The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.
> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored.
Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed her and that was like 2nd grade. They can also team up together to accumulate these reports against student they don't like and just let the state come down on them and ruin their life.
HR and school admin are the same in that many mistakenly think they are there to help the employee or the student. That is not true. They are there to protect the institution, to manage and mitigate risk and liability. Any assistance to employees or students is a side effect of that work.
The institutions we force on our children often closely mirror the institutions we implement for ourselves. Conversely, the institutions we go through as children mold our perceptions of how they should appear in adulthood.
> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.
This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.
Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.
So we are complaining:
1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)
2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.
3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"
These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.
The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).
Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.
> This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
The implication is that the system overreacts one way only, taking the word of the victim at face value and then applying "zero tolerance" towards the perceived bully.
Like I mentioned "if the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor". Think of it like a tree that's unbalanced and leaning heavily one way, well you can make it fall on someone by pushing it in the way it leans, it won't take much effort to do that, it's already leaning as opposed taking tree standing tall and trying to topple that down on someone.
My (private) school had the luxury of sorting this through a multi tier system.
a) detention was 3 hours minimum on a saturday. It involved manual labor like mulching flower beds, picking up litter while rolling around 50 gallon drums, etc.
b) if you liked manual labor you were made to do homework with someone paying direct attention or lecturing subjects you were bad at.
c) if you attempted to opt out of that they would have you dig holes 3 feet deep with a post hole digger and fill them back in.
d) if you attempted to opt out of that you got 2 options
1) the teachers thought you were redeemable. you pushed the dumpster around campus picking up the 50 gallon drums. 3 times during the circuit you'd come back and raise a 50 lb plate overhead and drop it to smash the garbage. Aroudn 30 times each round. One of the philosophy teachers would expound on your life decisions for the full 3 hours.
2) you were enrolled at your public school immediately, and truant the next day. your parents were called and told to pick you up and returned the balance of the tuition.
It works too well. Especially with the "first to call" or "first to complain" gets automatically a 500 point boost in credibility. "Clearly if they called the police first, the to other party must be at fault".
To who!? It doesn't sound fair at all. It sounds like an "authority" being embarrassed their precious system wasn't able to catch the perceived issue. "I can't see everything so, until I can (ominous foreshadowing camera angle), every suspect is guilty."
It isn't sold like this though, hence it working differently on paper and in practice.
There is no tolerance for violence. The kid is involved in a violent situation, and the kid is punished for it. That is a fairly logical set of steps until you realize how vague "involved" is.
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.
That's 100% how it worked in practice. Hell, I've even heard of some parents encouraging their kids to do that if they get hit precisely because the notion of "no tolerance" is absurd
> can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating
I'm 100% for the retaliation. If I'm going to get kicked out for fighting, I'm not going to do it without hitting the other guy.
One time I was almost kicked out for a "serious fight" I never threw a punch in. Was a friend who was having a rough time and I knew I just needed to give him a minute. Arm up to keep some space, stepping back. Caught and detained for it. Couldn't figure out what else I was supposed to do. Didn't matter because I was involved.
> bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences
If you punish a kid that didn't retaliate just because "he was involved in a fight" you remove every incentive for that kid to restrain themselves next time. If he's gonna be punished, he might just as well be punished for something.
I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it.
If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything else that school teaches you.
The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.
I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us.
These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, which seems to skew hard towards an unmet desire for respect/authority coupled with a relatively dull intellect. Most just aren't equipped to take charge of children.
You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.
I stopped a kid from hitting me and the school tried to punish me for another kid attacking me, and I non violently grabbed his fist and stopped the attack.
When I learned I'd be punished the same as the attacker, or if I had hit back, I told the school, "Next time, I will knock him out."
I don't recall if the policy was changed, but I was not punished, and no one bullied me when they realized I would defend myself and was prepared to fight back. Don't pick on the quiet fat kid.
And where were your parents in this? My school in USA tried this... Once. My dad went to have a talk with them. I do not know what was said, but the principal walked out of the room white-faced and they never tried that bullshit on me again.
Ten minutes ago my son came home from school and told me there was a fight and that the kid who started it has no punishment but the kid who finished it got a weeklong suspension.
That's exactly the kind of situation that made hateful as a teen. I'm so glad to be free of that now. Therapy works (over the long term, not a quick fix).
I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten.
I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.
Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.
Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!
It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.
I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.
2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.
She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.
I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.
I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.
School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.
In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education and they're often the source of really stupid policies that sound decent only if you know nothing about schools and/or are incapable of seeing second order effects, such as with zero tolerance.
In any case, the admins there probably wished the OP would have punched the bully back. That's what stops bullying, and oddly enough often even results in friends being made. At least among boys - girls that get physical with each other will hold a death grudge til the end of time, but also get physical far less often as a balance to that.
> In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education
There don't actually exist so many things that you need to know so that you can at least make decent decisions:
For this particular case, it suffices to know the trivial fact that if children are in half-time jail ("compulsory school attendance"). From this, one can easily conclude that thus structures that one knows from prisons will develop on the schoolyard.
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?
I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.
That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.
Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.
> child has to be in education until they turn 18.
> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal
These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
>>I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later".
>> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Saying that keeping 15 year olds out of a job is harmful to the society is....certainly a take, for sure.
>>What we do with children now is equally effective.
Well, thank you for editing this sentence from what you wrote originally, but just to be clear - I'm not advocating that misbehaving kids should be forced to sit in normal classrooms and disrupt everyone else - rather that schools should be given the resources to deal with it - the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids which were much smaller and where you basically had to meet up with specialists every week and your grades were severely impacted. It does work in most cases. Sure there will be ones that are truly beyond any kind of help - but that is very very rare. Most of the time you just have kids who could get on the straight path if someone helped them, but public schools are usually so underfunded they can't help even if they want to.
> Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later
Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public school, so there is no financial incentive.
15 year olds forced to sit in classes they don't want are way more miserable than those allowed to work and feel like adults. In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.
> the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids
That's a great solution too, and must be available option for parents. Sadly very few schools do that, making both unruly kids and good kids miserable as a result.
> schools should be given the resources
I don't think the problem is the lack of resources, specialist for helping unruly kids is not going to cost more than a math teacher. The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study. As a result they have a system that harms everyone involved.
>>Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public schoo
I have to ask, what public school would accept adults taking classes along the rest of 15 year olds?
>> In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.
I'm sorry, but kids/teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons. If you're an adult, then sure, do whatever. But kids should be in school, whether they like it or not - it's really not their choice to make. We can argue that maybe 15-16 year olds are at the cusp of being able to do this - but I'd say the cut off should stay at 18. You're under 18, you go to school. There's no other option. The question is how does the state manage this.
>>The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study.
And I agree that it's an awful thing(that the schools are unwilling to do this)
I went to school at 6 years, our schools were for 10 years, and at 16 i went to university. At the university with us were some 20 year olds, who went to school at 7 years, were not able to get to university in their 17, were drafted to army at 18 and came back. 20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.
20 year old who wants to study is not going to cause any problem for the public school either, it will even be beneficial for the class as children will see that studying is useful.
> teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons
When they are not allowed to make choices, the parents are supposed to make choices for them, not corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
>> the parents are supposed to make choices for them
Parents don't have any choice in this either. A child under 18 should be in full time education - there is nothing to choose, maybe except for the school they can be in.
>>20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.
I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds.
That's a very fucked up thing to say, governments or random strangers from internet do not have a right to decide how parent raises his child. Do you even have a child?
> I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds
It was just my own experience, if you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
I do. And like I said, you as a parent have a choice about the kind of school you send your child into. You don't have a choice whether they are in education or not.
>>And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
When you were at school were there many adult students in your classes?
>>you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
Yes, 100 years ago in the early days of the soviet union the classes were offered to everyone to increase literacy rates. I can assure you that throughout the rest of history of the soviet union you didn't have adults attending primary/secondary school, gymnasiums or other types of schools for children. Soviet union had schools for adults from very early on.
Laws like "do not kill", "do not steal", have been found long before politicians existed, by the natural selection of societies. That is groups of people who did not follow these laws were largely outcompeted by those who followed.
If you decide to break the law of "do not steal" in large extent you get millions dead like it have happened in communist Russia or Maoist China. If you break it in smaller extent (e.g. by very high tax) you get stagnant economy like in EU.
In contrast to that, the laws banning children to work were adopted at the point when children did not need to work, so they are largely irrelevant. If these laws existed in 18th century London or Paris they would cause many deaths too, since there was no other way to feed these children.
>I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds
> So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
That becomes the parents' problem. Let them find a school willing to take their abusive kid - or have the state come after them for having children not in school.
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
People with this mentality should never, ever be given any semblance of power. In almost every one of your comments you went to the extreme but "forced labor" and "committed to mental asylum" really take the cake.
> but I don’t know any which is better.
Are you genuinely wondering what's better, investing in prisons or in education? As far as I can tell your solutions involve making the problem worse by cutting the access to the only thing that could fix it (education), then building forced work camps and asylums to contain the now exploding problem.
The US stands proof that building more prisons doesn't lead to having fewer criminals. Education does. The first thing you thought of axing.
> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in > mental institutions.
That was how NAZI-Germany and USSR (communist) governments 'solved' their problems.
In the USA, we had this president named Ronald Reagan who solved the mental institution problem: he closed all the mental institutions and expelled the patients so the patients live on the streets. That's really gave us a new influx of homeless people on a national scale, and it hasn't improved.
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
>>My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8
And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on?
>>12 year olds are not babies.
Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school? What would you have them do, exactly?
> And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work?
No, he was doing it for maybe a few hours at a time, no more. He demonstrated capability.
> if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school?
I would not establish a work program for 12 year olds that misbehave at school. I would however ensure that there exist programs for 12 year olds who have proven that they can not function in the company of polite mannered society.
Ok, so answer the question then - what work program would there be for those 12 year olds that cannot function in the company of polite society. Like what kind of work would you have them do and how would you ensure compliance.
I don't have to answer the question because my goal is more the welfare of the remaining children in the school and less whatever happens to the bully. I really don't care what happens to them. Let their parents care. Let their parents find some solution. The more difficult that is, the better.
But someone has to answer. Saying "I really don't care what happens to them" is just such a lazy way out of this conversation. The whole problem is that we have to decide as a society what to do with them. You suggested work programs - great! Now give some examples of work programs you would put 12 years old in. If you can't or won't, then you have no more solution to this than someone who thinks having an idea equals having a business - it's precisely the execution that matters.
Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.
>> School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.
It's actually neither of those things, because we discovered hundreds of years ago that having an educated population is good for everyone. No, it's not a prison, but it's not a privilege either - you have to be in school until certain age. Work is not substitute for education.
Have an educated population does not mean that every last uncivilized brat needs to participate. Especially if he is distracting other people from acquiring an education.
Being in school does not make one educated. Keeping disruptive child in the same room with normal children, means we get fewer educated people, not more.
Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
Yes, that is a hard problem that society in general doesn't like dealing with, but the solution doesn't involve letting kids be abused. That's the point I'm making. Don't let kids get abused. I honestly didn't think that was very controversial.
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
> They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb
For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys?
> some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support
They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social.
Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective.
Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
...the mentality that says schools should be given the resources to deal with it, instead of (like some other commenter suggested) sending kids to mental institutions?
The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it, leading to a death spiral of reduced enrollment and funding -- at least for SFUSD. I imagine the story is similar elsewhere.
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)
It's a hard line to balance. In my younger years I should have absolutely been kicked out of school, but as I grew older and my hormones calmed me down, I then was a good student.
I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
No this is not true. Expulsion works in many cases. The idea of getting expelled prevents a lot of problems. A lot of people avoid doing things that will get them expelled but this of course doesn't apply to everyone including the person in your example.
It's similar to how prison is a deterrent to crime. But it doesn't change the fact that there are people who still do crimes and get into prison.
Many unruly pupils have trouble at home, impoverished backgrounds, dyslexia, autism, social anxiety and a host of other things. Expelling them solves none of these things.
They may be bullies themselves because of an ongoing toxic culture in the school. That can include the teachers in some cases, who are some of the worst bullies in there. I had one who persecuted me for a speech impediment and humiliated me in front of an entire class of children by making me say tongue twisters.
> expel them and they become another person's problem
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
Schools make some of these issues worse. They are riddled with bullying, and until recently made little accomodation to people with learning or social disabilities.
I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue.
In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.
Sorry to hear that - I knew someone who was sectioned in the Royal Edinburgh about 30 years ago now. A really difficult place to visit emotionally. I can believe it's expensive given the kinds of difficulties the patients are experiencing.
Yes, it's some place. There are buildings lying empty (one had a Legionnaires' scare recently), and the grounds could be better but are run down. There are some mature trees that look good, but the bowling green has been ripped up as well. Morningside is a good area which is a mixed blessing as it means it may end up being developed.
As one of my friends remarked to me it's not a healing environment. The staff there, in my limited experience, vary a lot in their attitude. Some of them are great. Some not so much. It depends who you are dealing with.
Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies.
But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally:
That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours).
If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse).
One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins.
Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.
You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).
Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.
I think you misunderstand the premise - in fact I struggle to understand how you interpreted the GP that way. No one is arguing that parents should provide 100% of life and academic lessons or that kids should be locked up at home, but that they, rather than schools, should have the leading role.
I took my kids out of school when they were eight or nine and up to 16 (the end of compulsory school age in the UK) my experience was that they met a wider range of people, and had a lot more freedom. Instead of being locked up at school they were free to do more on their own or with friends and to go to a wide range of classes and activities. They have done well academically (conditional offer from Oxford for one, the other starting a PhD later this year) and I was complimented regularly on their social skills when they were children, and this seems to be continuing as adults (and my older daughter now has work responsibilities that require soft skills - I would assume she would not have them if her managers had not observed her as having the skills).
The problem is not the involvement of other people, it is the outsourcing of responsibility and decision making and the main part of parenting. Parents are frequently little involved.
I think the village would be a healthy model for sure. But that is something that was pretty much killed in the modern society as well as most people, especially lower/mid-income workers in larger cities, are spending exceedingly little time of their day in their local neighborhoods.
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.
Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.
I have a peruvian (not athletic/nerdy) friend who moved to the us a while ago. (I played through college) his son randomly started playing football his sophmore year after getting beaned by a baseball and felt baseball was more dangerous.
About junior year the kid was having some issues at home. Dad didn't know what to do. I said email the coach. He's like what will that do. I was like coach can make him run (corporal punishment) and take away things. Emailed the coach. Coach was like "I'll have a chat with him".
Next day he said son came home and apologized to him. Cleaned up amazingly instantly (great kid). Pretty sure it was literally just a talk from another respected figure (who likely said maybe you should play less or miss practice while you sort this out.
I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.
It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.
Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.
Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.
Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?
My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.
So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.
We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.
We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.
Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.
Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.
It was de rigueur for us, but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner. And no, it didn’t work, we’d just plot collective revenge on him, and collectively figure out how to escape the punishment.
It appears that you are saying that because someone is an Afrikaner, they must be a member of the apartheid regime or a proponent thereof.
If you are not saying this, then it's unclear how this is related to your previous comment.
You could write a comment that makes sense by saying "Afrikaners usually believed in weird corporal punishments because that was normal in their culture" or something and that would be perfectly acceptable.
Or perhaps, you have some specific knowledge that this guy was actually a proponent of apartheid, which you should share.
I’m sorry, calling Dutch colonists colonisers is despicable? Well, I suppose not just Dutch colonists, they did have their population bolstered by a lot of Austrians and Germans escaping war crime prosecution in the 40’s.
Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.
Some Afrikaners resent British people and Anglophone South Africans, and this dates back to the Boer Wars and beyond. The British interned large numbers of Afrikaners and some of them died in their camps. They marginalised their language, and tried to replace it with English in administration (much the same as with the Québecois etc). The Afrikaners remembered all this, and the insecurity it gave them was partly what led to apartheid and attempts to reinstate Afrikaans as the main national language.
We tended to hear a lot about black-white relations in South Africa, and even fighting between different black African groups... But much less so about the split among whites. I'm told by white South African English speakers that certain Afrikaans speakers were very resentful of them. Some of them didn't like the rugby and cricket boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s either.
It is perfectly possible that some of what you experienced from that teacher came from all this.
I do not agree with this statement though "They were coming over for one reason only." Many South Africans came to the UK for economic reasons, or cultural ties much like Aussie and Kiwis. I had a white South African drama teacher at school and while I could criticise many of my other teachers, I always found him to be pretty easy going. Except in one area. Some of the children used to make fun of his accent and he didn't like that, which I can understand. He came over years before apartheid was dismantled by the way, but never gave any indication of supporting it.
I will just say you lack basic knowledge of history of Afrikaners and South Africa in general and that, coupled with your prejudice on display, is a pretty ugly sight.
I'm sure that person must've been a pretty bad one. But to tie Dutch colonialism, apartheid and WW2 war criminals (centuries later by the way) together this way to excuse these discriminatory remarks is pretty daft. Needless to say, not everyone was/is like that.
American colleges I can understand. But other than bragging rights, why should a high school give enough of a shit about championships to look the other way on bullying?
Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider
In Texas HS Football is very much the central/highest tier of social status/standing in the community, and the stadiums they play in are bigger than small college stadiums elsewhere (and are televised.)
For football, yes. Although I think it only broadcast on some small cable TV channel that you had to get special access for. There definitely were small media crews at the games (I was in the band; I went to most of them).
One year I was there, the football team made it to the state championship, and got to play in one of the big 70K-seat stadiums the NFL teams use. About half of our small town bought tickets and went to it.
I just checked, looks like mine is one of many schools that streams games live on here:
https://www.nfhsnetwork.com/
If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators.
If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as a regular thing. Especially if you're at one of the 50++ high schools that has a 10,000+ capacity stadium.
Edit: yea and as other replier mentioned, there's some regional tendencies too.
Oof wow, that's bigger than I realized. I knew there were a lot of big ones (10k+), but I didn't realize there was US highschool football being played in stadium bigger than the smallest EPL stadiums.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given a lot of college stadiums are 50k+ capacity.
In this case it was at roughly age 8-10. It was a sporty school and I don't think it prioritised that above student wellbeing, not at the level of one individual player anyway.
That said, I know school sports is a way bigger deal in the US than most other countries so YMMV.
> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that
Or actively don't want to do that. There have been cases in Ohio where football players have done things that should have them suspended or expelled (or more) and the school has literally gone on record that "we didn't remove him from the team as that would be unfair to the other players on his team, who are having a great season".
I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved.
There was one though, small kid that probably had a harder life at home than us, he wasn't fazed by the caning, didn't even flinch. Even him avoided getting in trouble too frequently, so caning still kind of worked.
Edit: I think the most terrifying thing wasn't the pain, but the sharp SLAP!.
> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Most schools just care more about their sports teams are doing, so they'd have no interest in a punishment that involved removing a player who otherwise was good enough to make the cut. Look at how many people looked the other way for stuff way worse than bullying at Penn State.
the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.
This worked for us. A little thug was bullying my kid until I taught my kid how to land a punch to the mouth. That was a one-shot solution to that problem.
Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
You think that a child being bullied should have to suck it up until they commit forced violence against another child? Maybe beating up a bully is something that happens when adults abdicate all responsibility, but it's insane to claim that's better than "the adults should just do their fucking jobs".
It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.
I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.
Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:
This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.
The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.
Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.
Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.
Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.
I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
Generally true, but the school's core protection responsibility is for its own students and staff - not the rest of the world. And the school's authority and resources are even more constrained.
At least in some places, school systems have "special" schools or other programs for the kids who they'd rather keep out of contact with the general student population.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools
In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.
The public schools are loathe to expel (unless there's an agreement in the district that one school is a dumping ground) - midrange private schools are quick to expel to protect the rest, but the highest end private schools will figure out a way to not expel, because the money is sooooo good.
If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.
Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.
This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.
I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.
> teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
Oh common, threatening to take something a kid loves away is the most bland/generic policy there is, there is exactly zero "understanding" required, though some care would be required to actually trying to do anything
Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.
As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"
"Bad" is a cool label, it marks you as dangerous. But the comment proposes "immature", "behind". So give then a neat, pink shirt, not a black one with a skull on it (not saying that this works either, just clarifying).
I was bullied, a lot. The only thing that really stops a bully is shaming them, treat them like they are a child that needs to be treated as younger than their age. Bullies are demanding and demonstrating dominance, and if that is turned around on them, the bullying stops.
There are lots of reasons this stuff happens, but one of them is definitely that some kids aren't acting out for school reasons but for attention from their parents.
It's not always straight up immaturity. A lot of it could be other issues related to the bullies environment/household or many other issues.
Classical stereotypical case is that the bully himself has an abusive/alcoholic father. There's a lot of complexity in what's involved here, but society is only equipped to deal with the "immaturity" case which is real but not the only story.
I'm tired of trying to find excuses for their bad behaviours. The first goal should be to protect the victims. By whatever is necessary. People have a right to live in security. Then, once that first step is done, we can think about pampering the bullies into conformance. Not the other way around.
The bullied often end up becoming bullies, and in my experience, two children can bully one another, so that is not necessarily a one way experience. In some cases, a smaller child can even bully a taller one, although an adult would think that was unlikely.
While it is possible to stamp out physical bullying, psychological and verbal bullying are near impossible to eliminate, and so any sizable school which denies having it is lying. It is a matter of degree, and how they handle it.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"
Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.
> "[...] nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs."
This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.
> There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.
Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.
I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:
- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.
Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
People respond differently to different things. One bully who gets punched back will stop, while another will escalate. Trying to fix bullying requires a solution tailored to each individual bully.
