ABSTRACT
Students have become popularly associated with violence, although the amount and degree of student violence in this country seem to have remained fairly constant. Violence was perfectly proper if it could be defined as 'good-humoured fun'. Students themselves recognize their new status as a corporate group and the importance of their 'violent image'. This is partly a result of their response to the newly refined public image, but it is also a reflection of a significant and largely autonomous shift in 'student consciousness'. When a large number of students lobbied the House of Commons, the Evening Standard thought it necessary to point out that 'it was a quiet demonstration with no violence'. Violence can dramatize and exemplify the militant student's situation and draw attention to the phenomena which he wants to destroy. Violence is undertaken, not merely to destroy the old order in a material sense, but to bring about qualitative changes in the participants.
