I’ve heard some stories about schools with zero tolerance. Bullying victims soon found out that you get equal punishment for defending themselves or for some serious violence. The logical response is to go full berserker mode.
“So, Kid A jumped Kid B in the hallway, called them a bigoted slur, then beat Kid B so badly he had to go to the hospital. Kid B tried to fight back, but was overwhelmed. Our solution is that kids are going to be suspended for an equal amount of time and suffer equal repercussions, because zero tolerance.”
Zero tolerance is the absence of humanity as a policy. It’s abhorrent.
Totally.
My mom would always ask, “Why didn’t you walk away?” And I would respond “I get suspended either way, at least this way everyone knows not to fuck with me.”
I am so glad I haven’t had to hit someone in a long time.
That, and have you ever tried to “walk away” when there are like five people chasing you with the intent of beating you up? Good luck with that.
JFK should have just walked away from Lee Harvey Oswald instead of encouraging him
Oswald was only doing it to get a rise out of him. Kennedy should have been the bigger man. Really, he’s just as culpable for giving Oswald the reaction he wanted.
Or my favorite, “just walk away” when dickhead would sneak up behind me and put me in a headlock…
Or my favorite “Well did you tell them to stop treating you that way?”
Woah, Master Oogway, that’s some deep enlightenment right there. :O
“Zero tolerance” is just a code word for “zero brain cells.”
And it’s not just stupid on the part of school administrators, it’s actively cowardly. Just insist that right and wrong don’t matter and no one can hold you accountable for anything.
Is being suspended even a punishment? I would have been psyched to be suspended, I hated going to school.
Depends on your home situation. My mom made being suspended so much worse than being at school, and I hated school.
I used to cut class, then get suspended as “punishment”. I called it two for the price of one…
Got really harshly dogged in sophomore year by an asshole, one day in gym class he threw a basketball (iirc?)directly at my head. That day I gave him a death stare and we squared up, gym teacher came over and threw US both on the ground yelling like you do when dogs start fighting. A year later I was questioned by the school councilor whether I was safe enough to go to my honors classes at a neighboring high school (zero tolerance for bad behavior in this program). I nearly got denied my favorite class (equine science+veterinary science) over that shit. Don’t even remember the guy’s name, but he was a total loser. I’m still salty that I didn’t beat the shit out of him that day lol.
Zero tolerance needs to be applied to administration too, so that they can see how absolutely unjust the policy is against victims of abuse. Spray brake fluid on the superintendent’s car and then accuse them of vandalism. Same thing. Set fire to their lawn, blame them for arson. Same thing. Maybe being part of the injustice will highlight their idiotic reasoning.
Such a dumb fucking policy made by lawyers who don’t react like normal people.
The Ender Wiggin solution. Take that as you will.
It’s lawsuits, not reputation, the administration is worried about.
Teachers, however, actually care about human development, and attempt the impossible job of steering students in the right direction.
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Anti-bullying policies at schools aren’t meant to protect victims. But they aren’t meant to protect perpetrators either.
They are instead meant to protect the school administration, notably from having to actually assign fault in bullying situations. They can simply say “zero tolerance,” punish all parties equally, and wash their hands of it.
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Back when I was in school, I was bullied so bad it resulted in multiple head injuries and even a broken arm.
My parents tried to complain to the school but got nowhere, so they went to the local newspaper. I was interviewed, so were other kids at my school. The story was pulled from the paper at the request of the school superintendent.
Years later after I graduated, I saw a documentary on Amazon about school bullying, and it featured the very same school!
As shit as social media is, I do think the aspects of it that allow stories like yours to go viral nowadays and bring eyes to a situation beyond the local community can be helpful.
My niece’s school also had an intense bullying situation, and several students posted on Tiktok about it. The videos went semi-viral, and the school got bombarded with phone calls and negative Google reviews (I didn’t even know schools HAD Google reviews until then lol). The regional news station got wind of it this way, and came sniffing around. Suddenly administrators were VERY concerned and attentive to the situation, when they couldn’t even be bothered half of the school year.
I actually think the victim’s family were able to settle something legally because a lawyer offered their services reduced cost or pro-bono, again by learnings about the situation from social media.
That was my experience in school. I frequently got worse punishment than my bullies. Then the one day I actually fought back I got worse punishment again. But the next day I was ignored by the bullies.
I can just hear someone out there saying that’s what the school wanted to teach me but dude, it was not some reasoned, cool headed, defense of myself. It was a dirty emotional scrap where I used anything I had to hand. If I had possessed a weapon it would have been used. That’s not resilience training, that’s trauma and teaching kids they cannot trust authority. Because if you think the lesson was lost on anyone around me then you are a fool.
teaching kids they cannot trust authority
Which is still a valuable lesson
No, this isn’t, “don’t talk to the police”. This is, “don’t pay taxes, don’t vote, fight the police, fuck everything, the system is rigged and all government employees are complicit in a system of cruelty.”
One of those is a valuable lesson and the other is going to give us the next Unabomber.
Not saying your experience was a good thing by any stretch, but I do think especially in the U.S, we all run into that point at one time or another, when it really hits you that the “authorities” don’t really have much stake in your well-being, and so usually disregard it.
A lot of times this will be in school, yeah, with nonsense “zero tolerance policies.”
Other times it’s the “You can trust me and tell me anything” HR department that fires you for “performance reasons” conveniently after being a harassment victim.
Eventually something goes the wrong way and you realize “Help ain’t coming.” And it sucks.
Ourselves and each other are who we’ve really got in the end. Look out for each other. <3
Yeah, one time is a lesson. I’m more talking about the kids that are bullied for years, ostracized, and yes punished for the pleasure of being beat and humiliated multiple times a day. It happens in every school unless action is taken to stop it. Those kids? Those are the ones being radicalized.
