something I haven’t forgotten: “If you walk away, everybody thinks you’re scared. Or that you’re going to tell. So you just stay.”
Another kid said, “It’s not about the fight. It’s about not being the one who misses it. Then you’d walk in and everyone’s talking about it and you have nothing to say.”
I’ve been in schools for fifteen years, and this is what I’ve learned: kids aren’t jumping into fights because they’re violent. They’re jumping in because they’re terrified of being irrelevant. The fight is entertainment. It’s a live event with a crowd and a soundtrack and sometimes a recording that gets posted to Snapchat before the last punch lands. Standing there isn’t passive to them. It’s participation. It’s belonging. When the crowd yells “world star” or “get him” or just makes that noise, they aren’t shouting at the fighters. They’re shouting at each other. The fight is the excuse. The crowd is the real thing that’s happening.
So what do we actually do about it?
First, we have to stop pretending that telling kids “don’t fight” is the answer. They already know not to fight. They’re told that every year in assemblies and every time something happens. But nobody has ever told them what to do in the exact moment when the circle starts forming. They don’t have a plan. They only have the instinct to stay in place.
At home, you can build that plan in five minutes. Not in a heavy “we need to talk” way, but at the dinner table, or in the car, after school. Ask your kid this: “If a fight breaks out in the lunchroom tomorrow, what are you going to do?” And don’t accept “I’d walk away” as enough, because they don’t believe walking away is socially possible. Instead, give them a move that exists between joining and fleeing. For example, teach them to walk toward the nearest adult and say, “There’s a fight down by the gym, they need help now.” That’s not snitching in their eyes if it’s done to get help, not to get someone in trouble. Or teach them to use their voice differently. Instead of cheering, they can shout “Let him breathe!” It sounds weird, but it breaks the rhythm. It makes other kids look around. You’re not the one who stopped the fight—you’re just the one who said something that made it less thrilling.
At school, I’ve started changing how I position myself. The fights are rarely random. They happen in the same places—the stairwell by the parking lot, the far end of the courtyard, the hallway corner where the camera doesn’t cover. We know where the blind spots are. The most practical thing we’ve done is put a staff member at the far end of the courtyard for the first and last ten minutes of passing period. We don’t stand there to catch kids. We stand there to interrupt the space. A crowd can’t form when an adult is already watching it form. That alone reduces the number of fights where I work by a noticeable amount, not because kids stop being angry, but because the audience doesn’t materialize.
We’ve also started talking about the phones. I hear adults say “we need to ban phones at school,” and I understand the impulse, but a ban doesn’t change the culture it just moves the filming to a bathroom stall or a bus. The more useful approach is to talk about what it means to be the person holding the phone. In my classroom, we did a small activity where I asked students to describe what the person filming a fight looks like to them, and after the jokes worn off, they came up with words like “bystander,” “coward,” “clout chaser.” They have more clarity about the role of the phone-holder than we give them credit for. They just need permission to act on that opinion in the moment.
One thing that didn’t work was trying to shame them. A few months back, our principal announced over the intercom that “any student who participates in or encourages fighting will be held accountable, and that includes yelling and filming.” The kids laughed. They laughed because “encourages” is such a wide net that it catches everyone and therefore no one. Discipline that broad doesn’t change behavior. It just teaches kids to hide better.
I don’t have a perfect solution. I don’t think there is one. The hallways are still loud and the blind spots still exist and there will be another fight probably before the school year ends. But I’ll tell you what’s shifted: more kids are starting to break the circle instead of joining it. Last week at the far end of the courtyard, I watched a group of eighth graders standing around two kids who were shoving each other. Before the crowd could settle into its rhythm, one of the girls—same quiet girl who spoke up in advisory—walked right through the circle and grabbed one of the boys by the sleeve. “Come on,” she said. “This is stupid.” He went with her. The crowd made an unhappy noise, but the circle broke. And that was it.
She didn’t break up the fight because she was brave or well-trained. She broke it up because she’d decided, somewhere between that advisory discussion and that moment, that standing and watching was the same as being stuck inside. She left. The rest of the circle stayed, and the fight fizzled out without its audience.
I don’t know if that’s a victory or just one instance. But I know this much: the jumping culture doesn’t start with the first punch. It starts with the first kid who decides to stay and watch. So that’s where we need to aim—not at stopping violence, but at making it easier to leave. The punishments will still be there for the fists. We just need the crowd to go somewhere else.
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