I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
> I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying
I don't think anyone is making that assumption, but being ok with corporal punishment likely comes down to three things:
1. We should care more about victims of violence than perpetrators, and all measures should be taken to protect victims and prevent victimization, even if it hurts perpetrators. Meaningful consequences for violent behaviour is critical.
2. The belief the physical deterrents work, if applied consistently and not abused to the point where it doesn't provide clear guidance as to acceptable behaviour.
3. That the primary job of schools and educators is to provide a safe and effective learning environment. Being therapists that get to the root of problematic behaviour is neither in their training nor in their job description.
How about when the perpetrators are also victims? If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home (as is often the case), don't both kids deserve help and support? Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
> If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home
Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others, just like it wouldn't excuse breaking the law. You can say "here is the punishment for your bad behaviour, now let's ALSO have child services remove you from that environment AND have the justice system punish your parents' bad behaviour". Everybody has their job and if they do their job, then what's the problem?
> Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
Firstly, there's no "just do X" for multifaceted problems. Secondly, people these days dramatically underestimate the value of prison. Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
> Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others
I totally agree, but I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no? There are other punishment options if you still insist on inflicting some hardship.
> Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back? "Simply removing them" for a period of time simply perpetuates the problem, thus helping to ensure more violent crime in the future, not less.
> I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no?
The dirty secret is that we have absolutely no idea how to rehabilitate anyone. Even our best therapies for people who desperately want to change their behaviour are only 40% effective at only slightly modifying behaviour, and most violent criminals unfortunately have no such desire.
This is partly psychology's fault for doing such poor science for decades (35% replication rate!), but partly also the false premise that there are no innate biological factors at play.
> That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back?
This is already known but ignored in "polite" society: poor impulse control. Most repeat offenders only stop offending once they age out of impulsive behaviour, not because they had some kind of revelation or personal growth; stories like this conflate correlation and causation.
Age is the best behaviour modifier we know, because hormonal profiles change, which ends up changing strength and frequency of the impulses we have to overcome. Imprisoning repeat violent offenders until they age out of it poor impulse control is totally a policy that should be on the table.
At the point a parent is beating up their own kid I wonder what options are available. If they're removed from the family then placing them in foster care almost always leads to worse outcomes than leaving them with the abusive family. The state doesn't know how to raise children.
Then surely the focus should be on solving that problem? Just clamping down on the proximate cause doesn't really help - as others have pointed out, it seems likely to incite revenge attacks rather than stopping the bullying.
That's the thing, it's unclear if it's a problem that can be solved. It has to do with fundamental benefits of staying with biological family, and avoiding the extremely negative consequences of lack of attachment.
I grew up in a place where teachers could and did beat children. School kids there are far better behaved than kids in US public schools. I’m not making an argument for it, just an observation of effectiveness. It works.
My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.
Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.
As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.
I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.
> it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people
Not curious at all. Ingrains the lesson that, should you feel inclined to abuse your strength, there is always someone stronger. That's a clear lesson that even works on psychopaths who otherwise feel no remorse and cannot be influenced by other means.
Conversely, it also ingrains the lesson that it is ok to abuse anyone weaker than you A) if you know you can get away with it (because someone stronger is not always around/aware/inclined to intervene), or B) because that is just normal / the way the world is.
I don't see how that follows. In an environment in which physical correction has no reason, and is doled out unfairly (as with alcoholic parents), then sure, someone would ingrain the idea that the world is callous and unfair and they should get theirs at the expense of others if they can. If they instead only experience physical correction due to specific reasons that are deemed far outside the bounds of acceptable (such as inflicting violence on others), that's a whole different lesson.
A teacher’s like or dislike of a student is often irrational and based on personal emotion; they are human beings, after all. The real issue is that they wield significant power with very few checks and balances. They are essentially dictators. They work within a system where colleagues often cover one another’s works rather than questioning each other’s professional conduct.
It is far too dangerous to grant them the power of corporal punishment while simply hoping they will remain fair. I believe that in every school, there is at least one teacher who would abuse it.
Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.
We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.
Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.
Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.
Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.
Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.
What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?
In theoretical land - if my son had beaten some other kid to pulp, and he got a slap from teacher to stop that (on top of probably being expelled)? Absolutely, the least of the issues in such problem.
This is very far from organized canning as a punishment, but stating teacher should never ever use violence or they end up losing their job for good and getting dragged to courts with possibility of jail is just as extreme position as letting them be beaten at teacher's will.
Middle path folks, middle path. If you don't trust teachers at all in the first place, why do you give them your children to co-raise them? Schools should do procedural punishments, not corporal. But 100% is a fairy land, and some psychotic parents who never admit their child is doing something bad (and there are so many of those, aren't they just ask literally any teacher) take it as a gospel and go to jihad mode against anybody. World doesn't need more empowered Karens, do we.
There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.
Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.
The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.
Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.
And when it is permissible to say that a society is trash? Cause 30% who think beating children is OK, is frankly abhorrent.
And yeah, Singapore society as a whole is pure trash. When you have monikers like, "Disneyland with the death penalty", you know it's a real authoritarian shithole.
> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
> In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.
In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.
Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.
The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.
Good thing that's not the lesson then. Of course if you see any use of physical correction as violence and abuse, then you're just assuming the conclusion.
I see any use of violence as violence, yes, and find it abhorrent to see people justifying violence against children. I'm happy I grew up in a civilised country where it was and is a criminal offense
Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence. It's not much different than kidnapping and that's usually considered violence. How about a time-out for a child?
> Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence.
Yes, I do. It should also be a last resort to mitigate worse consequences to society, and is severely over-used for many things where it has no proven benefit.
> How about a time-out for a child?
It can be cruel if over-used, but it is not the same as physically hurting a child.
> It can be cruel if over-used, but it is not the same as physically hurting a child.
Anything is cruel if "overused". And nobody is claiming "it's the same" as corporal punishment, the argument is whether corporal punishment should be on the table in some circumstances at all, and what those circumstances should be.
I think the conclusion that it should never be permitted is completely unjustified, based on fantasy notions that everyone is innately good if properly directed using words (false), that we understand psychology enough to change people using words (we don't), and how common and abused the power for physical punishment can be (it can be bad, as can many things whose risks we manage).
I think there are many functional and legitimate ways that humans can organize themselves (law and culture), and the idea that corporal punishment cannot be justifiably used in any of them seems almost certainly false.
> Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
When I was young me and two of my brothers were one-day really misbehaving. My grand-father, who had been capture on the first day of WWII (well on the first day Germany invaded Belgium) and spent 5 years in a PoW prisoner camp in Germany, wasn't a little wuss.
He spanked our three arses so bad I remember it to this day.
It was an amazing lesson.
Something has to be said about peaceful time that create weak men who then find all the excuses towards abusers. The issue with the "well-thinking" mindset is that when pushed to its logical end, rapists are walking totally free after having been caught (UK) and people can break a female police officer' nose at the London Heathrow airport and walk totally free too. With weak judges from a weak society ruling that: "In their culture/countries men don't know that you're not supposed to rape women".
We then end up with people, in the west, who genitally mutilate women and non-sense like that.
When, on the contrary, you decide to take the psychopaths who ruin society for everyone by the scruff of the neck and put them in chain, you get the homicide rate slashed, in ten years by 100.
That's not being decimated: that's being decimated and then being decimated, again.
1/100th.
> So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable
That's typical victimization, which create more weak men. Weak men who then, for example, become politicians who vote ultra-lax laws and weak judges who then let rapists walk free, making the streets unsafe.
If bullies getting spanked by an authority figure don't get the lesson, it's their problem. Not society's problem. Society, as a whole, is supposed to have the monopoly of violence. Instead of that in many countries (like France and the UK), the government gives up and gives the monopoly of violence to drug dealers and rapists. Drug dealers and rapists who learned, since a young age, that were exactly zero repercussion when being a bully.
You've got your opinion, I got mine: putting gang members in chains in El Salvador slashed the homicide rate by 100x. Ponder that.
I believe a better approach might be installing surveillance cameras in classrooms and hallways, then expelling bullies once their actions are confirmed by footage.
Perhaps we could establish "special schools for confirmed bullies," where students who show improvement could eventually be "promoted" back to mainstream schools.
But seriously, I don't know how much I'd trust society to care / keep funding such schools, or people working there to that with enough empathy and motivation for too long.
The sentiment that (even low-level) criminals in prison are trash, that deserves the worst instead of rehabilitation, is I feel too wide-spread for me to think it would be different.
Well, one of my formative memories while being a child at school contributes to it, I was once saying some mean thing to another child because of other kids, that child slapped my face back quite good, I don't remember what I was saying, just that it was mean and that the slap made me question "why was I being mean for no reason?", an epiphany which helped me greatly.
On the other side of things, I do remember having suffered some forms of violence from parents and those really did not contribute to anything than showing me why they were bad parents.
> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums
Even “light” physical punishment is not proven beneficial. The research generally does not find a safe beneficial threshold where hitting becomes good if mild enough; it finds that physical punishment may suppress behavior briefly but is associated with worse outcomes over time. “Light” changes the severity, not the evidence.
Depending on the age, yes. Strict discipline, punishment and rewards works very well. What does not work, is the past 30 years of wokeism, where children are granted their every wish.
> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven!
Can you share any reference or scientific study affirming this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
> hysterical children out of tantrums
In my humble experience, children throwing tantrums are likely experiencing overstimulation or emotional overwhelm, and fixing the causes could eliminate the problem more effectively that slapping the problem out of them.
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
Which of these biological differences in capacities and functions make it so that girls should not be punished by physical pain but it is OK to punish boys with a physical pain using a method that often leaves permanent scars and lasting psychological damage?
Men bear greater physical risk (war, dangerous labor etc) and boys/young men have always been subject to violent "rites of passage" that prepare them for this.
Girls and women receive greater physical protection, as required to manage reproductive capacity and long‑term demographic stability.
Historical societies are... historical. We shouldn't be looking to them. They didn't have the technology we have today.
Yes boys are strong. You know what's stronger than a boy? Gun. Girl with gun is stronger. It's not fucking 400 AD and this isn't Rome and we don't have slaves. Things are different today.
Yes, there are biological differences, but they definitely matter the least now as opposed to ever. Think about jobs. Women can do basically every modern job a man can do, and definitely the high paying ones. Now think about ancient societies and why that wasn't the case.
It's not even remotely clear to me what this has to do with the topic at hand because insofar as gender plays into bullying girls tend to be more impacted than boys, and secondly corporal punishment and 'disciplining' women by men was historically normalized.
The Singaporean habit of caning is a very modern practice of industrial and military society that has no biological analog, an offshoot of mass discipline society of the 20th century and gender roles of Victorian Britain where groups of men needed to be 'whipped into shape' and women were feminine and pure, but it sure is convenient to randomly invoke biology when one runs out of arguments
>What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.
As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.
If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.
>we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem.
Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.
Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.
Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).
>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments
They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.
Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.
Ethnicity and culture are not static concepts. They change over time. The culture in central Europe, North America, the Middle East etc. 500 years ago looked very different from today. The ethnicity too. People have always migrated and that's part of where ethnicity and culture are coming from in the first place. And that's a good thing.
Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.
The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.
I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).
>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
How on earth is that an acceptable argument for physical abuse that is directed purely at boys?
I'm not saying girls should be beaten too. But the ethical blindness here is striking.
Besides, girls are just as much capable of bullying as boys are. Society might have taught them to use different methods, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable or any less vicious.
Nah, I have girls and there's definitely a biological difference there even at a young age. They're much more sensitive to more subtle negative feedback in a way that boys just aren't.
I'm not saying boys should be beaten whenever they misbehave, but girls are definitely more tuned into the way they're being perceived by others.
With girls, you'll get the same corrective effect from an uncomfortable grimace as you would a wooden spoon.
I'll also add since this is about bullying, the type of bullying behaviours girls engage in is much less physical and a lot more underhanded. It's much harder to correctly identify who's the victim and who's the perpetrator.
We just have millenia of history, experience in every country and culture, and countless scientific papers on the matter, but please go on with your question...
While I hold the same conclusion as you, individuals chiming in to concur based on their own experience is nothing more than a way to validate what certain people of the time & place commonly believe to be true.
E.g. if people were apt to believe girls preferred green peppers more often than boys, there will always be plenty who say "Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur". It could be true, it could be false, or the cause could be something else. E.g., because people think there are certain differences it shapes differences in development which lead to some of them actually being more common for nothing more than the sum of environmental factors - even if those biases only started as misconceptions.
Whichever it actually is, there will usually be large segments of the populations who would observe it to be conflicting things from an individual at-home view and it takes a lot of work & really good data to be able to make a meaningful claim about what and why differences exist.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
I've always found that quite interesting. I agree women should have equal rights and never be discriminated against, but when push comes to shove I imagine men would be the ones called up to fight in wars for most countries around the world.
Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
> Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
Why the hypothetical? In Israel, for example, women often serve in equal roles during wars, although neither at the same rate as men, nor are laws there completely gender-neutral. I would imagine in Northern European countries with actual gender-neutral military regulations they will be called up similarly to men.
I don't think you can divorce the laws from their application in cases like this. This isn't some nebulous situation where if you squint right it's equal.
one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
> one of the many reasons America is so screwed up right now
Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?
well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the other.
The fact that teenager boys can't tell that Andrew Tate is a characture of failed masculinity or that looksmaxxing is straight up idiotic is a pretty glaring example of that.
The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women?
I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.
In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?
> "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects.
describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.
Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.
In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.
But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.
consider the two statements
- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.
- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.
These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.
I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level.
treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with talking about gender differences but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the focus of your argument.
Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.
I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.
I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?
As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.
Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence? What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.
> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?
In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
> In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
As I've said, and @echoangle repeated, caning is used for cyberbullying, which girls do too (at a rate relatively close to boys actually). If the law was caning in response to physical bullying, and it just so happened that the vast majority of offenders were boys, I would not object on the basic of sexism (I still would not approve of schools being allowed to physically punish students).
> Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
There's no way the typical 16 year old girl is more fragile than the typical 9 year old boy, yet only the latter is subject to this punishment. Until children reach the age of 12 or so the strength difference is quite minor (and there's even a brief period where girls are taller and heavier).
Also it's absurd to punish demographics differently based on their statistical averages. Redheads are less sensitive to pain, should your hair colour determine how many strokes of the cane you get?
Girls are not meaningfully more fragile than boys, especially before puberty. Before puberty they're practically indistinguishable. If it weren't for long hair and the color pink none of us would know.
That's just something people tell themselves. Yes, we socialize boys not to cry. That doesn't mean boys are "stronger", it means that they have a pathological fear of being perceived as weak which will cause them sexual and relationship problems until the day they die.
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
"but perhaps boys and girls are different" should be interpreted as a joke; specifically satire on people who actively push that there are no differences between the sexes.
---
To bring some context:
I have a friend who called up other friends in the group and repeats over and over that there's no difference between the sexes, that it's artificial, ect. He did this when he dated a trans woman, yet didn't seem to realize that his partner felt so strongly about their gender that they changed it.
Can you first define what you'd be comfortable considering as evidence before I spend time on this? I don't want to provide research just so the other party complains that there's still some cultural bias somewhere.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
I have kids. Children are not a tabula rasa. Boys and Girls act very differently almost right from Birth, and it becomes so much more pronounced as they grow.
Hormones don’t raise kids in particular gender norms, don’t carve them a place in society, don’t feed them gender-based culture 24/7. They do have a physical impact, impact on sexual development, their sex, reproductive function, temperament, but gender is a human invention.
All those differences do impact roles in society. They let women breastfeed. They give men greater physical strength. Other biological differences make women become pregnant. These will affect roles in society.
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
> Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
Bricklayers? Much manual labour. Some women can do it, some men cannot, but far more men can do it than women.
> People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
> I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
Not as much as some people think they should. It really depends what specific views you are thinking of. There are important differences: for example, women do initially need more parental leave to recover from giving birth. I think its a good idea to give men as much, but with different timing. Pregnancy has huge physical effects for quite a long time.
It goes both ways too. There wold be real social advantages to having more men becoming nurses (which can benefit from physical strength) and teaching (so boys, especially disadvantaged boys, have male educated role models).
> We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
Brother do you hear yourself. Your key example, the thing holding your entire argument together was brick layers. Fucking... brick layers.
And you think we don't have anything to eskew gender differences? Brother, look around you. 99.9999% of jobs can be done by men and women thanks to modern technology. Including fucking war!
Because you know what's stronger than men? Guns. And you know who can hold guns? Women. So, there you go, that's why the US army accepts women.
While this is true, these are nothing burger examples. The world will not crumble if you don't help a nice lady put her luggage in the overhead compartment.
Yes, as a man, our "strength" is mostly for show and is redundant in modern society. Also most men are not even very strong because we live sedentary lives. Because - surprise! - 99.9999% of all economic activity has nothing to do with strength.
This isn't ancient Rome and you aren't a spartan. Most men are fatties sitting at an office job. They don't have, nor need, strength. They need statins and metformin.
There's lots and lots of jobs where physical strength makes a fuckton difference. I don't see construction workers, garbage people or figherfighters using exoskeletons yet.
Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to perform the same day in day out. Which works out pretty well for men, but for women... I'm not so sure.
There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength.
I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.
There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?
I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.
We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I somewhat agree with you, but I think there is an underlying cause. We are generally not accepting of individual differences, needs, and commitments outside work. We have improved in some ways (e.g. with regard to making adjustments for disability) but there is a long way go.
> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I think individual specialty and massive group specialty is somewhat different.
For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.
As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.
Our "gender based culture" wasn't imposed on us by space aliens; it's something we humans came up with ourselves. And given that basically every culture divides people by gender (as opposed to by height, hair color, or fingernail shape), it very much indicates that there is a biological component to gender.
> but gender is a human invention.
So you don't believe a person can be transgender, right?
What you call „gender norms“ is the result of society trying to contain said differences.
Physical possibilities are differences, drives are different, temperament and it's swings are different. Also many other differences. But hey, let's hide all the differences, strengths and weaknesses... And pretend everyone is equally good at everything.
We need equality, not sameness. Brute-forcing equality-through-sameness sucks on both sides. I'd say girls and women are more affected though. But men ain't taking it easy either. It's a hill I'm willing to take downvotes on.
Well prepubescent children have very similar hormone make up. That's why young boys have no muscles and have the same sort of body as girls. The only reason we can tell them apart at all really is because of long hair and the color pink.
Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.
It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.
The comments here are fascinating. A generation of men who've never been in a physical confrontation in their lives are absolutely certain that physical consequences don't work. How would you know?
A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back. You can teach that with a cane at 13 or let him find out at 25 when he mouths off to the wrong person. One of these comes with a controlled environment and a school nurse on standby.
Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out
Beating a child who acts out because they get abuse from other people in their life is a reliable way to not at all improve things and merely reinforce their broken worldviews.
If getting the shit beaten out of you by authorities was a reliable way to raise people, my parent's generation would have had zero crime and zero bullying, and the local "White trash" trailer parks would be pinnacles of human behavior.
You know that's not how it works out, right?
Being hit works on people who would respond to nonviolent punishment.
> Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out
Not in my experience. There definitely will be some problematic kids, but to the majority of school bullies, I don't think this applies. To recall two of my own experiences:
As a boy I was being bullied by a group of kids. Some day I snapped at them and decided to resolve the matter there and then. I didn't care they outnumbered me. I didn't care if I'd win or lose. I genuinely was ready to fight to the death (lol). But it never came to that. Showing some teeth spooked them and they left me alone after that. I remember the dumbfounded look on their faces. So while it didn't come to violence, the threat of violence scared them off.
On the other hand, when I was bullying a boy (I honestly don't know why), he eventually fought back. That really surprised me and I vividly remember how much respect he gained in my eyes for it. It was humbling. We became friends.
The best thing that can happen to a bully is their victim standing up for themself. Like the person you responded to said: "A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back." The exception to this is kids with sociopathic tendencies (for lack of a better term) - kids that double down on their behaviour despite being confronted with the consequences. How a kid will respond is, I think, more of a function of their personality than the punishment received. But what do I know?
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.
It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.
I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.
Just to state what I hope is obvious - every serious person, on any side of the smacking debate, agrees that physical abuse of children is wicked and wrong. The disagreement is about smacking; some people think that it is physical abuse by definition. Others may not think that, but believe that smacking is still a bad idea. Those on the other side believe that you can distinguish between reasonable corporal punishment and physical abuse. I'm sorry for what happened to you!
I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.
Consider: not hitting kids is much easier than hitting kids, and also free. Ergo, if we're gonna be hitting kids, we need really strong research to show that it's effective. Which we don't have. The default should be DENY, not ALLOW, just like good security practice.
One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
Some things can be good/bad in and of themself, rather than just a means to an end. I would argue that "violence against children" is bad in and of itself, and outlawing it is good in and of itself. If you want to argue that you see violence against children as a useful means to an end, why stop there? Let's also put the children to work. The children yearn for the mine.
Right, but if you smack your child on the wrist, is it violence? You can't really answer these things by throwing definitions around. (Imprisoning children is wrong, I'm sure we can agree. So, if you ground your child, is that imprisonment?)
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:
1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.
2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.
If you define absolutely anything as violence in that way, you’re completely within your rights to do that, but then you can’t claim it’s intuitively obvious that we should never use violence against children. Instead you will need actual evidence, which leads us back to where we started - the evidence base is weak.
Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
My imprisonment analogy was meant to point out that it is not valid to take a common intuition that X is wrong, apply a very extended concept of X (even if you think that the extended concept is the only coherent one), and then expect the intuition to still command universal agreement.
I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today.
> Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
Just like Putin's war in Ukraine is a "special military operation" or Trump's war in Iran is "just a little skirmish", right? You can play word games all you want, but it won't change the substance of the arguments. The point I made earlier was that some things are inherently good or bad, and that "violence against children" is part of those things. If you want me to say "xzglorb" instead of "violence", sure, we can say "xzglorb", but the substance doesn't change: xzglorb against children is inherently bad.
I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.
But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.
No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better.
You don’t seem to have answered my second question.
Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.
Regarding that second question:
> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.
I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.
*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.
No, it's about as "controversial" as claiming lead exposure is bad for children's brains.
Do we have RCTs for that? Or might we reasonably shape our priors from the hundreds of studies using a dozen different causal methodologies, which all find the same result?
The evidence for lead exposure harming children's brains is extremely solid, I believe. The evidence for spanking is not in the same league. It is not just about a lack of RCTs.
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.
I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.
Because it may be effective for boys but not girls.
Men have to deal with some form of violence in their lives, or at least the threat of it. Most male encounters has an undercurrent of violence. Offend another male and you might get assaulted.
So when you expose men to violence it's a matter of the world. Like Tyson said, social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.
If you expose women to violence they will acclimate to it and begin to see it as the norm. That means they'll accept it, from their teachers and eventually their partners.
Its entirely rational to only apply this to boys only.
The mental gymnastics at play here are astounding.
Why would women acclimate to it and see it as the norm while men don't? If anything, exposing men to violence will also make them more violent in their future relationships.
Bottom line of all these comments here is "because women are too innocent / fragile / weak / ignorant". It's entirely unrelated to how men view them, of course.
What mental gymnastics? Women that are abused often marry an abuser because it's just the way things are in relationships.
For boys, fighting or threat of violence is just a fact of life. They are taught at a young age not to use that violence against someone that's not roughly physically matched, which includes women. That's why we tell boys never hit girls.
Part of the reason men cause so much violence is because of people like you, your exact mentality. Which says that's its expected for men to be violence, so, c'est la vie!
Men are not just like... inherently violent creatures, that's a stupid and toxic mentality. No, they're socialized to be violent by other men, who were also socialized to be violent.
I don't agree with the notion of caning children, but... Why only males are eligible to be caned? That doesn't sound fair within the framework, girls can be bullies too.
But also “we would cane more kids if only it weren’t for those pesky laws” is crazy. The world seems to be on a speedrun to rid itself of all civility. I guess that’s its default state, but where did the civilizing forces go?!
This line of reasoning, always strikes me as rather idiotic.
It's often heard from the progressive side of politics, in this general form, as if having everyone equally affected by bad things is a useful policy aspiration:
"<thing>, which is bad, disproportionally affects <girls, poor people, non-white people, etc.>, which is an outrage!"
Apparently, it's easier and more popular to make sure bad things are fairly distributed, rather than reduced or eliminated.
It’s a tragedy that scholars don’t study Singapore more to understand what it did right. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, Singapore (then part of Malaysia) was a poor country. Today it’s rich but the subcontinent is still poor. The best thing all these so-called “humanitarians” could do to improve the human condition would be to study Singapore to understand how that model can be translated to all the poor countries in Asia and Africa.
I agree. I worked in Singapore for a short while and I was so very impressed by the people and the government.
Singapore is a great place. It is breathtaking to see a government govern in the interests of its people. I live in the USA and we have two institutions, the democratic party and the republican party, that do little except cater to special interests.
I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country.
The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares.
Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vacation.
I got into 2 taxis there. One of them explained how corrupt the country was by the banking industry and the other, more memorable one, was a guy in his 70s that still had to work long houes while his wife was on her death bed at home. He called her while I was in the taxi, I saw the conversation and burst out crying myself. I ended up tipping him 100 USD.
Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnight. That's a common story in Bangladesh, and it used to be a common story in Singapore. But in my dad's lifetime, Singapore became richer than Europe, while Bangladesh is still mired in hopeless poverty.
The poverty and dysfunction in Asian countries feels inescapable and permanent. My dad wanted to take my kids to see his village, but they overthrew the government last year so those plans are on hold indefinitely. I have no confidence that Bangladesh will ever be a place I want to take my kids. Singapore somehow managed to escape that trap. If it took a brutal, regimented society and economy to achieve that, then so be it.
The ironic thing is that the latter taxi driver I mentioned was actually Bangladeshi-Singaporean (I believe ~9% of Singaporeans are of Indian descent).
Reading the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus really opened my eyes to the instability and poverty in Bangladesh.
Yeah, Yunus is good at self promotion. But people like him are the reason that poor man’s wife died alone, thousands of miles away from her family and homeland. You see that story as a failure of Singapore. But in reality it’s a failure of Bangladesh, its founders, and its people. Singaporeans could have been in that same situation today if it hadn’t been for the actions of its leaders after independence.
Cheap foreign labor flocks to Singapore because it's much richer than the countries around it. But that's not how it got rich in the first place. Singapore had a restrictive policy on foreign workers until the 1980s. But by that point its GDP per capita was already almost as high as the UK's: https://emergenteconomics.com/2012/03/12/718/
And insofar as Singapore has such a policy now, the rest of the world should take notes. Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.
If the Sinaloa could turn an impoverished asian country into Singapore, I’d like to hire them and help overthrow the government so they can get to work. If you’re in such a country, everything is secondary to economic growth. GDP per capita growth translates directly into saving the lives of children.
Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
This doesn't solve the harder problem: properly identifying bullying.
Bullies don't usually bully other people in front of their authority figures. Most "anti-bullying" policies in the past 25 years have the unintended consequence of fostering a more clever species of bully called the "crybully". People who are skilled at being assholes and manipulating authority figures into treating them as the victims.
In criminal law, increasing the odds of getting caught is statistically far more effective in decreasing the incidence of violent crime than increasing the punishment.
Other than that, I'm not particularly interested in the moralizing from either side about corporal punishment. Some problem children need mentorship, some just need consequences; most of it depends on their home life. Kids from abusive homes need to be moved to a safer environment and treated with therapy. Kids who are neglected or enabled by their parents need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them and other people don't have to put up with their crap.
Reading a lot of the comments here is pretty depressing, I thought things had improved since I was a boy.
My school (posh, British) turned a blind eye to bullying and fighting, there wasn't a great deal but I distinctly remember walking past a teacher having recently been punched in the face, bleeding from my mouth, and him acknowledging that I looked in a state but doing nothing.
Since I never turned away from a scrap I never really encountered bullying, now I have boys of my own and hope that when they're of school age they don't have to run the gauntlet as I did.
It doesn't matter which rules and policies you have in place, if teachers are afraid of some parents, or simply tired of some, they will neglect or look away from your child being abused.
Which is a direct result of parents influence on the schools.
What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
I've never seen a bullying program which acknowledged that there were multiple types of bullying with different causes:
- Some Stephen King-styled cretin who is just big and dumb and wants to hurt people.
- Kids vying for status in an unhealthy way and trying to cut people down.
- That weird "smelling blood in the water" problem that happens when a group of people come across someone who is just _too_ weak and their biology just seems to rev them up.
- A weird kid who is socially maladjusted and thinks they're being bullied, but actually it's just that no one likes them.
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
This matches with my experience. Men really don't hold grudges against authority that give them stern, but fair punishments. Think of any sports coaches that make their athletes do extra running or push ups or whatever for punishment. They garner respect from their players, and there isn't real negativity towards them. Its cruel, arbitrary punishments, or mocking that causes resentment. If you take a test and get a 70 but its a fair grade, thats how it goes. If you deserved a 95 though, or the professor calls you an idiot, that is the antagonism generating event.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
There's no denying a broken nose and some lost teeth will make many bullies twice about trying again.
Problem is it's often illegal or against the rules to do it since deliberately beating the crap out of a bully isn't self defence in the traditional sense. And in the cases where it doesn't work, the situation may escalate or the victim might end up being punished harder than the bully.
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
That's a fair point. The challenge is that a lot of the time, it's hard to escape in that way. The ideal would be that a bully is expelled or forced to change schools to get their victims away from them, but the system seems very reluctant to do that. Same with letting the victims find a new school to replace the old one.
It works really well for bullying in workplaces and communities though.
And true, the bully might win. But the thing is that it puts the victim from an easy target to a slightly harder target, and a bully may decide it's not worth the hassle/risk when others aren't going to fight back at all. It's like that old joke about outrunning a bear; you're not trying to outrun the bear, you're trying to outrun the people next to you. Or perhaps the old adage about home burglaries. A lock won't stop a determined thief, but they'd usually rather find an easy to break into house than go through the effort of defeating a security system.
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
In a friends school in Denmark the teacher could decide that your family had to host a party for all the kids at the family home, so they could get to know each other better, and that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
>that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
The canning would vastly shorten the time span on which all parties stop misbehaving while the bullying continues. I was bullied as a kid and the school didn't do anything. When my father tried to reason with the bully's family he discovered they were just awful, violent people, bullies, all of them. When he came home, frustrated, he sat me and said something like "uhm, well, ok, listen, I went to talk to the boy's parents and... well... the next time he bothers you just beat the shit out of him. I'll deal with the school" and the quoted the motto of my country: "by reason or by force". Some things just works faster than diplomacy and all shit get sorted out without extending the suffering for most parties involved.
Good when all parents are able to host such party. I would say that in Poland, most of parents with a misbehaving kid are barely able to throw a party for their kid and several of his/her friends. Many times people complain about the cost of school supplies for their kids already.
Just like I thought. I'm sure your solution would work when majority are nice people. That won't work on people who are from "lower social circles". We still have a lot of them in Poland and don't know how to make them behave better, because trying to make them behave better typically results in defensiveness about their way of life and a lot of excuses about their circumstances. They only dig their heels and start being more aggressive.
Most humans are nice people.
Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
That general observation, for me at least, describes the world from rural Pakistan to backwater Tschechia.
The only exception were groups that had a very strong in-group out-group separation. These people always treated me with too much suspicion to express passing kindness.
> Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
I agree, but bullies actually come mostly from that last group. Putting pressure on overwhelmed, self-absorbed or excuse-prone people in order to educate their children better won't work. I think bullying is because of lack of proper emotional education of children, it would be better to educate those parents and children in how to behave and why, but that requires resources most schools won't have and I've never seen anyone actually teaching this in schools.
Then it is an even bigger deterrent. And maybe it forces people to ask their neighbors for help, which can also improve the social dynamic. People bond over helping each other.
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
I (think) many bullies have bad home lives. I wish parents would be held accountable instead of taking it out on the kids that are struggling to process their emotions / hormones in a healthy manner.
And parents are acting out for myriad of reasons. There's a never-ending chain if you go that way. At the end of the day, bully victims end up holding the short end of the stick. And they frequently become bullies themselves. Maybe stopping bullying at the visible link is not the most right solution... But is there anything better that does not lead to eternal finger pointing?
I think the puck should stop with the first adult.
The front line adults at school have this policy now, which covers 30 hours of the student's week.
Parents need to be responsible for the remaining 183 hours they have with their kid.
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In Seattle, I hate seeing news articles about kids doing stupid stuff (murdering classmates [0], stealing cars, etc) and not an ounce of accountability for being a bad parent.
I read the article as defining bullying as kids posing physical threats to others. Yet, the memory that immediately jumps into my mind is of a boy who always wore a jacket and a hat with ear muffs inside school who would hold his books to his chest as he ran to/from classes in between periods.
Kids would always laugh at him and block his path or trip him or knock his books out of his hands. My sense is that this was widespread behavior, not limited to a small group.
I also seem to recall a group of kids who were picked on all eating at the same table during lunch and always being subjected to taunting and being picked on verbally or having their books knocked off the table, etc.
Sadly, I do not recall ever seeing anyone stand up for him or help him pick up his books. The memory makes me feel horribly ashamed because I have no recollection of ever helping.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
In the USA it is not banned federally or in all state public schools. Find a school near you that associates with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, their school discipline policy likely includes corporal or physical punishment terminology.
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
You might not have noticed what you've done here, but you've not only agreed to corporal punishment for children but also for harsher corporal punishment for criminals across the board. Read the whole conversation chain and reflect on how bad the optics are. There is a reason why your stance is unpopular.
"Spanking looks like an 8/10 on the subjective harmful scale, but actually on the objective harmful scale its closer to a 3/10. We must rectify the bad reputation of spanking!" is not the type of motivation that should drive pedagogy research.
If you're saying we should pretend that spanking is worse than (we currently know) it is, then I don't agree.
I haven't said anything about corporal punishment for criminals, and I don't know of any evidence for or against it - that strikes me as a very different argument, partly because the level of violence is likely to be much greater.
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
Corporal punishment is brutal, inhumane, uncivilized. Hurting children is a barbaric practice, and inevitably attracts the attention of a very particular kind of person.
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
Behavior like this is why I unironically have lost the mythos of "teachers are good for society" as default thinking. I get why Mao/Pol Pot/Communists through history lined them up against walls.
Most, even in America, are little tyrants who has entirely far too much power to pick and choose the winners and losers of society. A single bad teacher acts like a whole bucket of crabs pulling down on soon-to-be-succesful youth.
It was always funny to us as kids, and we often laughed at the poor bugger who had earned that punishment (and were laughed at when it was us).
Our teachers didn't abuse us like some do in other societies, with extra homework and detention. We new the rules and punishment for breaking them, and made choices accordingly. Wonderful teachers who I remember fondly decades later, though some of them have passed on.
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
> My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now
You can't have this. Have a one-to-one conversation with your kid and tell them you can't have this. If they continue... well, I'm not saying "whoop their ass", but you can't have this.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
To be clear, I don't think beating children and desensitizing them to violence is good, I was just arguing that there's a reason why it has been practiced throughout history. The modern era of relative peace and social order in vast tracts of the world has changed laws and norms profoundly for the better, not least in making such barbaric practices obsolete and unacceptable to most people.
My point was that equating beating/spanking to violence on children (which is sometimes is) is over generalizing. I think the scenario I mentioned exhibits the argument. If not, I'd be interested in hearing why you think not.
As someone born substandard, who only became fully human as an adult, I was both the bully and the bullied as a youth. I've reflected on this throughout my years and see some virtue in this. Bullying can be extremely destructive to one's development, on either side. While I'm not 100% confident caning is the wisest option, personally I greatly value the experience of having my ass kicked for being a menace.
It's probably not for everyone. For the thinking type, it's a solid shortcut to empathy and effective antidote to hostile ego.
If it were up to me, there'd be an option for The Stick, or a brutal psychology session, at least initially. A bit idealistic though when the kinetic purity of the stick often just works.
As adults, I think we tend to forget about the difficulties of childhood bullying, some parents being obvious exceptions. For many, the experience is profound and the impressions lifelong. I get confused here, because I want children to be tough, or prepared to defend themselves, which usually is more effective with experience. But with so many personality types, that cannot apply to all.
There's also the eternal ghost of error and some children who did nothing wrong will inevitably be receiving the stick. That's a small but significant can of worms.
For me this is yet more evidence of humanity's aversion to holistic consciousness. One can argue violence is intrinsic. I think it is but do not agree that its manifestations necessarily are; or rather, we have the potential to change the the output if we really try. Idealistic, yes. The stick is real.
There's also the bizarre possibility that if humanity managed to develop an effective method of imparting empathy, respect, and consciousness to children, that it might break the present system. An awful lot of business wouldn't happen if both parties cared about each other.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
Have them make something difficult and time consuming to make, out of a flammable material, then as soon as it get's a pass from a supervisor they have to burn it.
Not the right approach as classifying someone as a bully is left to someone's subjective perception. This makes caning legal in the hope it would reform those boys and leaves room for misuse. Once bullying is proven in front of PTA group then other formal methods should be used, starting with counselling-> monitoring for improvement -> separating them from their peers and moving them up seniors, that might turn the tables -> community service with final recourse being termination from school and in worst case / rarest or rare scenarios the country would already have a juvenille justice system to reform.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
And that makes it a super pleasant place to live, I don't ever have to smell that junk on the street. I prefer the smell of good food and that's pretty much what all of Singapore smells like.
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
About three decades ago, a student attacked me by poking my face with a pencil very hard, close to my left eye. I could have become blind, but fortunately I did not. Yet the student was not even punished in the kindergarten run by PAP.
Besides that, I was slapped hard across the face by my Primary 1 teacher (Miss Maisura, iirc... or might get zero marks for mispelled her name) at Queenstown Primary School because I unknowingly brought my spelling book home and had difficulty understanding the instructions. Years later, I happened to meet her on a public bus in Singapore, but she had no recollection of who I was.
I was also physically abused by classmates for months. Some stole my coins or manipulated me through social engineering.
Some teachers were ridiculous and unprofessional when caning students. I witnessed that many times.
Despite all these terrible experiences, a school belle, Lisa Huang Shu Shung, once became smitten with me. We lost touch after graduation — I was in the worst class while she was in the best class. Sometimes, I still wonder how she is doing now. But why should I post in HN?
I have become semi-disabled in my 40s, now living with night blindness and no love life.
Even after growing up, you can still encounter people who would beat others up. That even happened to me during NS, my phone was even stolen by one of them in our room but the officers could not do anything.
My view is that caning only provides a short-term solution; it does not solve long-term problems.
Of course, some of the naughty classmates (gangsters who loved causing trouble and making noise) were eventually sent to jail — one for voyeurism and another for assault — while others were expelled from school.
Years later, I came across some old schoolmates again, but we had become strangers on the street. We were no longer the students we once were.
So I hope the future kids would never have to go through the same expereince. Just don't be selfish and don't lose your empathy towards others, because we won't be reborn after billion years just as we did not experience the pain of waiting 13.6 billion years.
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
People wonder why the state of the world is the way it is. Traumatized child expresses themselves the only way they know how? Let's beat them, surely this is the solution not creating a safe environment.
I'm not saying beating children is good but.. if you think the 'state of the world' is bad, well, most countries have massively reduced how much beating children get over the last 40 years or so.
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
On a list of cthullian horrors, its one of the less uglier ones. On a scale from mere bad to "reading about it damages yourself", the "nice" is a word describing its location on that scale.
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
You'll notice that my carefully chosen link does not look favorably upon this practice, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't paid to do a job that they've been trained to do with some consistency, unlike school officials.
I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.
I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.
I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are willing to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.
The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.
Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.
With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.
I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
I grew up in Nairobi during the 90's, and corporal punishment was common. We had massive work loads (by grade 7, we had 13 subjects and like 50 books, and no locker system like in america so had to drag two bags everyday) and there was often some chance of us not being able to complete a certain piece of homework... so we got hit on the hands or the butt with a pipe. Not quite caning, but still very painful.
Not sure how it helped, I just lived in constant stress of homework. But more importantly, the 'naughty' kids got immune to it. If you pipe everyone for minor infractions, then people just took it in stride.
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Then we were posted in to Saudi in the early 00's, and I vividly remember an event. I was in an all boys high school by then (segregated because saudi, duh), and one day, just an hour or so before end of school, we were all ordered to assemble in the main ground. It was surprising since no event was planned, and the teachers were grim faced.
Soon a van came into the forefront, and out came the police (both the normal uniformed police and the religious police, remember this was saudi like 3-ish kings back) and a few kids.... who were caned in front of us. Not much, 3-4 strikes each, and their backs were clothed, but it was whole dramatic production nonetheless, with a speech in arabic and everything.
Turns out (explained by teachers after we came back to class) they were boys from our school who had loitered around the girls section, and upon the security guard's attempt to shoo them away, had bullied and hurt him badly.
Now THAT put the fear of god in the kids, at least for awhile. It didn't mean there weren't kids smoking in the bathrooms or other teenage bullshit even after, but the reminder that you could be caned in front of the entire school did put a damper on the amount of mischief that kids committed for some time.... until of course the kids who saw the scene graduated and the memory was lost, I guess.
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So, while there is some merit to public corporal punishment and the humiliation ritual... but even then, kids are stupid and will justify to themselves many things (hey I'm not going to the extent of going to the girls section, nah it's just me and the lads messing around with a fellow classmate, doesn't rise to the level of caning, does it?)
And secondly, teachers will react by lower the bar further and further down until they go back to corporal punishment for everything (when all you have a hammer...)
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One of the best way to control mischievous kids, imho, is to just kick them out.
Sounds brutal, but when you have a collective environment like a school, you can't waste the time of the overwhelming majority of kids for the very few who just don't want to 'fit the system'.
And yes, 'fitting the system' was a deliberate choice of words, because usually that terminology is used for kids who need guidance... but these aren't 'naughty' kids who just need a 'creative outlet', we are talking about bullies here; if you have reached highschool age and you still haven't grokked that you can't just hit fellow students just because you are miserable... then you need to spend time elsewhere and learn the costs of fitting in society.
Maybe very [south]asian-coded of me, but our parents put a lot of time and expense in our educations (literally the only source of social uplift for us), and if we can't study because some other parent is lacking in raising their child.... that should not affect us, the education market is already very competitive and we can't risk falling behind.
The question of course arises, what to do with the kids who have been kicked out? Can't let them roam around or the problem gets worse, nothing more dangerous than a teenager with no goals, they are walking loose cannons.
Honestly... I don't know. Caning will work for a bit... but how long before the shock value passes? Some sort of juvie? That again just gets them into the crime pathway. Maybe some special school for them? But isn't that a juvie by another name?