Oh yeah, absolutely agreed.
Schools will care so much about their reputations, deny responsibility, and then it’s all “thoughts and prayers, who could imagine such a thing” when their gamble busts.
I bet they secretly love the “gun debate” because they can just back out Homer Simpson style while everyone fights and argues about dangerous objects, meanwhile they’ll continue to cultivate an environment where they can ignore the kids who are learning to hate the world and everyone in it with such intensity they’ll feel like doing something terrible about it.
Adequate motivation will always find the means, and they keep creating an environment that fosters that motivation.
If we take this thinking to its ridiculous extreme: Admins likely wouldn’t care if they had an entire school of bullied, depressed, violently rageful potential killers in every class, provided they were able to remove all of these students’ hands and the funding kept flowing.
It’s unforgivable. Nobody copes well with believing they’re alone in the world and nobody is on their side or understands them.
The thing about taxes is it only works when you’re a big fish in a small pond. Amazon Fulfillment Center doesn’t have to pay taxes to the small Arkansas municipal government they functionally own. But you can be fucking sure that the extremely white sheriff and his Good’ole’Boy deputies won’t tolerate a tax payment showing up late when it’s the low-income black neighborhood Amazon Fulfillment Center workers who are on the hook.
That is, after all, the agreement between the city and the business. The city budget doesn’t come from the company coffers, it comes from the salaries of the employees’ paychecks. Rents are for Little People.
I agree. We should really start centralizing some of that so Multi National Corporations can’t just buy a town.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
We should have trust in the system. The system is supposed to be representational of the people that fund it through their taxes and elections for people like school boards, town councils, and DAs.
If the system is fucked, it’s our fault…not the systems.
The root of the problem is that nobody wants systemic fixes. Everyone elected either wants to fix their own little corner independently or just ignore it and starve the beast. Neither work. Systemic problems need to be addressed systematically.
Let’s look at bullying and the causes of it…usually the bullies are abused or neglected, and usually abuse and neglect comes from generational poverty. So you gotta fix that. But nobody wants to.
I’ve actually had a couple of my bullies reach out to me recently, now nearly 30 years later and they are parents themselves, apologizing for the shit they put me through because their home life was shit. Their words, not mine.
usually abuse and neglect comes from generational poverty.
Worst bullying I dealt with was when I went to a (not cheap) private school, so I don’t think that’s all that relevant.
Yeah, it is generally considered to be a bad thing.
It teaches the younger and weaker kids that they cannot expect administrators to act in their interests.
It teaches the older and meaner kids that they can act with impunity, safe in the assumption that administrators will look the other way.
The lesson is two-fold, and the end result is a cycle of bullying as the younger kids grow up knowing they can punch down without consequences.
Like that kid who got kicked off the swim team because another student engraved the n word on him
In my town, a kid and his sister were bullied to the point of the kid shooting up the school. The principal that ignored it all is being hailed as a hero for being shot along with the bully of the sister.
Allegedly, the kid was also a piece of shit beforehand, so being bullied isn’t really a defense of him.
The conversation about doing something about the rampant bullying at the school lasted a week, maybe, before turning back to meaningless platitudes. More memorials, more fundraising, more blue shit to show support, but nothing about stopping the root cause.
And then a school shooting happens and the reputation is more than tarnished
Same as it ever was
Back in the 90s, my middle school had a policy of punishing any students involved in a fight. If you threw a punch, you were in trouble. If you got hit, you were in trouble. The official line being that it would be unfair to punish two students brawling simply because the teacher didn’t arrive until the last punch was thrown. But in practical terms, it meant you had a huge disincentive to report being attacked because it would amount to a confession of guilt.
Found this out very personally when a kid in a foul mood decided to start marching through the hallway and swinging at anyone standing in his way. He struck three kids on his way out of the building (including myself). When this got up to the principal’s office, the principal was forced to explain to three different sets of parents why their children were in trouble because one (older, btw) child went on a rampage.
In that particular incident, the offending kid was suspended and ultimately moved to a disciplinary school. But the policy wasn’t changed, just exempted in this particular instance.
We don’t discovered tarnish so bully
gotta skin it to win it
It’s about school reputation? I thought it was about dominance hierarchy, the same reason boys’ sports is a higher priority than any other education program world-wide.
We just like our beefy kids and wish we could toss the defects down a pit like the Spartans.
And it keeps on going and then we elect them.
The teachers are requesting that, if someone harrasses you, you go WAY TOO FAR in defending yourself, and will dole out and withhold punishments to encourage it.
Anyone who wasn’t basically ordering you to do that would behave differently.
I don’t believe that’s true.
Maybe it’s true in American private schools where you need to chose which school to give money to, but where I live schools don’t have reputation to care about. You just go to the one closest.
I was expelled for being bullied for being queer
Clearly it’s your fault for being bullied.
Did you read my comment? I am not claming that bullying does not exist.
You are talking about only private schools being the exception from this but the public school I went to doesn’t fit your belief.
Happens in public schools where funds get cut for poor performance of students.
In my central European country, performance tracking is centralised and operated by the State, and does not affect funding.
kids need to learn how to fight back. the bullies will still be there when you grow up.
Then to make the comparison work, the police (real ones) should be called every time a student reports being assaulted, and it shouldn’t be treated as school disciplinary matter any more than it would be an HR issue if I were punched by a coworker.
sigh. keep trusting in institutions.
i live in a world of pod people.
The police aren’t a good solution but they’re better than forcing our kids to risk being assaulted in school every day because the schools refuse to stop it.
