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Comment by deodar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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