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
sometimes not just unpleasant. i was locked in a storage closet hundreds of times as punishment while growing up and it caused irreparable damage to my psyche
i heard punishments where the parent stays at the timeout and are present but firm are better than abandoning them an hour at a time to cook or work out, sometimes your life is just tragic I'll say
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
In my jurisdiction prison sentences and imprisonment for public protection are different things, and only the latter is to protect innocent people. It is also pretty rare. Most prison sentences are, because society 'thinks' the aspiring prisoner deserves it, not because the public needs to be protected. Also penalties also fulfill the desire of the society for vengeance.
I think, being locked in isolation or with very dangerous individuals can leave deeper scars than a short period of violence. It's also not, like people in general never have any injuries, so it's not the pain itself that is an uncommon experience, but more the knowledge of it being linked to your actions. People don't have traumas just because they walked through nettles, feel from their bicycle or broke their legs.
> And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
That's nice, but I think he still has an amount of accepted violence by the state, because the policy of 'I don't give a fuck, let the strongest do what he likes' doesn't actually lead to less violence.
I just want to point out, how it is not necessarily a black or white thing, I'm not arguing for child abuse.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
No, I don't think it is different. Both are applications of state violence for enforcing laws. I think it would be reasonable to use (public) caning as a judicial punishment in the US for certain kinds of crimes, for the same reason I think it is reasonable to use incarceration as a judicial punishment in the US for other types of crimes.
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
Applying physical force to counter in the moment someone that tries to rob you is not vigilante justice. That would be more like if you had your phone robbed, and a few days later you went with your buddies to beat him up and get your phone back.
The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.
It'd be silly to blame the police, this kind of crime can only be addressed at a much higher level.
I'm not even too inclined to blame government, as I consider this minor loss of security a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in return for their economically beneficial pro-immigration policies.
This is just what living in a big city is like, unless you're in a police state.
> So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Yes; under those conditions vigilante justice is a reasonable way to 1) protect society from criminals, and 2) encourage the state to correct its failures of policing.
lmao the person you’re responding to didn’t say that anybody was breaking the rules, they just pointed out that there’s a lot of people here pontificating on the side of the merits of violence against children
You can post anything on hacker news if you phrase it right. Sometimes the mods will even pop in and interject unprompted that it’s all good so long as nobody is saying swears
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear.
In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.
People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.
In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.
> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments
Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.
Singapore also has
1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.
2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.
3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.
I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...
Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.
Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.
A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.
> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent
> not think of consequences
> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead
Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.
Sure, but that’s not deterrence anymore. The question there is less “will it work” and more “is this morally justifiable?” especially given the concerning proximity to eugenics (which started off as eliminating crime by eliminating people with “crime genes”).
Yet somehow, people aren’t that deterred if they keep executing people at a 20x rate than the U.S.?
I’m confused about that because the executed obviously are not deterred anymore, but the the not-yet executed people still are getting caught at the higher rate than in the U.S.?
Maybe the prison population is much smaller, because people are either law abiding or dead?
The incarceration rate is much lower. The US has an incarceration rate of 541 per 100k, Singapore is 178 per 100k. Singapore is just much more likely to execute convicts; in part because SG has a mandatory death penalty for some crimes, and in part because much of the US doesn’t have the death penalty in all.
It does not appear to be an effective deterrent. https://www.academia.sg/extra/death-penalty-research-appendi... This article has a criticism of the SG government report (Study 6 header) on the deterrent effect when they added the mandatory death penalty in the 90s. The big takeaway is that convictions didn’t drop notably (cannabis convictions dropped a single percentage point, opium convictions went up 2%. Average opium weight seized dropped a ton, but is still like 13 times the mandatory death penalty limit so hard to call it there).
This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.
I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.
Rest personal opinion.
I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.
Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.
Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.
To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.
In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths.
Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.
Most if not all the terrorist-related deaths are attributed to The Troubles that ended in - you guessed that - 1998. It is not possible to attribute the deaths or lack thereof to corporal punishment.
The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.
Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.
But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.
Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.
The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It is the threat of competent violence that keeps me from, say, sunbathing in a park without clothes on, on a nice day. Our world runs on violence, but we mostly try to deny it, because it serves the few that control the many to keep the many divided.
Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.
> Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.
That's a rather flippant attitude when given the details of what we're talking about. "Oh well, some folks get caned, whatcha' gonna' do?!"
Also, if the only thing that keeps you from sunbathing nude in a public park is the threat of someone kicking your ass, then that says a lot more about you than you might think. It's not "oh, I shouldn't expose myself to others who have not consented to being exposed to my naked body," it's "someone will inflict physical violence on me, thus I won't do this."
"Our world runs on violence..." Yeah, and there's plenty of us who think that is not something we should be proud of and should instead work to rectify instead of blindly accepting it as fact.
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?
Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.
> Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net
The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
James "Whitey" Bulger was given LSD in exchange for a reduced prison sentence after some low level crime. He went on to work as a professional hitman, taking out politicians and trafficking drugs.
LSD does work for things such as alcoholism, but MDMA is usually used in treatment programmes as it doesn't have such life changing mental effects.
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
another take: some people are emotionally “dumb” and have a really hard time feeling empathy for others. This is just another way to force the bully to be in someone else’s shoes…literally.
What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
I do agree we shouldn't limit it to children! But I don't think the boss/employee relationship should involve violence though because firing someone is simple and effective. But if someone is doing something bad for their community that has no obvious other consequences? Then yeah, it absolutely should be an option.
These rules should be implemented locally at a town or city level. No need to enforce the same set of rules across all society.
And it's interesting you bring up that bullying is a second order affect. If one of the parents is abusive, that should be something that has physical consequences. Solve the problem at the source, stop wringing our hands and getting lawyers / police involved for everything. That's not scalable and as a result there are a bunch of unsolvable problems in our society today.
I don't understand your view here. You want people to take care of problems/injusitice by violence but you also want this violence to be limited to "someone doing something bad for their community"? How can that be enforced at all. Like if you are doing something good for your community, the other community feels slighted and gets a free pass to... beat you?
Like I dont understand what you're saying at all because it seems like you want the social contract but also give anyone the agency to conduct violence and both cannot exists at the same time. We live in communities and created the police and law precisely because personal grudges and fights cannot scale and work to be a functional society. God i hope you are trolling
There ought to be an understanding that the school has leeway to use a ruler on misbehaving children without the police being involved. That's what I meant when I said stop getting police involved in everything. I'm not talking about vigilante justice.
An example that requires police to be involved: Small Town A has a law stating that anyone dealing drugs must be caned for the first offense. Someone deals drugs in Small Town, so police catch them and cane them.
Yes, because it is a well-known fact that police never use their power to bully others. It's also an established fact that nobody is ever wrongly accused of crimes by the police.
I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.
A former coworker of mine walks funny because he had polio as a child, and his father worked for the railway union after WWII. He told me one day in high school, one of his friends came to school with bruises couldn’t hide, inflicted by his drunk father. Everyone in school knew, everyone in town knew, but no one did anything.
My coworker informed his dad, about the egregious injuries that day. His dad drove to the drunk man’s house and knocked on the door and seized the drunk man by the collar: “if you ever touch that boy again, I’ll kill you.”
The threat must have been believable coming from a rail union worker, because it rehabilitated the recipient’s decision making processes going forward.
> father would lose the responsibility for his child
This HN discussion of systemic abuse in US Catholic orphanages last century also discusses vast, documented ongoing abuse in both religious and state run care/foster systems around the globe. Statistically, these systems cause more abuse than they prevent, and should only be a last resort.
I'm not an expert in all nations but systemic abuse in abuse prevention systems is not uniquely american. For instance, the British care system seems consistent with American results - a Brit I talked to told me that in year, roughly 1 in 2 children report sexual abuse at the hands of their caretaker or an older child. It's hard to tell the extent of the unreported abuses. And yet, widespread abuses doesn't preclude the possibility of children escaping unharmed. I'm glad you made it through.
This is a horrendous rate. But given the discussion context the success rate of a punch into the face of an alcoholic father is less than 50 % (I claim that given my knowledge with alcoholism) so even the bad British system is better.
Also given the lack of scandals in the German system (better most scandals are about how the system wasn't strict enough against abusive parents) I see it is clearly possible to build a better system.
> My coworker informed his dad, about the egregious injuries that day. His dad drove to the drunk man’s house and knocked on the door and seized the drunk man by the collar: “if you ever touch that boy again, I’ll kill you.”
Yeah that wouldn’t fly nowadays. Your friend’s father would be hot with a slew of charges from “terroristic threats” to “meanacing”
Yes. I think bullying should automatically lead to bully being shipped to suitable facility where they are rehabilited. It must be done to protect other children. Best way is to remove the perpetrator not the victim. Adults and evil monsters should stop excusing bullying with something like bad home conditions. If home conditions are bad remove them from that home. Or at least remove them from places where they can cause suffering to others.
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it.
And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
I'm pretty sure the proportion of corrupt people in any country will be pretty similar if the right structures are put to place. I think people give in to corruption when the system favors regardless of the country or continents and as a matter of fact a lot of people in government and places of power in my country were foreign schooled or bred.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
I can think of only 3 times where i or someone else confronted a bully and made it stop.
In 2 of those cases the bully was stronger but such stuff can always carry risks that the bully might not like or scenarios they can't take.
In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimpering fool in front of a ton of people. As far as I know he didn't try to get back at the victim.
In the second it was I that flipped out and had some luck. I didn't seriously hurt him but he realized the blind intent in the moment was there. He just seemed shocked and no longer bothered
The 3rd guy had some Moroccan machismo thing going and kept picking on people he couldn't beat and it always happened fairly conventionally without suprise.
Because I can't really think of examples.
Mind you that might be biased because people do often have an intuition for when they'd either get their ass handed to them or it would otherwise backfire so I assume there'd be some examples otherwise if they didn't take that into account.
Also these examples were mostly from incidents where the bullying got physical anyway. Much of it isn't and making it physical even as the victim tends to have drawbacks.
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
That’s “zero tolerance” hard at work.
Wouldn't want a kid who is being bullied to think about retaliating.
Also, because the bully can time the bullying, the initial event is often missed, but the victim is caught retaliating.
It sounds fair on paper, but punishing everybody involved does not work.
Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.
> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored.
Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed her and that was like 2nd grade. They can also team up together to accumulate these reports against student they don't like and just let the state come down on them and ruin their life.
So, what you’re saying is, HR department behaviours start long before HR department employment.
HR and school admin are the same in that many mistakenly think they are there to help the employee or the student. That is not true. They are there to protect the institution, to manage and mitigate risk and liability. Any assistance to employees or students is a side effect of that work.
The institutions we force on our children often closely mirror the institutions we implement for ourselves. Conversely, the institutions we go through as children mold our perceptions of how they should appear in adulthood.
> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.
René Girard
This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.
Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.
So we are complaining:
1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)
2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.
3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"
These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.
The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).
Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.
> This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
The implication is that the system overreacts one way only, taking the word of the victim at face value and then applying "zero tolerance" towards the perceived bully.
Like I mentioned "if the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor". Think of it like a tree that's unbalanced and leaning heavily one way, well you can make it fall on someone by pushing it in the way it leans, it won't take much effort to do that, it's already leaning as opposed taking tree standing tall and trying to topple that down on someone.
You can also use the school staff to help you bully other kids.
Play the victim, they can't allow that, now the other kid is in trouble for nothing.
Start a fight knowing you'll both get into trouble, laugh at the other kid who is in trouble because of your choices.
My (private) school had the luxury of sorting this through a multi tier system. a) detention was 3 hours minimum on a saturday. It involved manual labor like mulching flower beds, picking up litter while rolling around 50 gallon drums, etc. b) if you liked manual labor you were made to do homework with someone paying direct attention or lecturing subjects you were bad at. c) if you attempted to opt out of that they would have you dig holes 3 feet deep with a post hole digger and fill them back in. d) if you attempted to opt out of that you got 2 options 1) the teachers thought you were redeemable. you pushed the dumpster around campus picking up the 50 gallon drums. 3 times during the circuit you'd come back and raise a 50 lb plate overhead and drop it to smash the garbage. Aroudn 30 times each round. One of the philosophy teachers would expound on your life decisions for the full 3 hours. 2) you were enrolled at your public school immediately, and truant the next day. your parents were called and told to pick you up and returned the balance of the tuition.
it was a large luxury of privilege.
Bullying via playing the victim can work after school too. Eg. some legal cases are like this.
It works too well. Especially with the "first to call" or "first to complain" gets automatically a 500 point boost in credibility. "Clearly if they called the police first, the to other party must be at fault".
> It sounds fair on paper
To who!? It doesn't sound fair at all. It sounds like an "authority" being embarrassed their precious system wasn't able to catch the perceived issue. "I can't see everything so, until I can (ominous foreshadowing camera angle), every suspect is guilty."
Yeah, this is about avoiding a decision, not trying to even pretend to be fair. The administration is betting the parents won’t escalate the issue.
It isn't sold like this though, hence it working differently on paper and in practice.
There is no tolerance for violence. The kid is involved in a violent situation, and the kid is punished for it. That is a fairly logical set of steps until you realize how vague "involved" is.
I don't know why you were downvoted to hell. You were not defending the school's disciplinary approach, you were just describing it.
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.
That's 100% how it worked in practice. Hell, I've even heard of some parents encouraging their kids to do that if they get hit precisely because the notion of "no tolerance" is absurd
> can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating
I'm 100% for the retaliation. If I'm going to get kicked out for fighting, I'm not going to do it without hitting the other guy.
One time I was almost kicked out for a "serious fight" I never threw a punch in. Was a friend who was having a rough time and I knew I just needed to give him a minute. Arm up to keep some space, stepping back. Caught and detained for it. Couldn't figure out what else I was supposed to do. Didn't matter because I was involved.
> bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences
This is exactly how it plays out other times.
If you punish a kid that didn't retaliate just because "he was involved in a fight" you remove every incentive for that kid to restrain themselves next time. If he's gonna be punished, he might just as well be punished for something.
The next step is parents' lawyers going zero tolerance on the school system.
victims shouldn't be accountable for contributing to the problem.
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> But I became fixated on how unfair it was.
I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it.
If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything else that school teaches you.
The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.
I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us.
These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, which seems to skew hard towards an unmet desire for respect/authority coupled with a relatively dull intellect. Most just aren't equipped to take charge of children.
> relatively dull intellect
You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.
I stopped a kid from hitting me and the school tried to punish me for another kid attacking me, and I non violently grabbed his fist and stopped the attack.
When I learned I'd be punished the same as the attacker, or if I had hit back, I told the school, "Next time, I will knock him out."
I don't recall if the policy was changed, but I was not punished, and no one bullied me when they realized I would defend myself and was prepared to fight back. Don't pick on the quiet fat kid.
And where were your parents in this? My school in USA tried this... Once. My dad went to have a talk with them. I do not know what was said, but the principal walked out of the room white-faced and they never tried that bullshit on me again.
Ten minutes ago my son came home from school and told me there was a fight and that the kid who started it has no punishment but the kid who finished it got a weeklong suspension.
I have no clue how they come up with this stuff.
That's exactly the kind of situation that made hateful as a teen. I'm so glad to be free of that now. Therapy works (over the long term, not a quick fix).
I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten.
I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.
Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.
Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!
It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.
I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.
2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.
She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.
I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.
I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.
[dead]
If your parents didn't make a serious stink about this, they failed you.
As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.
School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.
In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education and they're often the source of really stupid policies that sound decent only if you know nothing about schools and/or are incapable of seeing second order effects, such as with zero tolerance.
In any case, the admins there probably wished the OP would have punched the bully back. That's what stops bullying, and oddly enough often even results in friends being made. At least among boys - girls that get physical with each other will hold a death grudge til the end of time, but also get physical far less often as a balance to that.
> In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education
There don't actually exist so many things that you need to know so that you can at least make decent decisions:
For this particular case, it suffices to know the trivial fact that if children are in half-time jail ("compulsory school attendance"). From this, one can easily conclude that thus structures that one knows from prisons will develop on the schoolyard.
Your 1st sentence is spot on.
Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.
Pretty sure the second sentence was meant to be ironic.
thats called collective punishment when persons aside from the offender are also punished for the crimes of that one offender.
a school being a government entity, cant be doing that malarchy.
Or, it was a pop quiz to stand up for yourself, which you then failed.
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
Expel the kid
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
Two problems:
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?
I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.
That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.
Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.
> child has to be in education until they turn 18.
> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal
These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
>>I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later".
>> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Saying that keeping 15 year olds out of a job is harmful to the society is....certainly a take, for sure.
>>What we do with children now is equally effective.
Well, thank you for editing this sentence from what you wrote originally, but just to be clear - I'm not advocating that misbehaving kids should be forced to sit in normal classrooms and disrupt everyone else - rather that schools should be given the resources to deal with it - the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids which were much smaller and where you basically had to meet up with specialists every week and your grades were severely impacted. It does work in most cases. Sure there will be ones that are truly beyond any kind of help - but that is very very rare. Most of the time you just have kids who could get on the straight path if someone helped them, but public schools are usually so underfunded they can't help even if they want to.
> Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later
Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public school, so there is no financial incentive.
15 year olds forced to sit in classes they don't want are way more miserable than those allowed to work and feel like adults. In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.
> the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids
That's a great solution too, and must be available option for parents. Sadly very few schools do that, making both unruly kids and good kids miserable as a result.
> schools should be given the resources
I don't think the problem is the lack of resources, specialist for helping unruly kids is not going to cost more than a math teacher. The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study. As a result they have a system that harms everyone involved.
>>Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public schoo
I have to ask, what public school would accept adults taking classes along the rest of 15 year olds?
>> In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.
I'm sorry, but kids/teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons. If you're an adult, then sure, do whatever. But kids should be in school, whether they like it or not - it's really not their choice to make. We can argue that maybe 15-16 year olds are at the cusp of being able to do this - but I'd say the cut off should stay at 18. You're under 18, you go to school. There's no other option. The question is how does the state manage this.
>>The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study.
And I agree that it's an awful thing(that the schools are unwilling to do this)
I went to school at 6 years, our schools were for 10 years, and at 16 i went to university. At the university with us were some 20 year olds, who went to school at 7 years, were not able to get to university in their 17, were drafted to army at 18 and came back. 20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.
20 year old who wants to study is not going to cause any problem for the public school either, it will even be beneficial for the class as children will see that studying is useful.
> teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons
When they are not allowed to make choices, the parents are supposed to make choices for them, not corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
>> the parents are supposed to make choices for them
Parents don't have any choice in this either. A child under 18 should be in full time education - there is nothing to choose, maybe except for the school they can be in.
>>20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.
I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds.
> Parents don't have any choice in this either.
That's a very fucked up thing to say, governments or random strangers from internet do not have a right to decide how parent raises his child. Do you even have a child?
> I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds
It was just my own experience, if you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
>>Do you even have a child
I do. And like I said, you as a parent have a choice about the kind of school you send your child into. You don't have a choice whether they are in education or not.
>>And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
When you were at school were there many adult students in your classes?
>>you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
Yes, 100 years ago in the early days of the soviet union the classes were offered to everyone to increase literacy rates. I can assure you that throughout the rest of history of the soviet union you didn't have adults attending primary/secondary school, gymnasiums or other types of schools for children. Soviet union had schools for adults from very early on.
Show me a single law that was not given by a politician? I don't think there are any. Aside from maybe F = MA or Pie are squared LOL.
Laws like "do not kill", "do not steal", have been found long before politicians existed, by the natural selection of societies. That is groups of people who did not follow these laws were largely outcompeted by those who followed.
If you decide to break the law of "do not steal" in large extent you get millions dead like it have happened in communist Russia or Maoist China. If you break it in smaller extent (e.g. by very high tax) you get stagnant economy like in EU.
In contrast to that, the laws banning children to work were adopted at the point when children did not need to work, so they are largely irrelevant. If these laws existed in 18th century London or Paris they would cause many deaths too, since there was no other way to feed these children.
So not all laws are given by politicians.
Right now, today, there are hundreds of millions of 15 year-olds with jobs all around the world. In the US this wasn’t uncommon two generations ago.
>I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds
They do but not many and with very limited work hours.
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
People with this mentality should never, ever be given any semblance of power. In almost every one of your comments you went to the extreme but "forced labor" and "committed to mental asylum" really take the cake.
> but I don’t know any which is better.
Are you genuinely wondering what's better, investing in prisons or in education? As far as I can tell your solutions involve making the problem worse by cutting the access to the only thing that could fix it (education), then building forced work camps and asylums to contain the now exploding problem.
The US stands proof that building more prisons doesn't lead to having fewer criminals. Education does. The first thing you thought of axing.
I think he makes a good point. Why do we let disruptive kids stay in the same class as the kids who want to study? The current state is terrible.
> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in > mental institutions.
That was how NAZI-Germany and USSR (communist) governments 'solved' their problems.
In the USA, we had this president named Ronald Reagan who solved the mental institution problem: he closed all the mental institutions and expelled the patients so the patients live on the streets. That's really gave us a new influx of homeless people on a national scale, and it hasn't improved.
I'm a bit confused. Are you saying Hitler and the communists were right for putting people in mental institutions or Reagan who didn't?
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
>>My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8
And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on?
>>12 year olds are not babies.
Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school? What would you have them do, exactly?
Ok, so answer the question then - what work program would there be for those 12 year olds that cannot function in the company of polite society. Like what kind of work would you have them do and how would you ensure compliance.
I don't have to answer the question because my goal is more the welfare of the remaining children in the school and less whatever happens to the bully. I really don't care what happens to them. Let their parents care. Let their parents find some solution. The more difficult that is, the better.
But someone has to answer. Saying "I really don't care what happens to them" is just such a lazy way out of this conversation. The whole problem is that we have to decide as a society what to do with them. You suggested work programs - great! Now give some examples of work programs you would put 12 years old in. If you can't or won't, then you have no more solution to this than someone who thinks having an idea equals having a business - it's precisely the execution that matters.
