Continued from Page 2

Messaging fuels combatants

Teen fight clubs have staged bouts on school campuses and in backyards, city streets, public parks, parking lots and gas stations.

Mac Bernd, superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, says ringleaders have orchestrated fights the same way they do parties: through word-of-mouth, phone calls and text messages. Text-messaging enables instigators to inflame a minor dispute between teens at breakfast into a full-scale brawl by lunch. "You have an electronic rumor mill that moves at the speed of light," he says. That's why Bernd, despite the objection of some parents, is outlawing all telecommunications devices for the 2006-07 school year — including cellphones, pagers, beepers, PDAs, digital and video cameras, MP3 and CD players and video games. The ban covers 74 schools with 63,000 students, including a half-dozen high schools with 20,000 students.

Race does not appear to play much of a factor in teen fight clubs' bouts. Rita Sibert, president of the Arlington chapter of the NAACP, says the clubs include "a mix of all children, all races."

Most of those in the Agg Townz video are African-American. However, just a week after Jackson's arrest, Arlington police booked a group of 11 white teens and one Hispanic youth for fighting in public, Hawthorne says. A fight video made in nearby Grand Prairie shows mostly white teens, city police Detective John Brimmer says.

Silence surrounds participants

Teen fight clubs in Arlington often and elsewhere follow that advice, and police and school authorities have been frustrated by the wall of silence that has surrounded the clubs. Not one of the hundreds of parents who viewed clips from Agg Townz 2 at several community and church meetings seemed to have a clue that fight clubs existed — or that their kids were involved, Hawthorne says. Among local teens, he says, the clubs have been common knowledge.

"It was a revelation for the parents," notes the NAACP's Sibert.

Bernd and other school administrators say most teens, even the ones absorbing the bloodiest beatings, refuse to roll over on fight-club participants for fear of retaliation by ringleaders or gangs involved.

Citing such secrecy, Bernd says he suspects there are more fight clubs operating under the radar.

"It's almost like the kids have created a completely different world we don't have access to and don't understand."

By Michael McCarthy, USA TODAY Contributing: Bruce Rosenstein

Teenage Anger is a feeling; not a behavior.   Anger takes many forms -- from indignation and resentment to rage and fury -- and it is the expressions of the forms of anger -- the behavior -- that we see. Linda Labelle

Parents – Wake Up and Read Up:

Continued...go to page 4

------------------
Please visit the sponsored links on this page. Although they are advertisements, these companies have been carefully selected to provide you with a relevant resource to an issue that you may be having with your teen.