I'm 60+, Australian, and (eventually) went to a high school with a lot of physicality, mixed groups, and seething undercurrents - a mining town with global migrant workers on traditional indigenous land.
We had fights, they could be brutal, the social mechanics allowed a needle to be threaded which myself and a number of others largely managed to do; stand your ground, don't engage physically, don't run .. if someone calls you out and starts smack talking, don't rise, just reply and confound. If they take a swing dodge it and don't respond, if it lands, suck it up and don't respond - in the rung climbing of high school and elsewhere this makes the other look a fool.
There were lessons learned from that and I can still my grandchildren benefitting from phyical encounters (not just fights, engagement with big waves, steep hills, solid animals, bicycles and motorbikes) that can hurt but largely don't kill them.