For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_service. 12 year old would be pretty fine to spend 4-5 hours a day cleaning streets for a while.
Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.
>> School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.
It's actually neither of those things, because we discovered hundreds of years ago that having an educated population is good for everyone. No, it's not a prison, but it's not a privilege either - you have to be in school until certain age. Work is not substitute for education.
Have an educated population does not mean that every last uncivilized brat needs to participate. Especially if he is distracting other people from acquiring an education.
...how do you think we got to the literacy rates we have now?
And schools have been able to deal with "brats" for over a century without kicking them out of school.
Being in school does not make one educated. Keeping disruptive child in the same room with normal children, means we get fewer educated people, not more.
Which is exactly why I advocate for not keeping them in the same classroom as other kids.
Most bullying happens outside the classroom.
I mean, we can repeat facts at each other, or we can carry on with the conversation in some more specific direction if you wish?
So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better?
We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
>>Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere
Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
Yes, that is a hard problem that society in general doesn't like dealing with, but the solution doesn't involve letting kids be abused. That's the point I'm making. Don't let kids get abused. I honestly didn't think that was very controversial.
And I completely agree with you.
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
> They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb
For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys?
> some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support
No need for support, just stop harming them!
It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison.
The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
One would be trading a chance of being murdered by psychopaths on the street for a chance of being murdered by psychopaths in the government.
They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social.
Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective.
Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
This is the mentality that turns public schools into zoos and drives families with means to private.
...the mentality that says schools should be given the resources to deal with it, instead of (like some other commenter suggested) sending kids to mental institutions?
The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it, leading to a death spiral of reduced enrollment and funding -- at least for SFUSD. I imagine the story is similar elsewhere.
>>The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it
Which is why I'm advocating for the schools to be given the resources to deal with it.
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
If it’s effective, yes.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
> Expel the kid
I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)
At that point it's not about punishing the expelled kid, it's about stopping them from ruining the other kids education
It's a hard line to balance. In my younger years I should have absolutely been kicked out of school, but as I grew older and my hormones calmed me down, I then was a good student.
I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
No this is not true. Expulsion works in many cases. The idea of getting expelled prevents a lot of problems. A lot of people avoid doing things that will get them expelled but this of course doesn't apply to everyone including the person in your example.
It's similar to how prison is a deterrent to crime. But it doesn't change the fact that there are people who still do crimes and get into prison.
Many unruly pupils have trouble at home, impoverished backgrounds, dyslexia, autism, social anxiety and a host of other things. Expelling them solves none of these things.
They may be bullies themselves because of an ongoing toxic culture in the school. That can include the teachers in some cases, who are some of the worst bullies in there. I had one who persecuted me for a speech impediment and humiliated me in front of an entire class of children by making me say tongue twisters.
>It's similar to how prison is a deterrent to crime. But it doesn't change the fact that there are people who still do crimes and get into prison.
None of what you said contradicts the above.
[dead]
> expel them and they become another person's problem
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
Schools make some of these issues worse. They are riddled with bullying, and until recently made little accomodation to people with learning or social disabilities.
So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue.
In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.
Sorry to hear that - I knew someone who was sectioned in the Royal Edinburgh about 30 years ago now. A really difficult place to visit emotionally. I can believe it's expensive given the kinds of difficulties the patients are experiencing.
Yes, it's some place. There are buildings lying empty (one had a Legionnaires' scare recently), and the grounds could be better but are run down. There are some mature trees that look good, but the bowling green has been ripped up as well. Morningside is a good area which is a mixed blessing as it means it may end up being developed.
As one of my friends remarked to me it's not a healing environment. The staff there, in my limited experience, vary a lot in their attitude. Some of them are great. Some not so much. It depends who you are dealing with.
The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.
The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies.
But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally:
That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours).
If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse).
One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins.
Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
That can be just fine to me.
I still live in my hometown, and while I was never bullied, a bully a year or so above me killed himself in his late 20s.
lol lmao was my reaction xD
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
> outsourcing
It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.
You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).
Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.
I think you misunderstand the premise - in fact I struggle to understand how you interpreted the GP that way. No one is arguing that parents should provide 100% of life and academic lessons or that kids should be locked up at home, but that they, rather than schools, should have the leading role.
I took my kids out of school when they were eight or nine and up to 16 (the end of compulsory school age in the UK) my experience was that they met a wider range of people, and had a lot more freedom. Instead of being locked up at school they were free to do more on their own or with friends and to go to a wide range of classes and activities. They have done well academically (conditional offer from Oxford for one, the other starting a PhD later this year) and I was complimented regularly on their social skills when they were children, and this seems to be continuing as adults (and my older daughter now has work responsibilities that require soft skills - I would assume she would not have them if her managers had not observed her as having the skills).
The problem is not the involvement of other people, it is the outsourcing of responsibility and decision making and the main part of parenting. Parents are frequently little involved.
I think the village would be a healthy model for sure. But that is something that was pretty much killed in the modern society as well as most people, especially lower/mid-income workers in larger cities, are spending exceedingly little time of their day in their local neighborhoods.
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
Community service perhaps?
Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.
Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.
It is a sad state of affairs if there's nothing a kid cares about at school.
I have a peruvian (not athletic/nerdy) friend who moved to the us a while ago. (I played through college) his son randomly started playing football his sophmore year after getting beaned by a baseball and felt baseball was more dangerous.
About junior year the kid was having some issues at home. Dad didn't know what to do. I said email the coach. He's like what will that do. I was like coach can make him run (corporal punishment) and take away things. Emailed the coach. Coach was like "I'll have a chat with him".
Next day he said son came home and apologized to him. Cleaned up amazingly instantly (great kid). Pretty sure it was literally just a talk from another respected figure (who likely said maybe you should play less or miss practice while you sort this out.
this is why those mandatory military programs for youth work. & at times boarding schools.
in boarding school - if I know where you sleep & I have always access it incentivizes you to behave better.
one system - where all the aggression is channeled through. you can't bully - a bully ie drill instructors.
I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.
It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.
Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.
Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.
Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?
My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.
So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.
I was a class clown type, but not a bully.
> Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways
An ADHD diagnosis and treatment.
Yeah, I got mine 30 years too late, too.
We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.
We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.
Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.
Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.
It was de rigueur for us, but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner. And no, it didn’t work, we’d just plot collective revenge on him, and collectively figure out how to escape the punishment.
> but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner
What are you saying?
That the apartheid regime and its proponents were not terribly nice people.
Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.
It appears that you are saying that because someone is an Afrikaner, they must be a member of the apartheid regime or a proponent thereof.
If you are not saying this, then it's unclear how this is related to your previous comment.
You could write a comment that makes sense by saying "Afrikaners usually believed in weird corporal punishments because that was normal in their culture" or something and that would be perfectly acceptable.
Or perhaps, you have some specific knowledge that this guy was actually a proponent of apartheid, which you should share.
Stereotyping all Afrikaners with that brush is despicable.
I’m sorry, calling Dutch colonists colonisers is despicable? Well, I suppose not just Dutch colonists, they did have their population bolstered by a lot of Austrians and Germans escaping war crime prosecution in the 40’s.
Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.
Some Afrikaners resent British people and Anglophone South Africans, and this dates back to the Boer Wars and beyond. The British interned large numbers of Afrikaners and some of them died in their camps. They marginalised their language, and tried to replace it with English in administration (much the same as with the Québecois etc). The Afrikaners remembered all this, and the insecurity it gave them was partly what led to apartheid and attempts to reinstate Afrikaans as the main national language.
We tended to hear a lot about black-white relations in South Africa, and even fighting between different black African groups... But much less so about the split among whites. I'm told by white South African English speakers that certain Afrikaans speakers were very resentful of them. Some of them didn't like the rugby and cricket boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s either.
It is perfectly possible that some of what you experienced from that teacher came from all this.
I do not agree with this statement though "They were coming over for one reason only." Many South Africans came to the UK for economic reasons, or cultural ties much like Aussie and Kiwis. I had a white South African drama teacher at school and while I could criticise many of my other teachers, I always found him to be pretty easy going. Except in one area. Some of the children used to make fun of his accent and he didn't like that, which I can understand. He came over years before apartheid was dismantled by the way, but never gave any indication of supporting it.
I will just say you lack basic knowledge of history of Afrikaners and South Africa in general and that, coupled with your prejudice on display, is a pretty ugly sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaners#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa#History
I'm sure that person must've been a pretty bad one. But to tie Dutch colonialism, apartheid and WW2 war criminals (centuries later by the way) together this way to excuse these discriminatory remarks is pretty daft. Needless to say, not everyone was/is like that.
this can only be effective if the school isn't counting on the bully to help the school win various sports competitions over the next few years.
often the school is in a tough spot because the only reason some jocks are there is for their sport ability, that the school needs.
American colleges I can understand. But other than bragging rights, why should a high school give enough of a shit about championships to look the other way on bullying?
Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider
My school wasn't like that. I assumed Varsity Blues was fiction. Or at least, kind of outdated.
Can any Americans confirm this?
Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?
In Texas HS Football is very much the central/highest tier of social status/standing in the community, and the stadiums they play in are bigger than small college stadiums elsewhere (and are televised.)
For football, yes. Although I think it only broadcast on some small cable TV channel that you had to get special access for. There definitely were small media crews at the games (I was in the band; I went to most of them).
One year I was there, the football team made it to the state championship, and got to play in one of the big 70K-seat stadiums the NFL teams use. About half of our small town bought tickets and went to it.
I just checked, looks like mine is one of many schools that streams games live on here: https://www.nfhsnetwork.com/
Really depends on where, and what sport.
If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators.
If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as a regular thing. Especially if you're at one of the 50++ high schools that has a 10,000+ capacity stadium.
Edit: yea and as other replier mentioned, there's some regional tendencies too.
> https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-high-school-...
Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.
Oof wow, that's bigger than I realized. I knew there were a lot of big ones (10k+), but I didn't realize there was US highschool football being played in stadium bigger than the smallest EPL stadiums.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given a lot of college stadiums are 50k+ capacity.
Eight of the top ten largest stadia in the world are for NCAA Football.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stadiums_by_capacity
That's my personal experience growing up in a suburban area in the South (edit: in the 90s)
In this case it was at roughly age 8-10. It was a sporty school and I don't think it prioritised that above student wellbeing, not at the level of one individual player anyway.
That said, I know school sports is a way bigger deal in the US than most other countries so YMMV.
> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that
Or actively don't want to do that. There have been cases in Ohio where football players have done things that should have them suspended or expelled (or more) and the school has literally gone on record that "we didn't remove him from the team as that would be unfair to the other players on his team, who are having a great season".
I think many people who wouldn't be disincentivized by demerits/expulsion/etc would find the threat of intense physical pain highly motivating.
Caning is no joke.
I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved.
There was one though, small kid that probably had a harder life at home than us, he wasn't fazed by the caning, didn't even flinch. Even him avoided getting in trouble too frequently, so caning still kind of worked.
Edit: I think the most terrifying thing wasn't the pain, but the sharp SLAP!.
> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Most schools just care more about their sports teams are doing, so they'd have no interest in a punishment that involved removing a player who otherwise was good enough to make the cut. Look at how many people looked the other way for stuff way worse than bullying at Penn State.
the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.
This worked for us. A little thug was bullying my kid until I taught my kid how to land a punch to the mouth. That was a one-shot solution to that problem.
Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
My daughter did the same thing. She actually “lost the fight” but no one messed with her ever since
You think that a child being bullied should have to suck it up until they commit forced violence against another child? Maybe beating up a bully is something that happens when adults abdicate all responsibility, but it's insane to claim that's better than "the adults should just do their fucking jobs".
> most schools don't do that
It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.
I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.
Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:
https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...
This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.
The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.
Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.
Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.
Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.
Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.
I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
The school, and every other student.
That moves the problem elsewhere, it doesn't solve it.
Generally true, but the school's core protection responsibility is for its own students and staff - not the rest of the world. And the school's authority and resources are even more constrained.
At least in some places, school systems have "special" schools or other programs for the kids who they'd rather keep out of contact with the general student population.
It returns the problem to the source: the child's parents or guardian.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools
In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.
The public schools are loathe to expel (unless there's an agreement in the district that one school is a dumping ground) - midrange private schools are quick to expel to protect the rest, but the highest end private schools will figure out a way to not expel, because the money is sooooo good.
If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.
Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.
This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.
I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.
> teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
Oh common, threatening to take something a kid loves away is the most bland/generic policy there is, there is exactly zero "understanding" required, though some care would be required to actually trying to do anything
Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.
As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"
"Bad" is a cool label, it marks you as dangerous. But the comment proposes "immature", "behind". So give then a neat, pink shirt, not a black one with a skull on it (not saying that this works either, just clarifying).
I was bullied, a lot. The only thing that really stops a bully is shaming them, treat them like they are a child that needs to be treated as younger than their age. Bullies are demanding and demonstrating dominance, and if that is turned around on them, the bullying stops.
Right?
There are lots of reasons this stuff happens, but one of them is definitely that some kids aren't acting out for school reasons but for attention from their parents.
It's not always straight up immaturity. A lot of it could be other issues related to the bullies environment/household or many other issues.
Classical stereotypical case is that the bully himself has an abusive/alcoholic father. There's a lot of complexity in what's involved here, but society is only equipped to deal with the "immaturity" case which is real but not the only story.
They may also have dyslexia, ADHD or social anxiety, which cause them difficulties in other areas and this is how it manifests.
I'm tired of trying to find excuses for their bad behaviours. The first goal should be to protect the victims. By whatever is necessary. People have a right to live in security. Then, once that first step is done, we can think about pampering the bullies into conformance. Not the other way around.
The bullied often end up becoming bullies, and in my experience, two children can bully one another, so that is not necessarily a one way experience. In some cases, a smaller child can even bully a taller one, although an adult would think that was unlikely.
While it is possible to stamp out physical bullying, psychological and verbal bullying are near impossible to eliminate, and so any sizable school which denies having it is lying. It is a matter of degree, and how they handle it.
Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Seems like a slippery slope fallacy? Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit? What an odd argument.
Seems like a decent approach to me tbh.
> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"
Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.
> "[...] nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs."
This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.
> There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.
Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.
I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:
- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.
Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
People respond differently to different things. One bully who gets punched back will stop, while another will escalate. Trying to fix bullying requires a solution tailored to each individual bully.
I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
> I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying
I don't think anyone is making that assumption, but being ok with corporal punishment likely comes down to three things:
1. We should care more about victims of violence than perpetrators, and all measures should be taken to protect victims and prevent victimization, even if it hurts perpetrators. Meaningful consequences for violent behaviour is critical.
2. The belief the physical deterrents work, if applied consistently and not abused to the point where it doesn't provide clear guidance as to acceptable behaviour.
3. That the primary job of schools and educators is to provide a safe and effective learning environment. Being therapists that get to the root of problematic behaviour is neither in their training nor in their job description.
How about when the perpetrators are also victims? If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home (as is often the case), don't both kids deserve help and support? Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
> If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home
Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others, just like it wouldn't excuse breaking the law. You can say "here is the punishment for your bad behaviour, now let's ALSO have child services remove you from that environment AND have the justice system punish your parents' bad behaviour". Everybody has their job and if they do their job, then what's the problem?
> Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
Firstly, there's no "just do X" for multifaceted problems. Secondly, people these days dramatically underestimate the value of prison. Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
> Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others
I totally agree, but I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no? There are other punishment options if you still insist on inflicting some hardship.
> Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back? "Simply removing them" for a period of time simply perpetuates the problem, thus helping to ensure more violent crime in the future, not less.
> I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no?
The dirty secret is that we have absolutely no idea how to rehabilitate anyone. Even our best therapies for people who desperately want to change their behaviour are only 40% effective at only slightly modifying behaviour, and most violent criminals unfortunately have no such desire.
This is partly psychology's fault for doing such poor science for decades (35% replication rate!), but partly also the false premise that there are no innate biological factors at play.
> That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back?
This is already known but ignored in "polite" society: poor impulse control. Most repeat offenders only stop offending once they age out of impulsive behaviour, not because they had some kind of revelation or personal growth; stories like this conflate correlation and causation.
Age is the best behaviour modifier we know, because hormonal profiles change, which ends up changing strength and frequency of the impulses we have to overcome. Imprisoning repeat violent offenders until they age out of it poor impulse control is totally a policy that should be on the table.
At the point a parent is beating up their own kid I wonder what options are available. If they're removed from the family then placing them in foster care almost always leads to worse outcomes than leaving them with the abusive family. The state doesn't know how to raise children.
Then surely the focus should be on solving that problem? Just clamping down on the proximate cause doesn't really help - as others have pointed out, it seems likely to incite revenge attacks rather than stopping the bullying.
That's the thing, it's unclear if it's a problem that can be solved. It has to do with fundamental benefits of staying with biological family, and avoiding the extremely negative consequences of lack of attachment.
https://nccpr.org/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-...
Do you have any personal experience with this?
I grew up in a place where teachers could and did beat children. School kids there are far better behaved than kids in US public schools. I’m not making an argument for it, just an observation of effectiveness. It works.
My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.
Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.
As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.
I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.
In
> such cases were easily resolved
Hah!
In any case, it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people.
Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.
That’s called training a person to live in the real world and not be a criminal.
> it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people
Not curious at all. Ingrains the lesson that, should you feel inclined to abuse your strength, there is always someone stronger. That's a clear lesson that even works on psychopaths who otherwise feel no remorse and cannot be influenced by other means.
Conversely, it also ingrains the lesson that it is ok to abuse anyone weaker than you A) if you know you can get away with it (because someone stronger is not always around/aware/inclined to intervene), or B) because that is just normal / the way the world is.
I don't see how that follows. In an environment in which physical correction has no reason, and is doled out unfairly (as with alcoholic parents), then sure, someone would ingrain the idea that the world is callous and unfair and they should get theirs at the expense of others if they can. If they instead only experience physical correction due to specific reasons that are deemed far outside the bounds of acceptable (such as inflicting violence on others), that's a whole different lesson.
I think you’re missing the point.
A teacher’s like or dislike of a student is often irrational and based on personal emotion; they are human beings, after all. The real issue is that they wield significant power with very few checks and balances. They are essentially dictators. They work within a system where colleagues often cover one another’s works rather than questioning each other’s professional conduct.
It is far too dangerous to grant them the power of corporal punishment while simply hoping they will remain fair. I believe that in every school, there is at least one teacher who would abuse it.
Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.
We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.
Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.
Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.
Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Schools have gone downhill since.
This is just a defense of violence and abuse.
> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)
Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.
Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.
What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?
Violence as punishment is different, of course.
This comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?
In theoretical land - if my son had beaten some other kid to pulp, and he got a slap from teacher to stop that (on top of probably being expelled)? Absolutely, the least of the issues in such problem.
This is very far from organized canning as a punishment, but stating teacher should never ever use violence or they end up losing their job for good and getting dragged to courts with possibility of jail is just as extreme position as letting them be beaten at teacher's will.
Middle path folks, middle path. If you don't trust teachers at all in the first place, why do you give them your children to co-raise them? Schools should do procedural punishments, not corporal. But 100% is a fairy land, and some psychotic parents who never admit their child is doing something bad (and there are so many of those, aren't they just ask literally any teacher) take it as a gospel and go to jihad mode against anybody. World doesn't need more empowered Karens, do we.
There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.
Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.
The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.
Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.
Give this a watch - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070649/
On the other hand, I got bullied a lot less after one lose a few teeth. Violence does work.
Singapore has 30% or more families using corporal punishment, according to this
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10311744/
30% engaged in child abuse is grotesque.
And when it is permissible to say that a society is trash? Cause 30% who think beating children is OK, is frankly abhorrent.
And yeah, Singapore society as a whole is pure trash. When you have monikers like, "Disneyland with the death penalty", you know it's a real authoritarian shithole.
https://thediplomat.com/2026/05/is-singapores-legal-system-b...
You should travel more.
> it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution
Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
> In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.
In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.
Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.
The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.
A bully is not necessarily a sadist
And neither a sadist or a bully are necessarily bad people.
yes they are, bullies some of the worst of humanity
"Bully" is an archetype.
Teaching someone that using violence and abuse as ways to exercise power is not a lesson I want people to learn.
Good thing that's not the lesson then. Of course if you see any use of physical correction as violence and abuse, then you're just assuming the conclusion.
I see any use of violence as violence, yes, and find it abhorrent to see people justifying violence against children. I'm happy I grew up in a civilised country where it was and is a criminal offense
Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence. It's not much different than kidnapping and that's usually considered violence. How about a time-out for a child?
> Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence.
Yes, I do. It should also be a last resort to mitigate worse consequences to society, and is severely over-used for many things where it has no proven benefit.
> How about a time-out for a child?
It can be cruel if over-used, but it is not the same as physically hurting a child.
A time-out can still be considered violence and something you approve for children.
And oranges can be considered apples. If you're going to redefine terms in the attempts at a gotcha all you're achieve is looking silly.
> It can be cruel if over-used, but it is not the same as physically hurting a child.
Anything is cruel if "overused". And nobody is claiming "it's the same" as corporal punishment, the argument is whether corporal punishment should be on the table in some circumstances at all, and what those circumstances should be.
I think the conclusion that it should never be permitted is completely unjustified, based on fantasy notions that everyone is innately good if properly directed using words (false), that we understand psychology enough to change people using words (we don't), and how common and abused the power for physical punishment can be (it can be bad, as can many things whose risks we manage).
