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Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

> children who grow in over surveillance have a tendency of not exercising moral

Sadly, so do many kids growing up without surveillance.

There are many kids bullied in schools, some of them to the point of suicide. Should we feel happy that their suffering provides to bullies the precious opportunity to reflect on their actions, which they would be deprived of in a safer school environment with cameras?

What's next? Abolish police, so that the adults can learn to live in peace without the external threats? Sounds great in theory, you probably wouldn't want it to happen in your city today.

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> which they would be deprived of in a safer school environment with cameras?

My personal experience with bullies is that they will leverage the cameras to make their bullying even more effective. Most bullies work inside the system, and the worst ones are part of they system.

Yep. Laws themselves are not barriers to protect victims, they're guidelines for abusers to follow. They're often written by abusers.

The cameras are abused through "crybullying," where you covertly antagonize someone into punching you, then you go crying to the teacher. The tapes indict your victim.

Personally, the cameras would dissuade me from fighting the bully back or fighting for someone else under the threat of punishment. Bullying in school and the “real world” could be solved by reporting to an authority, but real character development comes from learning to confront one’s aggressor.

Schools have been ~fine without cameras forever though? I don’t think the lack of enforcement around bullying is addressed by cameras, it’s due either to lack of caring by the administration or lack of levers to do much to stop it (kids basically have a right to go to school, it’s very tricky to take that away or to isolate them without taking it away).

> Schools have been ~fine without cameras forever though?

I believe the person you are replying to is emphasizing the "~" in your comment. Yes, it's not like half the kids will commit self harm because they are bullied, but a very small percent will. How do we, as a society, weigh their suffering against those who are being surveiled without ever having done anything to trigger it?

Step 1 is just actually punish and/or separate kids who are known to be bullies. Lack of surveillance or of “knowledge” of who the bullies are isn’t the inhibitor. Not to mention obviously cameras won’t successfully police online/out of school behavior, to which also the solution is not more surveillance.

Teachers, students, administrators, and often parents already know who the bullies are. The question is what to do about it.

> Teachers, students, administrators, and often parents already know who the bullies are. The question is what to do about it.

The school authority figures (teachers and administrators) both know who the bullies are, and enable/cover for them. My theory is these figures often were once the bullies themselves back when they went to school, and they identify with today's bullies. They'll watch and wait until the victim fights back, and then punish the victim using the "Zero Tolerance for fighting" excuse.

I think they like their jobs and would like to keep them and they are constantly under attack by the public at large.

Like do you actually think any kid who was a bully you grew up with went into teaching? There definitely are a few, but just like in the kids’ case, it’s suuuuuper obvious who they are — even as adults — and they are not the majority case in any school system I’ve ever been a part of.

FWIW it is literally legally difficult to do anything. A lot of forms of bullying are not illegal per se and kids — even asshole kids — do have a right to an education.

> FWIW it is literally legally difficult to do anything. A lot of forms of bullying are not illegal per se and kids — even asshole kids — do have a right to an education.

I think it odd how many wrong applications and problematic uses of in loco parentis schools actually use, but when it's dealing with a bully, it's all of a sudden retreating behind "well, legally we can't..."

Bullying will just happen in the camera's blind spots. Are you going to put cameras in the loo?

I was bullied fairly relentlessly in school. Not sure cameras would've helped (don't even remember if we had them in classrooms), especially the verbal stuff, but I also don't like the idea of always being watched. Honestly, I would rather have the administration be less afraid of lawsuits and covering its own ass with comfortable lies like zero tolerance. Being bullied and then having the vice principal tell you "they were only joking" was the ACTUAL travesty, not any lack of surveillance. Fix the broken authority figures before instituting the Panopticon.

Exactly. Kids are already living in an excessively sheltered world. I don’t buy into the “bullying makes you stronger” bullshit but kids should be able to go walk around outside and play in the woods and build their own little tiny societies before they enter the real one.

And in tiny societies, just like in the real one, there will be injustices that need to be managed by some mechanism other than just “don’t go outside, put cameras everywhere.”

Couldn't agree more. There seems to be some fundamental human dynamic at play here that I don't fully understand. Teachers and school administrators know exactly who they bullies are, yet they will tolerate and even actively enable them. They will punish any victim of bullying who dares to fight back with alacrity.

My personal and unproven theory is that most school staff are bullies/cowards themselves (two sides of the same coin). They have a instinctive fear of punishing bullies and dealing with the blowback from their parents because the odds are good that bully parents will raise bully kids. Victims are often socially awkward and an easy target to punish without much risk to the teacher.

IMO administrators tend to be craven bureaucrats who fail to back up their frontline workers (teachers, security, or custodial staff) in almost any difficult situation.

> There seems to be some fundamental human dynamic at play here that I don't fully understand.

The dynamic is laws and standards of evidence in court that make expulsion of problematic kids too costly, for example IDEA 2004.

Video and audio evidence is the only lawsuit proof mechanism to prove the problem child needs to be punished. And this applies in the adult world too, see cops and body/smartphone cameras.

And with these kind of settlement amounts, everyone is going to look to minimize their liability and maximize their plausible deniability, including teachers, taxpayers, admin staff, and the school district itself:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-bullied-teen-die...

The body cam analogy is a little tricky here though. Bullying is generally a pattern borne out over many months or years, often with the intensity of individual instances only ever rising to the level of minor annoyance.

Someone getting jumped? Video helps a lot. Someone being subtly poked and prodded for months on end who then turns around and punches a bully in the face… who is now expellable at the bully’s parents’ whim even though every individual in the school knows what happened?

> even though every individual in the school knows what happened?

And let's be real here, this includes the teachers. I, and most of my peers, thought our teachers were ignorant to most of the drama in school. I went back a couple of years after I graduated, and learned that teachers generally know exactly what's going on, who is in what relationships, what fights are going on, and yes, who is a bully.

> My personal and unproven theory is that most school staff are bullies/cowards themselves

There’s some wisdom here. What I’ve heard before is that teachers enjoy the feeling of school popularity and the power that comes from it. Perhaps the fact that teachers in Japan also engage in bullying validates this theory.

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