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.”
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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..."