I think there are many functional and legitimate ways that humans can organize themselves (law and culture), and the idea that corporal punishment cannot be justifiably used in any of them seems almost certainly false.
> because there's always someone with a bigger stick.
This is certainly not true. Someone has the biggest stick, and if they abuse that power, it can be horrible.
Nobody has the biggest stick forever, and time is implicitly included in the adage "someone always has a bigger stick".
> I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically!
How is this different from being in city where "police officer" has the power to shot you?
We're not required to be in a cop's room for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
We ARE required to be in an authoritarian's room for 8 hour a day, 5 days a week for 12 years.
A whole lot more would be arrested, assaulted, and executed if we were in cops' sight like this.
Point taken on the power being abused point.
But to the first point, it seems like Singapore has a strong reputation for being low in crime while high in severity of punishment.
William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" and all that.
> Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.
When I was young me and two of my brothers were one-day really misbehaving. My grand-father, who had been capture on the first day of WWII (well on the first day Germany invaded Belgium) and spent 5 years in a PoW prisoner camp in Germany, wasn't a little wuss.
He spanked our three arses so bad I remember it to this day.
It was an amazing lesson.
Something has to be said about peaceful time that create weak men who then find all the excuses towards abusers. The issue with the "well-thinking" mindset is that when pushed to its logical end, rapists are walking totally free after having been caught (UK) and people can break a female police officer' nose at the London Heathrow airport and walk totally free too. With weak judges from a weak society ruling that: "In their culture/countries men don't know that you're not supposed to rape women".
We then end up with people, in the west, who genitally mutilate women and non-sense like that.
When, on the contrary, you decide to take the psychopaths who ruin society for everyone by the scruff of the neck and put them in chain, you get the homicide rate slashed, in ten years by 100.
That's not being decimated: that's being decimated and then being decimated, again.
1/100th.
> So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable
That's typical victimization, which create more weak men. Weak men who then, for example, become politicians who vote ultra-lax laws and weak judges who then let rapists walk free, making the streets unsafe.
If bullies getting spanked by an authority figure don't get the lesson, it's their problem. Not society's problem. Society, as a whole, is supposed to have the monopoly of violence. Instead of that in many countries (like France and the UK), the government gives up and gives the monopoly of violence to drug dealers and rapists. Drug dealers and rapists who learned, since a young age, that were exactly zero repercussion when being a bully.
You've got your opinion, I got mine: putting gang members in chains in El Salvador slashed the homicide rate by 100x. Ponder that.
Okay, so you're a chump with a slave mentality who can be broken by a spanking but you think other men are weak. Got it.
All these corporal punishment societies and families have the people they don't talk about who were hardened or driven insane by beatings.
Those are valid arguments.
I believe a better approach might be installing surveillance cameras in classrooms and hallways, then expelling bullies once their actions are confirmed by footage.
Perhaps we could establish "special schools for confirmed bullies," where students who show improvement could eventually be "promoted" back to mainstream schools.
Only then can we truly protect innocent victims.
I think they call those prisons. /s
But seriously, I don't know how much I'd trust society to care / keep funding such schools, or people working there to that with enough empathy and motivation for too long.
The sentiment that (even low-level) criminals in prison are trash, that deserves the worst instead of rehabilitation, is I feel too wide-spread for me to think it would be different.
But yeah, I might be too cynical here.
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Well, one of my formative memories while being a child at school contributes to it, I was once saying some mean thing to another child because of other kids, that child slapped my face back quite good, I don't remember what I was saying, just that it was mean and that the slap made me question "why was I being mean for no reason?", an epiphany which helped me greatly.
On the other side of things, I do remember having suffered some forms of violence from parents and those really did not contribute to anything than showing me why they were bad parents.
That slap was not official punishment. You were interacting with a peer. It's different from what's being discussed here.
> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums
Even “light” physical punishment is not proven beneficial. The research generally does not find a safe beneficial threshold where hitting becomes good if mild enough; it finds that physical punishment may suppress behavior briefly but is associated with worse outcomes over time. “Light” changes the severity, not the evidence.
Where in the quoted sentence do you see the word punishment?
Where the proof that caning people for mistakes creates in the the desire for vengeance where they will hit their children.
Naughty children won't work, or do vocational training. Have you worked with children?
Depending on the age, yes. Strict discipline, punishment and rewards works very well. What does not work, is the past 30 years of wokeism, where children are granted their every wish.
> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven!
Can you share any reference or scientific study affirming this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
> hysterical children out of tantrums
In my humble experience, children throwing tantrums are likely experiencing overstimulation or emotional overwhelm, and fixing the causes could eliminate the problem more effectively that slapping the problem out of them.
Reference: Craske, M. G., et al. (2009). Anxiety disorders. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 5, 18033.
Covers mechanisms of panic and how sudden cognitive or sensory interventions can interrupt ruminative or panic loops.
I'm afraid I can't find this reference:
https://www.nature.com/search?q=anxiety+disorders&author=cra...
There is a paper from Craske in 2009 I could find elsewhere on anxiety disorders, but without this conclusion.
There is a 2017 piece in Nature Reviews Disease Primers, but the abstract does not mention such, nor do any of the references (I couldn't access the full text): https://www.nature.com/search?author=craske&order=relevance https://www.nature.com/articles/nrdp201724
Also, how did we go from a child throwing a tantrum, to diagnosing this as an anxiety disorder or a "ruminative or panic loop"?
Beat up their dad
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
Which of these biological differences in capacities and functions make it so that girls should not be punished by physical pain but it is OK to punish boys with a physical pain using a method that often leaves permanent scars and lasting psychological damage?
Men bear greater physical risk (war, dangerous labor etc) and boys/young men have always been subject to violent "rites of passage" that prepare them for this.
Girls and women receive greater physical protection, as required to manage reproductive capacity and long‑term demographic stability.
Historical societies are... historical. We shouldn't be looking to them. They didn't have the technology we have today.
Yes boys are strong. You know what's stronger than a boy? Gun. Girl with gun is stronger. It's not fucking 400 AD and this isn't Rome and we don't have slaves. Things are different today.
Yes, there are biological differences, but they definitely matter the least now as opposed to ever. Think about jobs. Women can do basically every modern job a man can do, and definitely the high paying ones. Now think about ancient societies and why that wasn't the case.
It's not even remotely clear to me what this has to do with the topic at hand because insofar as gender plays into bullying girls tend to be more impacted than boys, and secondly corporal punishment and 'disciplining' women by men was historically normalized.
The Singaporean habit of caning is a very modern practice of industrial and military society that has no biological analog, an offshoot of mass discipline society of the 20th century and gender roles of Victorian Britain where groups of men needed to be 'whipped into shape' and women were feminine and pure, but it sure is convenient to randomly invoke biology when one runs out of arguments
If strength is relevant, should particularly weak boys be "treated like girls"?
Should particularly strong girls be "treated like boys"?
Should girls and women without functioning reproductive systems be treated like boys?
What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Is the fact that chimpanzees do things a certain way remotely good evidence that we should do something that way too?
Answer key:
- no
- no
- no
- which gamete you supply?
- no
>What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.
As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.
> huge democraphic crisis
If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.
>we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem.
Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.
Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.
Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).
>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments
They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.
Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.
Ethnicity and culture are not static concepts. They change over time. The culture in central Europe, North America, the Middle East etc. 500 years ago looked very different from today. The ethnicity too. People have always migrated and that's part of where ethnicity and culture are coming from in the first place. And that's a good thing.
Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.
The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.
None of that is given.
I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).
Bonobos are just as close and they're matriarchal. They're a very different species.
They're chimps that are on the other side of the Congo river (and both types of genus Pan can't swim).
They're super close to chimps (and definitely much closer than us), rather than "a very different species".
Yes, and that’s a good point too. Pretty big difference between the sexes with them as well.
>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
How on earth is that an acceptable argument for physical abuse that is directed purely at boys?
I'm not saying girls should be beaten too. But the ethical blindness here is striking.
Besides, girls are just as much capable of bullying as boys are. Society might have taught them to use different methods, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable or any less vicious.
The big idea lately is to ignore all of that and just give everyone equal rights but unequal responsibilities.
Or maybe it’s based on bigotry
Nah, I have girls and there's definitely a biological difference there even at a young age. They're much more sensitive to more subtle negative feedback in a way that boys just aren't.
And that's why boys should be beaten when they misbehave?
I'm not saying boys should be beaten whenever they misbehave, but girls are definitely more tuned into the way they're being perceived by others.
With girls, you'll get the same corrective effect from an uncomfortable grimace as you would a wooden spoon.
I'll also add since this is about bullying, the type of bullying behaviours girls engage in is much less physical and a lot more underhanded. It's much harder to correctly identify who's the victim and who's the perpetrator.
I think that's the wrong question.
Kids need "an approach" that helps them learn necessary boundaries. That approach differs by gender (I have both boys and girls and that's obvious)
You have some data point at home so you extrapolate on the entire population?
We just have millenia of history, experience in every country and culture, and countless scientific papers on the matter, but please go on with your question...
Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur.
While I hold the same conclusion as you, individuals chiming in to concur based on their own experience is nothing more than a way to validate what certain people of the time & place commonly believe to be true.
E.g. if people were apt to believe girls preferred green peppers more often than boys, there will always be plenty who say "Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur". It could be true, it could be false, or the cause could be something else. E.g., because people think there are certain differences it shapes differences in development which lead to some of them actually being more common for nothing more than the sum of environmental factors - even if those biases only started as misconceptions.
Whichever it actually is, there will usually be large segments of the populations who would observe it to be conflicting things from an individual at-home view and it takes a lot of work & really good data to be able to make a meaningful claim about what and why differences exist.
There a line after which too much science fanboyism can get a person to tie themself in knots.
Science fanboyism is just in understanding what you do and don't know, not eschewing the possession of beliefs or actions made from them.
Theory vs practice.
One can practice the theory of practicality without needing to be ignorant of how uncertain they are as they do so.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
I've always found that quite interesting. I agree women should have equal rights and never be discriminated against, but when push comes to shove I imagine men would be the ones called up to fight in wars for most countries around the world.
Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
> Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
Why the hypothetical? In Israel, for example, women often serve in equal roles during wars, although neither at the same rate as men, nor are laws there completely gender-neutral. I would imagine in Northern European countries with actual gender-neutral military regulations they will be called up similarly to men.
>Unless you are from a select few Norther European
Even if you were, conscript training is not equally distributed: 24% of conscripts in 2023 were women in Sweden, 32% in 2024 in Norway.
Maybe one day it will get there but it's been a decade and has not got there yet.
> Even if you were, conscript training is not equally distributed: 24% of conscripts in 2023 were women in Sweden, 32% in 2024 in Norway.
I know but OP was talking about laws specifically, not their application.
I don't think you can divorce the laws from their application in cases like this. This isn't some nebulous situation where if you squint right it's equal.
one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
> one of the many reasons America is so screwed up right now
Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?
well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the other.
The fact that teenager boys can't tell that Andrew Tate is a characture of failed masculinity or that looksmaxxing is straight up idiotic is a pretty glaring example of that.
The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women?
I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.
In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?
> "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects.
describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.
Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.
In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.
But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.
consider the two statements
- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.
- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.
These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.
I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level. treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with talking about gender differences but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the focus of your argument.
Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.
I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.
I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?
As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.
Simple, boys and girls ARE different.
Yes, girls can be bullies too, etc..
Which country is that?
Well, how many reportedly liberal and democratic countries have obligatory draft for just one gender?
Sexism is illegal in your country? Whoa, your prisons must be crowded!
This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.
Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence? What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.
> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?
In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
> In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
As I've said, and @echoangle repeated, caning is used for cyberbullying, which girls do too (at a rate relatively close to boys actually). If the law was caning in response to physical bullying, and it just so happened that the vast majority of offenders were boys, I would not object on the basic of sexism (I still would not approve of schools being allowed to physically punish students).
> Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
There's no way the typical 16 year old girl is more fragile than the typical 9 year old boy, yet only the latter is subject to this punishment. Until children reach the age of 12 or so the strength difference is quite minor (and there's even a brief period where girls are taller and heavier).
Also it's absurd to punish demographics differently based on their statistical averages. Redheads are less sensitive to pain, should your hair colour determine how many strokes of the cane you get?
Girls are not meaningfully more fragile than boys, especially before puberty. Before puberty they're practically indistinguishable. If it weren't for long hair and the color pink none of us would know.
That's just something people tell themselves. Yes, we socialize boys not to cry. That doesn't mean boys are "stronger", it means that they have a pathological fear of being perceived as weak which will cause them sexual and relationship problems until the day they die.
> In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
Which systems aside form sharia law would that be?
And also the claim was that this law also applies to cyberbullying. So why should boys that cyberbully someone be caned and girls not?
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
"but perhaps boys and girls are different" should be interpreted as a joke; specifically satire on people who actively push that there are no differences between the sexes.
---
To bring some context:
I have a friend who called up other friends in the group and repeats over and over that there's no difference between the sexes, that it's artificial, ect. He did this when he dated a trans woman, yet didn't seem to realize that his partner felt so strongly about their gender that they changed it.
> This comment explains absolutely nothing
Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.
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When you impose gender ideology, gender roles on them from age 0, yeah you will get vastly different outcomes for boys and girls.
Yes, but you also get vastly different outcomes when you don't impose these as well.
Where is the evidence that this is the case in humans?
Can you first define what you'd be comfortable considering as evidence before I spend time on this? I don't want to provide research just so the other party complains that there's still some cultural bias somewhere.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
I have kids. Children are not a tabula rasa. Boys and Girls act very differently almost right from Birth, and it becomes so much more pronounced as they grow.
I have kids too. What exactly is different in them almost from birth, eg at 3-6 months? Could you describe in details?
You may want to do some research on this thing called „hormones“ and how they differ in both genders.
Hormones don’t raise kids in particular gender norms, don’t carve them a place in society, don’t feed them gender-based culture 24/7. They do have a physical impact, impact on sexual development, their sex, reproductive function, temperament, but gender is a human invention.
All those differences do impact roles in society. They let women breastfeed. They give men greater physical strength. Other biological differences make women become pregnant. These will affect roles in society.
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
> gender is a human invention.
That is a tautology. It is by definition.
Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
> Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
Bricklayers? Much manual labour. Some women can do it, some men cannot, but far more men can do it than women.
> People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
> I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
Not as much as some people think they should. It really depends what specific views you are thinking of. There are important differences: for example, women do initially need more parental leave to recover from giving birth. I think its a good idea to give men as much, but with different timing. Pregnancy has huge physical effects for quite a long time.
It goes both ways too. There wold be real social advantages to having more men becoming nurses (which can benefit from physical strength) and teaching (so boys, especially disadvantaged boys, have male educated role models).
> We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
Brother do you hear yourself. Your key example, the thing holding your entire argument together was brick layers. Fucking... brick layers.
And you think we don't have anything to eskew gender differences? Brother, look around you. 99.9999% of jobs can be done by men and women thanks to modern technology. Including fucking war!
Because you know what's stronger than men? Guns. And you know who can hold guns? Women. So, there you go, that's why the US army accepts women.
// Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?
Almost every flight I take, a woman asks (or appreciates the offer) for me to help put her bag in the overhead compartment.
My wife appreciates that I can can carry a double stroller with the kids on it up a few steps.
The fact that you can't think of such examples might reveal more about you than about the necessity of strength in modern society.
While this is true, these are nothing burger examples. The world will not crumble if you don't help a nice lady put her luggage in the overhead compartment.
Yes, as a man, our "strength" is mostly for show and is redundant in modern society. Also most men are not even very strong because we live sedentary lives. Because - surprise! - 99.9999% of all economic activity has nothing to do with strength.
This isn't ancient Rome and you aren't a spartan. Most men are fatties sitting at an office job. They don't have, nor need, strength. They need statins and metformin.
There's lots and lots of jobs where physical strength makes a fuckton difference. I don't see construction workers, garbage people or figherfighters using exoskeletons yet.
Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to perform the same day in day out. Which works out pretty well for men, but for women... I'm not so sure.
There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength.
I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.
There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?
I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.
We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
I somewhat agree with you, but I think there is an underlying cause. We are generally not accepting of individual differences, needs, and commitments outside work. We have improved in some ways (e.g. with regard to making adjustments for disability) but there is a long way go.
> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
More "lax" working conditions all round.
I think individual specialty and massive group specialty is somewhat different.
For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.
As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.
I think many men should be much and much more careful about lugging heavy weight as well. This never ends well for their health either.
When was the last time you spoke with a woman other than your mother?
Nice insult. But what's your point? That women do not tend to have hormones-induced mood swings?
Our "gender based culture" wasn't imposed on us by space aliens; it's something we humans came up with ourselves. And given that basically every culture divides people by gender (as opposed to by height, hair color, or fingernail shape), it very much indicates that there is a biological component to gender.
> but gender is a human invention.
So you don't believe a person can be transgender, right?
What you call „gender norms“ is the result of society trying to contain said differences.
Physical possibilities are differences, drives are different, temperament and it's swings are different. Also many other differences. But hey, let's hide all the differences, strengths and weaknesses... And pretend everyone is equally good at everything.
We need equality, not sameness. Brute-forcing equality-through-sameness sucks on both sides. I'd say girls and women are more affected though. But men ain't taking it easy either. It's a hill I'm willing to take downvotes on.
Well prepubescent children have very similar hormone make up. That's why young boys have no muscles and have the same sort of body as girls. The only reason we can tell them apart at all really is because of long hair and the color pink.
Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.
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Does not US have like 70% infant circumference rate and conscription for single gender?
It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.
Singapore already uses caning in schools, so it sounds this just extends it to be used in cases of bullying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore?useskin=ve...
The comments here are fascinating. A generation of men who've never been in a physical confrontation in their lives are absolutely certain that physical consequences don't work. How would you know?
A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back. You can teach that with a cane at 13 or let him find out at 25 when he mouths off to the wrong person. One of these comes with a controlled environment and a school nurse on standby.
I just don't understand why people would think it works.
We used to do it. Shocker, it didn't work. Bullies were much, MUCH meaner in the past. Mostly it's just mean words now, which is still bad but better.
So, we had corporal punishment, it was bad. Then we got rid of corporal punishment, and it got better. Hmm, thinking caps!
Of course that's just correlative evidence. But we have literally no evidence anywhere from anyone that corporal punishment is good.
Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out
Beating a child who acts out because they get abuse from other people in their life is a reliable way to not at all improve things and merely reinforce their broken worldviews.
If getting the shit beaten out of you by authorities was a reliable way to raise people, my parent's generation would have had zero crime and zero bullying, and the local "White trash" trailer parks would be pinnacles of human behavior.
You know that's not how it works out, right?
Being hit works on people who would respond to nonviolent punishment.
> Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out
Not in my experience. There definitely will be some problematic kids, but to the majority of school bullies, I don't think this applies. To recall two of my own experiences:
As a boy I was being bullied by a group of kids. Some day I snapped at them and decided to resolve the matter there and then. I didn't care they outnumbered me. I didn't care if I'd win or lose. I genuinely was ready to fight to the death (lol). But it never came to that. Showing some teeth spooked them and they left me alone after that. I remember the dumbfounded look on their faces. So while it didn't come to violence, the threat of violence scared them off.
On the other hand, when I was bullying a boy (I honestly don't know why), he eventually fought back. That really surprised me and I vividly remember how much respect he gained in my eyes for it. It was humbling. We became friends.
The best thing that can happen to a bully is their victim standing up for themself. Like the person you responded to said: "A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back." The exception to this is kids with sociopathic tendencies (for lack of a better term) - kids that double down on their behaviour despite being confronted with the consequences. How a kid will respond is, I think, more of a function of their personality than the punishment received. But what do I know?
A pencil makes one hell of an improvised weapon.
"I once saw him kill 3 men in a bar.. with a pencil. With a fuckin' pencil."
This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.
It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.
Posted more context here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059470
I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.
Just to state what I hope is obvious - every serious person, on any side of the smacking debate, agrees that physical abuse of children is wicked and wrong. The disagreement is about smacking; some people think that it is physical abuse by definition. Others may not think that, but believe that smacking is still a bad idea. Those on the other side believe that you can distinguish between reasonable corporal punishment and physical abuse. I'm sorry for what happened to you!
I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.
> a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc
But is that research of high quality?
Consider: not hitting kids is much easier than hitting kids, and also free. Ergo, if we're gonna be hitting kids, we need really strong research to show that it's effective. Which we don't have. The default should be DENY, not ALLOW, just like good security practice.
> The default should be DENY, not ALLOW, just like good security practice.
This argument could be applied to anything. I'm glad it is not.
> not hitting kids is much easier than hitting kids
These two are not the alternatives in question, so the following conclusion is invalid.
One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
Some things can be good/bad in and of themself, rather than just a means to an end. I would argue that "violence against children" is bad in and of itself, and outlawing it is good in and of itself. If you want to argue that you see violence against children as a useful means to an end, why stop there? Let's also put the children to work. The children yearn for the mine.
Right, but if you smack your child on the wrist, is it violence? You can't really answer these things by throwing definitions around. (Imprisoning children is wrong, I'm sure we can agree. So, if you ground your child, is that imprisonment?)
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:
1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.
2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.
If you define absolutely anything as violence in that way, you’re completely within your rights to do that, but then you can’t claim it’s intuitively obvious that we should never use violence against children. Instead you will need actual evidence, which leads us back to where we started - the evidence base is weak.
Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
My imprisonment analogy was meant to point out that it is not valid to take a common intuition that X is wrong, apply a very extended concept of X (even if you think that the extended concept is the only coherent one), and then expect the intuition to still command universal agreement.
> If you define absolutely anything as violence
I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today.
> Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them doesn’t count as “violence”.
Just like Putin's war in Ukraine is a "special military operation" or Trump's war in Iran is "just a little skirmish", right? You can play word games all you want, but it won't change the substance of the arguments. The point I made earlier was that some things are inherently good or bad, and that "violence against children" is part of those things. If you want me to say "xzglorb" instead of "violence", sure, we can say "xzglorb", but the substance doesn't change: xzglorb against children is inherently bad.
I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.
But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.
No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better.
You don’t seem to have answered my second question.
Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.
Regarding that second question:
> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?
Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.
I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.
*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.
No, it's about as "controversial" as claiming lead exposure is bad for children's brains.
Do we have RCTs for that? Or might we reasonably shape our priors from the hundreds of studies using a dozen different causal methodologies, which all find the same result?
The evidence for lead exposure harming children's brains is extremely solid, I believe. The evidence for spanking is not in the same league. It is not just about a lack of RCTs.
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.
I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.
If they believe it's OK to cane the kids, why limit it to boys? Girls can also be extremely nasty to each other
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Any source to share? I know most drug-related crimes get the death penalty but I haven't heard of potential innocents being routinely executed.
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Because it may be effective for boys but not girls.
Men have to deal with some form of violence in their lives, or at least the threat of it. Most male encounters has an undercurrent of violence. Offend another male and you might get assaulted.
So when you expose men to violence it's a matter of the world. Like Tyson said, social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.
If you expose women to violence they will acclimate to it and begin to see it as the norm. That means they'll accept it, from their teachers and eventually their partners.
Its entirely rational to only apply this to boys only.
The mental gymnastics at play here are astounding.
Why would women acclimate to it and see it as the norm while men don't? If anything, exposing men to violence will also make them more violent in their future relationships.
Bottom line of all these comments here is "because women are too innocent / fragile / weak / ignorant". It's entirely unrelated to how men view them, of course.
What mental gymnastics? Women that are abused often marry an abuser because it's just the way things are in relationships.
For boys, fighting or threat of violence is just a fact of life. They are taught at a young age not to use that violence against someone that's not roughly physically matched, which includes women. That's why we tell boys never hit girls.
Why do you pretend you don't understand?
No, in advanced societies we tell children to never hit others.
... and then everyone stood up and applauded.
But that's literally what we teach.
Part of the reason men cause so much violence is because of people like you, your exact mentality. Which says that's its expected for men to be violence, so, c'est la vie!
Men are not just like... inherently violent creatures, that's a stupid and toxic mentality. No, they're socialized to be violent by other men, who were also socialized to be violent.
What? Your argument is men should be used to violence, so it is ok to hit boys, but women should not be used to violence, so we shouldn't hit girls?
We hit boys, so it is ok to hit boys, but we don't hit girls, so it isn't ok to hit girls?
That's so very, very wrong.
Men have to deal w/ violence or threat of violence. For all of history this has been the norm. Women are protected from violence.
Let me give you an example. If a man called the police and told them his wife is hitting him, the police would come and arrest the man.
I don't agree with the notion of caning children, but... Why only males are eligible to be caned? That doesn't sound fair within the framework, girls can be bullies too.
> Why only males are eligible to be caned?
Because Singapore outlaw caning women, the schools cannot cane girls without changing other laws but they can cane boys.
The article says this, if it was legal to cane the girls they would also do that but they can't.
That just raises the exact same question.
But also “we would cane more kids if only it weren’t for those pesky laws” is crazy. The world seems to be on a speedrun to rid itself of all civility. I guess that’s its default state, but where did the civilizing forces go?!
This line of reasoning, always strikes me as rather idiotic.
It's often heard from the progressive side of politics, in this general form, as if having everyone equally affected by bad things is a useful policy aspiration:
"<thing>, which is bad, disproportionally affects <girls, poor people, non-white people, etc.>, which is an outrage!"
Apparently, it's easier and more popular to make sure bad things are fairly distributed, rather than reduced or eliminated.
On this same topic, Texas leads the US in paddling!
> Spanking has greatly decreased in elementary schools but increased at high schools, especially in non-urban districts.
> Between 2010 and 2025, over 180 high schools reintroduced paddling —- often justified as an alternative to out-of-school or in-school suspension.
https://www.corpun.com/rtsd.htm
I googled this and I didn't even have to scroll the search results before I found an article about a perverted teacher abusing a teenager this way.
It’s a tragedy that scholars don’t study Singapore more to understand what it did right. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, Singapore (then part of Malaysia) was a poor country. Today it’s rich but the subcontinent is still poor. The best thing all these so-called “humanitarians” could do to improve the human condition would be to study Singapore to understand how that model can be translated to all the poor countries in Asia and Africa.
I agree. I worked in Singapore for a short while and I was so very impressed by the people and the government.
Singapore is a great place. It is breathtaking to see a government govern in the interests of its people. I live in the USA and we have two institutions, the democratic party and the republican party, that do little except cater to special interests.
I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country. The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares. Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vacation. I got into 2 taxis there. One of them explained how corrupt the country was by the banking industry and the other, more memorable one, was a guy in his 70s that still had to work long houes while his wife was on her death bed at home. He called her while I was in the taxi, I saw the conversation and burst out crying myself. I ended up tipping him 100 USD.
Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnight. That's a common story in Bangladesh, and it used to be a common story in Singapore. But in my dad's lifetime, Singapore became richer than Europe, while Bangladesh is still mired in hopeless poverty.
The poverty and dysfunction in Asian countries feels inescapable and permanent. My dad wanted to take my kids to see his village, but they overthrew the government last year so those plans are on hold indefinitely. I have no confidence that Bangladesh will ever be a place I want to take my kids. Singapore somehow managed to escape that trap. If it took a brutal, regimented society and economy to achieve that, then so be it.
The ironic thing is that the latter taxi driver I mentioned was actually Bangladeshi-Singaporean (I believe ~9% of Singaporeans are of Indian descent). Reading the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus really opened my eyes to the instability and poverty in Bangladesh.
Yeah, Yunus is good at self promotion. But people like him are the reason that poor man’s wife died alone, thousands of miles away from her family and homeland. You see that story as a failure of Singapore. But in reality it’s a failure of Bangladesh, its founders, and its people. Singaporeans could have been in that same situation today if it hadn’t been for the actions of its leaders after independence.
The secret is maintaining a permanently impoverished underclass without labor rights or a path to citizenship! Much to learn here, indeed.
Cheap foreign labor flocks to Singapore because it's much richer than the countries around it. But that's not how it got rich in the first place. Singapore had a restrictive policy on foreign workers until the 1980s. But by that point its GDP per capita was already almost as high as the UK's: https://emergenteconomics.com/2012/03/12/718/
And insofar as Singapore has such a policy now, the rest of the world should take notes. Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.
> Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.
I'll convey your admiration to my local sinaloa confederate.
If the Sinaloa could turn an impoverished asian country into Singapore, I’d like to hire them and help overthrow the government so they can get to work. If you’re in such a country, everything is secondary to economic growth. GDP per capita growth translates directly into saving the lives of children.
No, the real secret is an expansive list of capital crimes! Or maybe it’s the public flogging. It’s hard to tell.
Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.
Ah, sorry, I was being facetious. You’re right, of course.
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
This doesn't solve the harder problem: properly identifying bullying.
Bullies don't usually bully other people in front of their authority figures. Most "anti-bullying" policies in the past 25 years have the unintended consequence of fostering a more clever species of bully called the "crybully". People who are skilled at being assholes and manipulating authority figures into treating them as the victims.
In criminal law, increasing the odds of getting caught is statistically far more effective in decreasing the incidence of violent crime than increasing the punishment.
Other than that, I'm not particularly interested in the moralizing from either side about corporal punishment. Some problem children need mentorship, some just need consequences; most of it depends on their home life. Kids from abusive homes need to be moved to a safer environment and treated with therapy. Kids who are neglected or enabled by their parents need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them and other people don't have to put up with their crap.
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Reading a lot of the comments here is pretty depressing, I thought things had improved since I was a boy.
My school (posh, British) turned a blind eye to bullying and fighting, there wasn't a great deal but I distinctly remember walking past a teacher having recently been punched in the face, bleeding from my mouth, and him acknowledging that I looked in a state but doing nothing.
Since I never turned away from a scrap I never really encountered bullying, now I have boys of my own and hope that when they're of school age they don't have to run the gauntlet as I did.
It doesn't matter which rules and policies you have in place, if teachers are afraid of some parents, or simply tired of some, they will neglect or look away from your child being abused.
Which is a direct result of parents influence on the schools.
Valiant effort, but it won't change anything.
What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
I've never seen a bullying program which acknowledged that there were multiple types of bullying with different causes:
- Some Stephen King-styled cretin who is just big and dumb and wants to hurt people.
- Kids vying for status in an unhealthy way and trying to cut people down.
- That weird "smelling blood in the water" problem that happens when a group of people come across someone who is just _too_ weak and their biology just seems to rev them up.
- A weird kid who is socially maladjusted and thinks they're being bullied, but actually it's just that no one likes them.
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
This matches with my experience. Men really don't hold grudges against authority that give them stern, but fair punishments. Think of any sports coaches that make their athletes do extra running or push ups or whatever for punishment. They garner respect from their players, and there isn't real negativity towards them. Its cruel, arbitrary punishments, or mocking that causes resentment. If you take a test and get a 70 but its a fair grade, thats how it goes. If you deserved a 95 though, or the professor calls you an idiot, that is the antagonism generating event.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
The revenge fantasies were for being bullied, not justly punished, and by different people. Not that I condone corporeal punishment.
An actual cane works more like a whip and can break skin and leave permanent scars.
They are not going to perform a prison style caning ffs...it's going to be a light but firm tap on the knuckles.
These things only hurt emotionally when done wrongfully.
You’ll be happy to meet him to do what? Hit him with a ruler multiple times?
No, give him a handshake and thank him for being a good teacher who didn't let me and my colleagues turn the class to a zoo and teached us discipline.
Corporal punishment is not bad when its fair, not arbitrary, unjust, nor physically damaging.
Solution against bullies: a bigger bully.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
Works really well, and doing nothing is exactly why western societies are fucked up.
New generations do whatever they want and do not face any consequences.
Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
>Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
Are you a time traveller from 1900?
https://libreo.ch/revues/sjsca/20232/sjsca-29-2023/sans-foi-...
Note that it was a time of widespread caning and death penalty...
Not sure if I agree or disagree with you but that’s a really interesting article actually, so thanks for sharing!
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
That’s generally the solution for bullies. I wonder whether that is also the solution for victims, making them strong enough.
There's no denying a broken nose and some lost teeth will make many bullies twice about trying again.
Problem is it's often illegal or against the rules to do it since deliberately beating the crap out of a bully isn't self defence in the traditional sense. And in the cases where it doesn't work, the situation may escalate or the victim might end up being punished harder than the bully.
You don't attack the bully first; you retaliate.
Retaliation is not self-defence.
> Have you seen how much of a shithole France became
No, how far away should I be to see that?
Paris, rue Poulet is a good intro, but the rabbit hole goes deep if you choose to go to the North of the capital.
Why are western countries fucked up?
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
That's a fair point. The challenge is that a lot of the time, it's hard to escape in that way. The ideal would be that a bully is expelled or forced to change schools to get their victims away from them, but the system seems very reluctant to do that. Same with letting the victims find a new school to replace the old one.
It works really well for bullying in workplaces and communities though.
And true, the bully might win. But the thing is that it puts the victim from an easy target to a slightly harder target, and a bully may decide it's not worth the hassle/risk when others aren't going to fight back at all. It's like that old joke about outrunning a bear; you're not trying to outrun the bear, you're trying to outrun the people next to you. Or perhaps the old adage about home burglaries. A lock won't stop a determined thief, but they'd usually rather find an easy to break into house than go through the effort of defeating a security system.
> The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
That's literally how the real world works. State violence or super power violence is exactly this playing out.
So, a regulating force must necessarily be of the same nature ?
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
In a friends school in Denmark the teacher could decide that your family had to host a party for all the kids at the family home, so they could get to know each other better, and that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
>that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
The canning would vastly shorten the time span on which all parties stop misbehaving while the bullying continues. I was bullied as a kid and the school didn't do anything. When my father tried to reason with the bully's family he discovered they were just awful, violent people, bullies, all of them. When he came home, frustrated, he sat me and said something like "uhm, well, ok, listen, I went to talk to the boy's parents and... well... the next time he bothers you just beat the shit out of him. I'll deal with the school" and the quoted the motto of my country: "by reason or by force". Some things just works faster than diplomacy and all shit get sorted out without extending the suffering for most parties involved.
Good when all parents are able to host such party. I would say that in Poland, most of parents with a misbehaving kid are barely able to throw a party for their kid and several of his/her friends. Many times people complain about the cost of school supplies for their kids already.
I think the cost of doing this as well as the time you need to invest are what puts pressure on you.
I’ll have to ask what would happen if you do not comply.
The Danish are nice people, but they really do not like if you break the social rules, so I guess it would get intense verry fast.
> The Danish are nice people
Just like I thought. I'm sure your solution would work when majority are nice people. That won't work on people who are from "lower social circles". We still have a lot of them in Poland and don't know how to make them behave better, because trying to make them behave better typically results in defensiveness about their way of life and a lot of excuses about their circumstances. They only dig their heels and start being more aggressive.
My experience with humanity is:
Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
That general observation, for me at least, describes the world from rural Pakistan to backwater Tschechia.
The only exception were groups that had a very strong in-group out-group separation. These people always treated me with too much suspicion to express passing kindness.
> Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
I agree, but bullies actually come mostly from that last group. Putting pressure on overwhelmed, self-absorbed or excuse-prone people in order to educate their children better won't work. I think bullying is because of lack of proper emotional education of children, it would be better to educate those parents and children in how to behave and why, but that requires resources most schools won't have and I've never seen anyone actually teaching this in schools.
Then it is an even bigger deterrent. And maybe it forces people to ask their neighbors for help, which can also improve the social dynamic. People bond over helping each other.
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
You can never fight against a bully with words.
The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Nothing else works.
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
I don't remember him bullying anyone after that.
This but unironically.
This is absolutely not going to teach a bully to be different; if anything, it may make them more cruel - and careful to avoid getting caught.
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I (think) many bullies have bad home lives. I wish parents would be held accountable instead of taking it out on the kids that are struggling to process their emotions / hormones in a healthy manner.
And parents are acting out for myriad of reasons. There's a never-ending chain if you go that way. At the end of the day, bully victims end up holding the short end of the stick. And they frequently become bullies themselves. Maybe stopping bullying at the visible link is not the most right solution... But is there anything better that does not lead to eternal finger pointing?
I think the puck should stop with the first adult.
The front line adults at school have this policy now, which covers 30 hours of the student's week.
Parents need to be responsible for the remaining 183 hours they have with their kid.
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In Seattle, I hate seeing news articles about kids doing stupid stuff (murdering classmates [0], stealing cars, etc) and not an ounce of accountability for being a bad parent.
[0] - https://www.fox8live.com/2024/07/05/13-year-old-bystander-ki... [1] -
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That'll sure teach them not to abuse their power over their fellow humans with less physical strength.
I read the article as defining bullying as kids posing physical threats to others. Yet, the memory that immediately jumps into my mind is of a boy who always wore a jacket and a hat with ear muffs inside school who would hold his books to his chest as he ran to/from classes in between periods.
Kids would always laugh at him and block his path or trip him or knock his books out of his hands. My sense is that this was widespread behavior, not limited to a small group.
I also seem to recall a group of kids who were picked on all eating at the same table during lunch and always being subjected to taunting and being picked on verbally or having their books knocked off the table, etc.
Sadly, I do not recall ever seeing anyone stand up for him or help him pick up his books. The memory makes me feel horribly ashamed because I have no recollection of ever helping.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
Yeah this seems like the kind of punishment that was also common in the west in 1800-1900.
I remember my parents still talking of getting hit with a ruler in the 50s tho the practice was technically forbidden since 1860 or so.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
In the USA it is not banned federally or in all state public schools. Find a school near you that associates with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, their school discipline policy likely includes corporal or physical punishment terminology.
If they like it so much, they should apply it to all kids, not just boys.
They like it as a punishment for boys exclusively.
I guess hitting girls with sticks makes them uneasy, huh. Maybe they should apply the same empathy to all children.
No its because hitting women with sticks as punishment is illegal in Singapore but its legal to do to men.
Seems like they just get what they did. To be honest, I think it should be less milder.
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
>We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
This is false. The evidence is not overwhelming; it's actually extremely poor quality. And the research question is one of the most difficult to resolve in social science. I wrote on this here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma.... See also this guy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=2HtqmZ0AAA...
You might not have noticed what you've done here, but you've not only agreed to corporal punishment for children but also for harsher corporal punishment for criminals across the board. Read the whole conversation chain and reflect on how bad the optics are. There is a reason why your stance is unpopular.
"Spanking looks like an 8/10 on the subjective harmful scale, but actually on the objective harmful scale its closer to a 3/10. We must rectify the bad reputation of spanking!" is not the type of motivation that should drive pedagogy research.
If you're saying we should pretend that spanking is worse than (we currently know) it is, then I don't agree.
I haven't said anything about corporal punishment for criminals, and I don't know of any evidence for or against it - that strikes me as a very different argument, partly because the level of violence is likely to be much greater.
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
Yeah my bad. I was the getting bullied side of students, but the current punishments are something that should be ended.
Corporal punishment is brutal, inhumane, uncivilized. Hurting children is a barbaric practice, and inevitably attracts the attention of a very particular kind of person.
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
Just stupd
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
Behavior like this is why I unironically have lost the mythos of "teachers are good for society" as default thinking. I get why Mao/Pol Pot/Communists through history lined them up against walls.
Most, even in America, are little tyrants who has entirely far too much power to pick and choose the winners and losers of society. A single bad teacher acts like a whole bucket of crabs pulling down on soon-to-be-succesful youth.
lol, standard practice in schools where I grew up, though not with a wooden rod but the wooden back of the blackboard duster.
I don't think this is something to laugh at. Whether or not you think it's necessary or a proper method of punishment, it isn't funny.
It was always funny to us as kids, and we often laughed at the poor bugger who had earned that punishment (and were laughed at when it was us).
Our teachers didn't abuse us like some do in other societies, with extra homework and detention. We new the rules and punishment for breaking them, and made choices accordingly. Wonderful teachers who I remember fondly decades later, though some of them have passed on.
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I was only punished like this once as a child. It was because I beat another kid and took his crayons. It worked like a charm. So YMMV.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
> My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now
You can't have this. Have a one-to-one conversation with your kid and tell them you can't have this. If they continue... well, I'm not saying "whoop their ass", but you can't have this.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
To be clear, I don't think beating children and desensitizing them to violence is good, I was just arguing that there's a reason why it has been practiced throughout history. The modern era of relative peace and social order in vast tracts of the world has changed laws and norms profoundly for the better, not least in making such barbaric practices obsolete and unacceptable to most people.
My point was that equating beating/spanking to violence on children (which is sometimes is) is over generalizing. I think the scenario I mentioned exhibits the argument. If not, I'd be interested in hearing why you think not.
This is naïve. This will just lead to the victims of bullying getting caned after the bullies set them up.
A bad person sees such a punishment as an opportunity to intimidate others.
I remember that Singapore caned an American teenager back in the 90's for vandalizing cars. It was a big event in the news at the time.
As someone born substandard, who only became fully human as an adult, I was both the bully and the bullied as a youth. I've reflected on this throughout my years and see some virtue in this. Bullying can be extremely destructive to one's development, on either side. While I'm not 100% confident caning is the wisest option, personally I greatly value the experience of having my ass kicked for being a menace.
It's probably not for everyone. For the thinking type, it's a solid shortcut to empathy and effective antidote to hostile ego.
If it were up to me, there'd be an option for The Stick, or a brutal psychology session, at least initially. A bit idealistic though when the kinetic purity of the stick often just works.
As adults, I think we tend to forget about the difficulties of childhood bullying, some parents being obvious exceptions. For many, the experience is profound and the impressions lifelong. I get confused here, because I want children to be tough, or prepared to defend themselves, which usually is more effective with experience. But with so many personality types, that cannot apply to all.
There's also the eternal ghost of error and some children who did nothing wrong will inevitably be receiving the stick. That's a small but significant can of worms.
For me this is yet more evidence of humanity's aversion to holistic consciousness. One can argue violence is intrinsic. I think it is but do not agree that its manifestations necessarily are; or rather, we have the potential to change the the output if we really try. Idealistic, yes. The stick is real.
There's also the bizarre possibility that if humanity managed to develop an effective method of imparting empathy, respect, and consciousness to children, that it might break the present system. An awful lot of business wouldn't happen if both parties cared about each other.
I know bullies that claim that they get bullied by the person they bully. The bully stopped in the end, but the wrong person got pushed.
I understand that caning leaves lifetime scars, at least the type I heard about. It's not something you can put weight on for a while.
This is not that kind of caning, it's basically a harder form of slapping kids, not the one they give criminals that breaks the skin.
For minors, caning is with half-inch cane, which is the only one available in supermarkets. Only judicial caning is with the inch cane.
It depends. For some, yes. For most, no.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
It's a matter of degree.
Life time physical or emotional scarring would, to pull out an example, be US slavery degree.
I grew up when corporeal punishment was a thing in schools. No physical or emotional scars.
Wish this is extended to white collar crimes.
Have them make something difficult and time consuming to make, out of a flammable material, then as soon as it get's a pass from a supervisor they have to burn it.
