I have heard from a guy friend of mine, who is 6 years older than me, told me that in the past in his secondary school, there used to have 2 gangs (Chinese VS Indian) in his school. The scary part was the 2 gangs had been passed down for 3 generations. The 1st and 2nd generation were the fiercest and scariest. There used to be fights, even slashes in the school itself. The school could not even handle this situation because the 2 gangs were not even scared of the teachers and principal. Imagine if you are a student there in the school, and everyday you have to go to school in fear. I did not expect to have gang fights because maybe I did not see one before and did not expect to have one in a civilized country, Singapore.
Nowadays due to teen gangs fights have made it into the headlines of newspapers, I start to see the seriousness of teens gangs. It is certainly extremely important to have schools teaching students how to avoid when you happen to see teen gangs and also, not to join their society. Schools should recruit counsellors to protect their students from gang activities and boost their self-confidence to keep them away from gangs. If only we could avoid these, we could actually prevent things from going beyond control, such as teen gangs fights and teen gangs will not have the confidence to do bad and dangerous things openly in Singapore.
A few major reasons teenagers chose to join the teen gangs society were because they did not like to study, could not make any friends in school, no self-worth, lack of parental love, dropouts, no self-control, no sense of belonging and no confidence. They feel that after they join the society, they will be able to make lots of friends and will feel good about it. They feel that if they are involved in fights, they are not a 'softie' but a tough person. By joining the secret society, they believe they will have a sense of belonging and this will build up their confidence.
Moreover, there is a major difference in today's and in the past teen gangs. Nowadays teen gangs tend to be disorganized, unlike in the past, gangs followed specific codes of conduct and were controlled by a headman. Recently I keep getting this sms or happen to see this message in facebook about teen gangs, "This message is for every girl who goes to work, college or school alone: if you find a child crying on the road showing his/her address & is asking you to take them there, take them to police station no matter what you do. Don't go to that address, this is a new way for gang members to rape females, please copy and pass this to all girls & boys so they can inform all friends and family members." This is rather horrifying, and when have Singapore become so unsafe?
