Ong Hock Chuan – When a group of students commandeered a 50-seat public bus to attack a rival gang last week, it was in many ways business as usual in Jakarta.

Student brawls happen all over Asia, but in the Indonesian capital they increasingly end as newspaper obit-uaries.

Police prevented serious injuries in last week's incident by quickly intervening and arresting nine of the students. They confiscated sickles, a sword, a knife, two sharp steel rulers, two belts with cogwheels attached to them and steel bars.

But other incidents have ended in tears - and worse. Nineteen students were killed last year in the 150 school-related brawls reported by police, and a total of 1,842 students were arrested. Police also said 541 buses were damaged last year as students "ran amok" in two schools.

There are many explanations for the violence; analysts have pointed to everything from poverty to bad television programming.

One of the more intriguing explanations centers around bus fares. Several years ago, to make transportation more affordable for students, the government introduced a student fare of 100 rupiah (US$0.04), compared with the normal Rp400 (US$0.17) ticket price.

But critics claim the well-intentioned measure has backfired. Bus drivers earn their day's wages in accordance with how much they collect from their passengers and it thus makes little sense for them to pick up students during peak traffic hours.

"They often would not want to pick us up," said Argus Sunandi, a 19-year-old economics student at Universitas Mercubuana, "because they can earn Rp300 more carrying other passengers".

Students are left stranded for hours as a result and many of them take to roaming in gangs. When these gangs of adolescents meet, it takes very little to spark a fight.

Bus fares, however, clearly do not tell the whole story. Analysts are still stumped by the escalation in the level of violence.

"The quality of violence and the number of students taking part are beyond everyone's expectations," said Daniel Dahkidae, a sociologist and senior researcher at Kompas newspaper.

He is not the only one stunned by the brawls. "The level of violence has developed at such a surprising rate that we cannot find an answer to explain why this is so," said Yaumil Chariah Argoes Achir, the head of the Psychology Faculty at the University of Indonesia. "So far even police, educators and social scientists have not been able to explain the phenomenon."

But Yaumil, who also serves as the assistant minister for population, pointed out that given Jakarta's huge student community, the number of students involved in violence in percentage terms was not very large.

Nevertheless, it was still a cause for concern, she said, and efforts to understand the factors driving students to violence were crucial.

"One of the most important factors is the stressful life they face every day in an urban environment," she said.

Sociologist Dahkidae agreed. He said that in a survey of students by Kompas two years ago, the paper found that most of the students who were involved in violence came from low-income classes and broken homes. Most of the student brawls also involved vocational and technical schools where these students end up.

The pressure of the living environment on these students cannot be underestimated, said an analyst. "Just take a drive to one of the poorer areas of Jakarta. There you will find narrow, congested streets reeking from waste, car fumes or a polluted river nearby. The houses are small, often there are no private toilets in these houses. And everywhere there is little privacy."

"Many of these students do not see much prospect in the future," said Yaumil. "They know that for them it is difficult to get into tertiary education and even if they do it would be difficult for them to get jobs."

A chat with some students at Blok M, a shopping area and bus terminus in south Jakarta which is a popular after-school hangout, seemed to confirm this. "I want to be a rich man," said Deny, a first year economics student at Universitas Mercubuana. He, however, could not say how he planned to get rich or why he wanted to be rich.

Wandering through the labyrinthine of stalls of Blok M, a pack of about 30 students stick to the basement of the shopping mall. "We ngongkrong [loiter] around here because we don't want to go up [to the ground floor] yet," said one student in the group from Penergbangan Technical School.

The student would not give his name but said that if they were to go up they would surely meet other student gangs from different schools and a fight would be likely. So they hang around in the basement of the shopping plaza until most of the other students have gone home before making their own way back.

Another student, Agung Canori, said that many of his peers also were in no hurry to go home. "Many of them do not come from nice homes and when they go back their parents get them to work. They don't want to do this so they hang around here until late."

Experts have also blamed the usual ills of violent television programs and a rapidly-modernizing society as causes of student violence.

Sarlito Sarwono, a consultant psychologist who lectures at the University of Indonesia, however, said that while it was easy to blame socioeconomic factors, what must not be overlooked was that government, teachers and parents were not properly addressing this problem.

"There are many followers but the students who get involved in the violence are actually criminals and must be treated as such," he said.

"People not only are reluctant to treat them as criminals because they are in school uniforms," Sarlito said, "[but] the teachers actually end up rewarding some of the troublemakers.

"They promote them up the grade at the end of the year irrespective of their academic performance just to get rid of them.

"When other students see this happening, they begin to admire these troublemakers because they are able to get away with it," he said.

Sarlito added that a large part of the problem also came from a culture which has developed in Indonesia in which people, especially teachers and other civil servants, were loath to take initiative for fear of failing.

"Nobody wants to take the first step to solve the problem. Everybody is waiting for Pak Harto [President Suharto] to give the word and take the first step." Minister for Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro has blamed the rural-urban migration patterns in the country which may be partly responsible for a 2.5-fold increase in the number of criminal cases in recent years.

But he also said that many of the students did not have an outlet for their youthful energy because of poor facilities. "Consider: Of the 1,600 schools in Jakarta how many of them have a sports field? Only very few," he said in a recent interview with a local magazine.

Wardiman and other educationalists also blame violent television programs and violent video games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.

He said one way to reduce these violent incidents was to choose with care the inter-school competition venues, where many of the brawls broke out. Another solution was for teachers and parents to have better supervision of the students.

But Wardiman ruled out changing the laws to penalize offending students because many of them were minors. Sending any of them to correctional institutions would bring a torrent of protests from activists, he said.

Not everyone is at a complete loss to deal with student violence.

Asrul Chatib, who is headmaster of SMU 3, a lower secondary school in the Kuningan suburb of southern Jakarta, proved in his last posting that school violence can be curbed, though not totally eliminated.

For the past four years, Asrul headed SMA 70, a school notorious for its brawling students and ranked about 40 in terms of academic performance. When he started, recalled Asrul, there were fights every day, not only between students of his school with students from other schools but also among themselves.

Four years later the incidence of school violence was down to perhaps one minor brawl in a month. The academic performance of the school also improved. It is now among the best 10 schools in the city. (See accompanying story.)

"There are many reasons for school violence," Asrul said. "But in the end it boils down to giving the students and teachers a good environment and self-respect."