Not the right approach as classifying someone as a bully is left to someone's subjective perception. This makes caning legal in the hope it would reform those boys and leaves room for misuse. Once bullying is proven in front of PTA group then other formal methods should be used, starting with counselling-> monitoring for improvement -> separating them from their peers and moving them up seniors, that might turn the tables -> community service with final recourse being termination from school and in worst case / rarest or rare scenarios the country would already have a juvenille justice system to reform.
Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
You can also to to jail for selling chewing gum. And you are legally required to flush a public toilet after using it.
Neither one is really enforced
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And that makes it a super pleasant place to live, I don't ever have to smell that junk on the street. I prefer the smell of good food and that's pretty much what all of Singapore smells like.
They also seem to be one of the few countries that won the war on drugs, no?
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
Owning 500g is enough to get someone hanged. A proof of trafficking or selling is not necessary.
It is exactly as I said. Please don't spread misinformation.
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Your point being?
What about girls? https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/11/us/michelle-carter-textin...
I read “caring” not “caning” and clicked on the url with hope.
Caring would be more effective than caning. But Singapore gonna Singapore.
About three decades ago, a student attacked me by poking my face with a pencil very hard, close to my left eye. I could have become blind, but fortunately I did not. Yet the student was not even punished in the kindergarten run by PAP.
Besides that, I was slapped hard across the face by my Primary 1 teacher (Miss Maisura, iirc... or might get zero marks for mispelled her name) at Queenstown Primary School because I unknowingly brought my spelling book home and had difficulty understanding the instructions. Years later, I happened to meet her on a public bus in Singapore, but she had no recollection of who I was.
I was also physically abused by classmates for months. Some stole my coins or manipulated me through social engineering.
Some teachers were ridiculous and unprofessional when caning students. I witnessed that many times.
Despite all these terrible experiences, a school belle, Lisa Huang Shu Shung, once became smitten with me. We lost touch after graduation — I was in the worst class while she was in the best class. Sometimes, I still wonder how she is doing now. But why should I post in HN?
I have become semi-disabled in my 40s, now living with night blindness and no love life.
Even after growing up, you can still encounter people who would beat others up. That even happened to me during NS, my phone was even stolen by one of them in our room but the officers could not do anything.
My view is that caning only provides a short-term solution; it does not solve long-term problems.
Of course, some of the naughty classmates (gangsters who loved causing trouble and making noise) were eventually sent to jail — one for voyeurism and another for assault — while others were expelled from school.
Years later, I came across some old schoolmates again, but we had become strangers on the street. We were no longer the students we once were.
So I hope the future kids would never have to go through the same expereince. Just don't be selfish and don't lose your empathy towards others, because we won't be reborn after billion years just as we did not experience the pain of waiting 13.6 billion years.
Humans are imperfect mammals.
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Why only for boys?
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
People wonder why the state of the world is the way it is. Traumatized child expresses themselves the only way they know how? Let's beat them, surely this is the solution not creating a safe environment.
The cycle continues.
I'm not saying beating children is good but.. if you think the 'state of the world' is bad, well, most countries have massively reduced how much beating children get over the last 40 years or so.
Haven't you heard? Not beating children is woke. Also violence is the only way to a high trust society.
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
Cane the parents first.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
No, it’s not a nice one and it can and in fact does ruin whole societies and generations of people. Here one case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
I never said its nice or justifyable. I wish there was a grown up to talk with here. I know the russian bully culture.
Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.
> From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones.
> I never said its nice or justifyable
Sir are you schizophrenic?
On a list of cthullian horrors, its one of the less uglier ones. On a scale from mere bad to "reading about it damages yourself", the "nice" is a word describing its location on that scale.
Singapore obviously shoulsnt be doing this. it is extrmeley evil to cane people.
This should be solved by nonviolence.
I wonder how severe a caning in an educational institute compares to one administered by state justice.
Adult caning is done by trained professionals. https://transformativejusticecollective.org/2023/10/20/getti...
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
Trained Professionals -> Goons exercising the states monopoly on force. Ftfy.
You'll notice that my carefully chosen link does not look favorably upon this practice, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't paid to do a job that they've been trained to do with some consistency, unlike school officials.
this does seem like an "I learned it from watching you" moment.
Maybe, give them estrogen injections too.
What a "lovely" country.
Hurt kids hurt kids.
I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.
I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.
I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are willing to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.
The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.
Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.
With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.
I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.
beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
Never Violence! - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Violence!
> beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
[0] - https://time.com/archive/6732416/in-defense-of-asian-values-...
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
Singapore signed the UN CRC Convention on the rights of the Child
So Singapore committed to protect children from violence
https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rig...
And it seems Singapore (like some other countries) struggles to figure what that actually means, come to think about it.
Violence creates more violence. Singapore has a lot of these sick backwater policies in place.
If that were true Singapore would be a particularly violent place, it's not. Source: I lived there.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
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As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
Caning proven to work.
For what, administered by who?
Usually is headmaster or disciplinary teacher if in school. Otherwise will be the special trained prison officer for general adults.
So when you say proven to work, do you just mean "proven that it gets them to follow rules"?
I grew up in Nairobi during the 90's, and corporal punishment was common. We had massive work loads (by grade 7, we had 13 subjects and like 50 books, and no locker system like in america so had to drag two bags everyday) and there was often some chance of us not being able to complete a certain piece of homework... so we got hit on the hands or the butt with a pipe. Not quite caning, but still very painful.
Not sure how it helped, I just lived in constant stress of homework. But more importantly, the 'naughty' kids got immune to it. If you pipe everyone for minor infractions, then people just took it in stride.
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Then we were posted in to Saudi in the early 00's, and I vividly remember an event. I was in an all boys high school by then (segregated because saudi, duh), and one day, just an hour or so before end of school, we were all ordered to assemble in the main ground. It was surprising since no event was planned, and the teachers were grim faced.
Soon a van came into the forefront, and out came the police (both the normal uniformed police and the religious police, remember this was saudi like 3-ish kings back) and a few kids.... who were caned in front of us. Not much, 3-4 strikes each, and their backs were clothed, but it was whole dramatic production nonetheless, with a speech in arabic and everything.
Turns out (explained by teachers after we came back to class) they were boys from our school who had loitered around the girls section, and upon the security guard's attempt to shoo them away, had bullied and hurt him badly.
Now THAT put the fear of god in the kids, at least for awhile. It didn't mean there weren't kids smoking in the bathrooms or other teenage bullshit even after, but the reminder that you could be caned in front of the entire school did put a damper on the amount of mischief that kids committed for some time.... until of course the kids who saw the scene graduated and the memory was lost, I guess.
____
So, while there is some merit to public corporal punishment and the humiliation ritual... but even then, kids are stupid and will justify to themselves many things (hey I'm not going to the extent of going to the girls section, nah it's just me and the lads messing around with a fellow classmate, doesn't rise to the level of caning, does it?)
And secondly, teachers will react by lower the bar further and further down until they go back to corporal punishment for everything (when all you have a hammer...)
____
One of the best way to control mischievous kids, imho, is to just kick them out.
Sounds brutal, but when you have a collective environment like a school, you can't waste the time of the overwhelming majority of kids for the very few who just don't want to 'fit the system'.
And yes, 'fitting the system' was a deliberate choice of words, because usually that terminology is used for kids who need guidance... but these aren't 'naughty' kids who just need a 'creative outlet', we are talking about bullies here; if you have reached highschool age and you still haven't grokked that you can't just hit fellow students just because you are miserable... then you need to spend time elsewhere and learn the costs of fitting in society.
Maybe very [south]asian-coded of me, but our parents put a lot of time and expense in our educations (literally the only source of social uplift for us), and if we can't study because some other parent is lacking in raising their child.... that should not affect us, the education market is already very competitive and we can't risk falling behind.
The question of course arises, what to do with the kids who have been kicked out? Can't let them roam around or the problem gets worse, nothing more dangerous than a teenager with no goals, they are walking loose cannons.
Honestly... I don't know. Caning will work for a bit... but how long before the shock value passes? Some sort of juvie? That again just gets them into the crime pathway. Maybe some special school for them? But isn't that a juvie by another name?
the problem is what if the victim fights back, then they might be misconstrued as the bully and get caned.
the point. of course. is to teach. that nothing is good or bad. consequences.
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
sometimes not just unpleasant. i was locked in a storage closet hundreds of times as punishment while growing up and it caused irreparable damage to my psyche
i heard punishments where the parent stays at the timeout and are present but firm are better than abandoning them an hour at a time to cook or work out, sometimes your life is just tragic I'll say
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
In my jurisdiction prison sentences and imprisonment for public protection are different things, and only the latter is to protect innocent people. It is also pretty rare. Most prison sentences are, because society 'thinks' the aspiring prisoner deserves it, not because the public needs to be protected. Also penalties also fulfill the desire of the society for vengeance.
I think, being locked in isolation or with very dangerous individuals can leave deeper scars than a short period of violence. It's also not, like people in general never have any injuries, so it's not the pain itself that is an uncommon experience, but more the knowledge of it being linked to your actions. People don't have traumas just because they walked through nettles, feel from their bicycle or broke their legs.
> And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
That's nice, but I think he still has an amount of accepted violence by the state, because the policy of 'I don't give a fuck, let the strongest do what he likes' doesn't actually lead to less violence.
I just want to point out, how it is not necessarily a black or white thing, I'm not arguing for child abuse.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
No, I don't think it is different. Both are applications of state violence for enforcing laws. I think it would be reasonable to use (public) caning as a judicial punishment in the US for certain kinds of crimes, for the same reason I think it is reasonable to use incarceration as a judicial punishment in the US for other types of crimes.
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
I genuinely did that kid a favour.
In Germany you can force somebody to stay until police arrives but unnecessary violence is forbidden
And what’d be the point? The police will not be interested in the would-be phone thief, calling them would be of negative value to society.
So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Looks to me like you should be pissed off at the police in your locale for forcing you to fend for yourself against criminals.
Applying physical force to counter in the moment someone that tries to rob you is not vigilante justice. That would be more like if you had your phone robbed, and a few days later you went with your buddies to beat him up and get your phone back.
The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.
It'd be silly to blame the police, this kind of crime can only be addressed at a much higher level.
I'm not even too inclined to blame government, as I consider this minor loss of security a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in return for their economically beneficial pro-immigration policies.
This is just what living in a big city is like, unless you're in a police state.
It's silly to blame the police for not stopping petty crime?
And what does immigration have to do with any of this?
> So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Yes; under those conditions vigilante justice is a reasonable way to 1) protect society from criminals, and 2) encourage the state to correct its failures of policing.
You and I have completely different definitions of "reasonable."
Why do you think?
I'm sure there are a few such comments, since you say so, but I read most of the thread and didn't see any.
lmao the person you’re responding to didn’t say that anybody was breaking the rules, they just pointed out that there’s a lot of people here pontificating on the side of the merits of violence against children
You can post anything on hacker news if you phrase it right. Sometimes the mods will even pop in and interject unprompted that it’s all good so long as nobody is saying swears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060620
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036265
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058102
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065636
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036672
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063728
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063439
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058265
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035671
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036627
Since we've been through this before I think I'll just link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47734762.
Wait did you see the links in that post? It’s about all those people advocating beating children in this thread
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear. In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.
People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.
In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.
> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments
Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.
Singapore also has 1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.
2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.
3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.
I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...
Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.
Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.
A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.
Putting your different points together:
> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent
> not think of consequences
> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead
Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.
Sure, but that’s not deterrence anymore. The question there is less “will it work” and more “is this morally justifiable?” especially given the concerning proximity to eugenics (which started off as eliminating crime by eliminating people with “crime genes”).
Yet somehow, people aren’t that deterred if they keep executing people at a 20x rate than the U.S.?
I’m confused about that because the executed obviously are not deterred anymore, but the the not-yet executed people still are getting caught at the higher rate than in the U.S.?
Maybe the prison population is much smaller, because people are either law abiding or dead?
The incarceration rate is much lower. The US has an incarceration rate of 541 per 100k, Singapore is 178 per 100k. Singapore is just much more likely to execute convicts; in part because SG has a mandatory death penalty for some crimes, and in part because much of the US doesn’t have the death penalty in all.
It does not appear to be an effective deterrent. https://www.academia.sg/extra/death-penalty-research-appendi... This article has a criticism of the SG government report (Study 6 header) on the deterrent effect when they added the mandatory death penalty in the 90s. The big takeaway is that convictions didn’t drop notably (cannabis convictions dropped a single percentage point, opium convictions went up 2%. Average opium weight seized dropped a ton, but is still like 13 times the mandatory death penalty limit so hard to call it there).
This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18047239/
I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.
Rest personal opinion.
I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.
Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.
Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.
To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.
Corporal punishment was banned in the UK in 1998.
In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths. Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.
Most if not all the terrorist-related deaths are attributed to The Troubles that ended in - you guessed that - 1998. It is not possible to attribute the deaths or lack thereof to corporal punishment.
Well, yes, obviously.
But it's even less possible to claim that the lack of severe punishment has increased terrorism, as cedws was saying.
Even when you exclude NI, terrorism is lower now than in the past yet punishments have not become notably more severe.
The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.
Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.
But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.
How many terrorists had to be killed upfront in their country to reach that result ?
None.
Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.
The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It is the threat of competent violence that keeps me from, say, sunbathing in a park without clothes on, on a nice day. Our world runs on violence, but we mostly try to deny it, because it serves the few that control the many to keep the many divided.
Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.
> Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.
That's a rather flippant attitude when given the details of what we're talking about. "Oh well, some folks get caned, whatcha' gonna' do?!"
Also, if the only thing that keeps you from sunbathing nude in a public park is the threat of someone kicking your ass, then that says a lot more about you than you might think. It's not "oh, I shouldn't expose myself to others who have not consented to being exposed to my naked body," it's "someone will inflict physical violence on me, thus I won't do this."
"Our world runs on violence..." Yeah, and there's plenty of us who think that is not something we should be proud of and should instead work to rectify instead of blindly accepting it as fact.
My sister had an interesting take on this:
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
There are many western states with welfare state. Do you think otherwise?
Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?
Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.
> Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net
The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.
> the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's
Oh, come on, stop whining. Skrewdriver is still on Spotify.
You're such a snowflake, posing as the victim of government oppression.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
> who were pro beating children
Correction: pro beating abusers.
>beating children
>I find this abuse horrific
>barbaric behavior.
Absolutely! We're all against bullying here.
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
James "Whitey" Bulger was given LSD in exchange for a reduced prison sentence after some low level crime. He went on to work as a professional hitman, taking out politicians and trafficking drugs. LSD does work for things such as alcoholism, but MDMA is usually used in treatment programmes as it doesn't have such life changing mental effects.
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
another take: some people are emotionally “dumb” and have a really hard time feeling empathy for others. This is just another way to force the bully to be in someone else’s shoes…literally.
Most bullies are responding to a poor home life where they are bullied and beaten.
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What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
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Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
I do agree we shouldn't limit it to children! But I don't think the boss/employee relationship should involve violence though because firing someone is simple and effective. But if someone is doing something bad for their community that has no obvious other consequences? Then yeah, it absolutely should be an option.
These rules should be implemented locally at a town or city level. No need to enforce the same set of rules across all society.
And it's interesting you bring up that bullying is a second order affect. If one of the parents is abusive, that should be something that has physical consequences. Solve the problem at the source, stop wringing our hands and getting lawyers / police involved for everything. That's not scalable and as a result there are a bunch of unsolvable problems in our society today.
I don't understand your view here. You want people to take care of problems/injusitice by violence but you also want this violence to be limited to "someone doing something bad for their community"? How can that be enforced at all. Like if you are doing something good for your community, the other community feels slighted and gets a free pass to... beat you?
Like I dont understand what you're saying at all because it seems like you want the social contract but also give anyone the agency to conduct violence and both cannot exists at the same time. We live in communities and created the police and law precisely because personal grudges and fights cannot scale and work to be a functional society. God i hope you are trolling
There ought to be an understanding that the school has leeway to use a ruler on misbehaving children without the police being involved. That's what I meant when I said stop getting police involved in everything. I'm not talking about vigilante justice.
An example that requires police to be involved: Small Town A has a law stating that anyone dealing drugs must be caned for the first offense. Someone deals drugs in Small Town, so police catch them and cane them.
Yes, because it is a well-known fact that police never use their power to bully others. It's also an established fact that nobody is ever wrongly accused of crimes by the police.
I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.
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Deterrent can be an effective form of rehab.
A former coworker of mine walks funny because he had polio as a child, and his father worked for the railway union after WWII. He told me one day in high school, one of his friends came to school with bruises couldn’t hide, inflicted by his drunk father. Everyone in school knew, everyone in town knew, but no one did anything.
My coworker informed his dad, about the egregious injuries that day. His dad drove to the drunk man’s house and knocked on the door and seized the drunk man by the collar: “if you ever touch that boy again, I’ll kill you.”
The threat must have been believable coming from a rail union worker, because it rehabilitated the recipient’s decision making processes going forward.
And today the drunk father would lose the responsibility for his child which is a better and non violent answer.
> father would lose the responsibility for his child
This HN discussion of systemic abuse in US Catholic orphanages last century also discusses vast, documented ongoing abuse in both religious and state run care/foster systems around the globe. Statistically, these systems cause more abuse than they prevent, and should only be a last resort.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17852129
Why do you assume that it works such in America = world wide? I was in such a system but I was a relief. But not America
I'm not an expert in all nations but systemic abuse in abuse prevention systems is not uniquely american. For instance, the British care system seems consistent with American results - a Brit I talked to told me that in year, roughly 1 in 2 children report sexual abuse at the hands of their caretaker or an older child. It's hard to tell the extent of the unreported abuses. And yet, widespread abuses doesn't preclude the possibility of children escaping unharmed. I'm glad you made it through.
This is a horrendous rate. But given the discussion context the success rate of a punch into the face of an alcoholic father is less than 50 % (I claim that given my knowledge with alcoholism) so even the bad British system is better.
Also given the lack of scandals in the German system (better most scandals are about how the system wasn't strict enough against abusive parents) I see it is clearly possible to build a better system.
> He told me one day in high school, one of his friends came to school with bruises couldn’t hide, inflicted by his drunk father.
Sorry, you're telling this story as a way of supporting beating kids...?
> My coworker informed his dad, about the egregious injuries that day. His dad drove to the drunk man’s house and knocked on the door and seized the drunk man by the collar: “if you ever touch that boy again, I’ll kill you.”
Yeah that wouldn’t fly nowadays. Your friend’s father would be hot with a slew of charges from “terroristic threats” to “meanacing”
Yes. I think bullying should automatically lead to bully being shipped to suitable facility where they are rehabilited. It must be done to protect other children. Best way is to remove the perpetrator not the victim. Adults and evil monsters should stop excusing bullying with something like bad home conditions. If home conditions are bad remove them from that home. Or at least remove them from places where they can cause suffering to others.
> Rehabilitation and figuring out why they are bullying is the correct response in a civilized society.
Your so called “civilized societies” have continuously failed at this though.
You can’t keep failing and then demand your method is the correct method.
How Germany or Denmark or Sweden failed?
>How Germany
Do you really need examples of Germany failing as a civilized society?
Id like to hear. At least people aren't beaten up by teachers or in custody.
Yes?
I hope you know that there are Germans on this site, so don't try any fox news bullshit.
Geez so this is the German sense of humor. Fox news bullshit? Come on.
Generically the term also includes Ellison news bullshit.
> "Rehabilitation and figuring out why they are bullying is the correct response in a civilized society."
Then why doesn't the "correct response" work in practice? We are clearly not seeing its effectiveness in real life.
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it. And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
I'm pretty sure the proportion of corrupt people in any country will be pretty similar if the right structures are put to place. I think people give in to corruption when the system favors regardless of the country or continents and as a matter of fact a lot of people in government and places of power in my country were foreign schooled or bred.
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If you follow the article link they reference a WHO (another UN organization) report regarding their position and review of research:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/B09424
Thanks.
Propaganda.
I wonder how many would get accustomed to the pain, or may even develop a liking for it. BDSM is a thing, after all...
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
No getting stabbed is rare. You made the right move and you learned to stand up for yourself. The bully learned not to fuck with you.
If you told authorities and they coddled you that experience might get imprinted on your personality.
I don't fully disagree, but the bullying will not stop if they see that they can beat you up easily. It might even get worse.
I can think of only 3 times where i or someone else confronted a bully and made it stop. In 2 of those cases the bully was stronger but such stuff can always carry risks that the bully might not like or scenarios they can't take.
In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimpering fool in front of a ton of people. As far as I know he didn't try to get back at the victim.
In the second it was I that flipped out and had some luck. I didn't seriously hurt him but he realized the blind intent in the moment was there. He just seemed shocked and no longer bothered
The 3rd guy had some Moroccan machismo thing going and kept picking on people he couldn't beat and it always happened fairly conventionally without suprise.
How about the amount of times when the bully didn't stop? That's the useful metric here. When there was resistance, how effective was it?
Judging from your description you didn't lay out any examples of where fighting back failed.
Because I can't really think of examples. Mind you that might be biased because people do often have an intuition for when they'd either get their ass handed to them or it would otherwise backfire so I assume there'd be some examples otherwise if they didn't take that into account.
Also these examples were mostly from incidents where the bullying got physical anyway. Much of it isn't and making it physical even as the victim tends to have drawbacks.
To be fair they said "I can think of only 3 times [...] and made it stop", implying that there were comparatively more cases where it didn't stop.
Yes I think the implication didn’t fully materialize in his head. If he stop to think about it he doesn’t actually have any other cases.
Which sort of explains why there’s no subsequent response.
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
That's pretty dumb