Deviant behaviors refer to actions recognized as abnormal and not compatible with the values upheld by society. Such behaviors are often found among school students, particularly in secondary schools. These behaviors may include skipping classes, plagiarism, and suicide. According to Centre of Suicide Research and Prevention (2022), age 15-24’s suicide rate was around 9-10, which means every 100,000 adolescents will have 9 to 10 adolescents died of suicide in Hong Kong since 2019. Moreover, according to The Standard Newspaper (2022) reported, the non-governmental organization Hok Yau Club had asked 2,187 candidates for the 2022 Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examinations to do a survey which reports their experienced stress level on a ten-point scale. The result of the average stress level was 7.16 in January. Later, the average result increased to 7.87 in March. As the instance provided by Hok Yau Club shows, the stress level of Hong Kong students is relatively high, especially when they face the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examinations, the university’s entrance exam. High stress may not directly lead to all deviant behaviours but most of the deviant behaviours conducted in school are related to stress such as suicide. This phenomena demonstrated a thesis statement that: The frequency of committing deviant behaviours by students shows the stress level of students, which contains positive relationships that higher stress levels would lead students to commit more frequent deviant behaviours, referring to Golparvar et al.’s research (2014) emphasized that emotional exhaustion have positive relationship with deviant behaviors.

  Besides suicide, there are other deviant behaviours conducted by students, for example, school absenteeism (skipping school), which is the deviant behaviour that will be mainly focused in this essay. Take myself as an instance, I have skipped school over 5 times when I was in Form 3. The reason why I skipped school was because I was extremely exhausted from going to school and began to feel stressed, therefore, I tried skipping school to create ‘extra holidays’ for resting and completing my schoolwork. Afterwards, my school found out I skipped school and contacted my parents. The reactions of my parents were angry and took actions to supervise me going to school. On the other hand, my class teacher arranged a meeting for me to have counseling with the social worker. However, the underlying problem is the heavy workload that school has given to students. My school wants students to develop their talents in different aspects, therefore, besides lessons, my school also strongly encourages students to join sports teams, music groups and club societies, by giving extra marks for the students who participated. Joining school teams means students need to take their afterschool time to participate in training and competitions, which reduces the rest time. Furthermore, before choosing our elective subjects for senior forms, students have to study all subjects before getting into senior form, which makes us have to study over 10 subjects in one semester and almost every subject has its homework or group projects. Therefore, I was significantly lacking in rest and decided to skip school.

  First of all, referring to Structural-Conflict Theory, there are inequalities between me, school and parents. In these triple relationships, I have the least power to make decisions. According to Ball (2012), the headteacher’s roles are to maintain and devise school functions as a formal organization, which also means he or she has the authority to control the school. Some teachers would choose to follow the instructions from the headteacher, in order to solidify their authority and influence in school. Teachers use sanctions to socialize the school as internalized social control, in order to conform  students. Therefore, when students are not satisfied with the policies of school, the higher authority teachers seldom stand for them, which leads to the conflict between students and school and decreases the sense of belonging to school. In this situation, parents would be the only ones who can solve this problem, however, due to Asian traditional thinking, Asian parents use to think that teachers are always the right one and neglect adolescents’ complaints. Parents would still enforce students to go to school and tell them to try harder to achieve the nonsense requirements, which leads to the conflict between parents and students. Some parents have tried to complain to the school, as a result, the school did nothing, or even some teachers would have ‘special treats’ to the students who asked their parents to write complaint letters. Most of the parents choose to take the same stance with the school, however, due to the mentioned cases, school creates conflict with some parents. Significantly, school has the highest authority, and students do not have any authority to arrange their own schedule. 
Applying alienation which means individuals feel excluded from social and cultural participation, from conflict theory that quoted from Dean (1961), the case of unequal authority between school and students creates conflict because of the power of school brings students to disadvantages, then makes students feel not be cared by school as they have been excluded from the structure of school. To criticize the default inequality, I choose to skip school, in order to against the socialization that students should be subordinate to school, which conflict theory can be applied to explain my action.
  
  Secondly, referring to Symbolic Interactionism, gestures, languages, actions have their own meanings, symbolic interactionist use it to express opinions, views, and find people who also share the same points, in this case, school absenteeism symbolizes the resistance of students. As mentioned I have skipped classes for over 5 times during From 3, except from tiredness, another reason why I did it frequently was because I enjoyed being labeled as a ‘bad student’. Refers to Hargreaves et al. (2012), labeling theory is applied when someone acts deviances would be labeled as deviant. Being labeled as deviant, people would give positive or negative sanctions which encourage or stimulate the deviant to commit the deviant behaviours again, leading to secondary deviance. In my case, I was self-labeling myself as deviant to make myself look cool, therefore, I abandoned ‘secret deviance’ and tried to manifest deviance, in order to gain my classmates’ appreciation. As students have no authority to arrange their schedules, being the one who was willing to commit deviant behaviours to challenge the school rules would be seen as a heroic action that illustrated you as a brave rebel and respected by others. The feedback and reactions from others have internalized my personality, which is exactly the term ‘ looking-glass self’, the process that adolescents develop themselves from others’ feedback and reactions. Referring to the labeling theory suggests that individuals who are labeled as deviant by others may be more likely to engage in such behaviors. In this case, if students are labeled as deviant, they may begin to self-identify with this label and feel that they cannot live up to societal expectations around education. This can then result in a continued tendency to skip school as a way of confirming their deviant label. As more classmates also skipped school frequently, it was hard to not discover our deviant behaviours and the teachers would start to ask why we were absent. Then, other students could have chances to explain the reasons why we committed deviant behaviours, leading the teachers to reflect on the works that they have given to us, hoping to have a reduction of workloads by sacrificing our reputations of being bad students. For me and my classmates, school absenteeism is a symbol of our silent-anger, and resistance among authorities. After committing deviant behaviours such as skipping school would be praised by other classmates, which is a kind of positive sanction, encouraging me and others to try skipping school for times that led to secondary deviance. Secondary deviance brings negative impacts to students who have been already labeled as ‘deviant’ because it solidifies the deviant image of them and decreases their reputations by others, therefore may lead them to be identified as deviant even they have stopped the deviant behaviours, projective labeling will also apply to them as preferring they will be deviant as past. If students who always be good, suddenly commit deviant behaviours will also be applied retrospective labeling that interpret their past with their current deivance, affecting their reputations. Therefore, it brought irreversible impacts to those who commit deviant behviours to resist the teachers, as they may be isolated by teachers and students, or even affect their conduct grades which may affect their future career path.

  In conclusion, deviant behaviors among school students often stem from high levels of stress and an overwhelming workload. These behaviors are not necessarily indicative of the students being deviant but instead represent a form of resistance to the inequalities between school, students, and parents that can lead to conflicts. Therefore, authorities and parents should work together to find a solution to these issues that take into account the needs and concerns of students to reduce the likelihood of deviant behaviors.