Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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 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.
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.
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"?
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.
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?
> So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds
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.
....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?
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
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?
> if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school?
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.
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.
And schools have been able to deal with "brats" for over a century without kicking them out of school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
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!
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.
Which is why I'm advocating for the schools to be given the resources to deal with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of what you said contradicts the above.
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. :-)
I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are you saying?
Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways
An ADHD diagnosis and treatment.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it was a large luxury of privilege.
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.
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.
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.
René Girard
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.
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."
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.
victims shouldn't be accountable for contributing to the problem.
As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.
Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no clue how they come up with this stuff.
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.
a school being a government entity, cant be doing that malarchy.
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.
Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?
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.
Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given a lot of college stadiums are 50k+ capacity.
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/
That said, I know school sports is a way bigger deal in the US than most other countries so YMMV.
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
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".
Caning is no joke.
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!.
Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And neither a sadist or a bully are necessarily bad people.
This is certainly not true. Someone has the biggest stick, and if they abuse that power, it can be horrible.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
https://nccpr.org/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All these corporal punishment societies and families have the people they don't talk about who were hardened or driven insane by beatings.
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...
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.
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.
How is this different from being in city where "police officer" has the power to shot you?
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.
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.
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.
They're super close to chimps (and definitely much closer than us), rather than "a very different species".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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
Girls and women receive greater physical protection, as required to manage reproductive capacity and long‑term demographic stability.
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.
Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.
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?
---
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.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> but gender is a human invention.
So you don't believe a person can be transgender, right?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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?
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.
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”.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
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.
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.
I know but OP was talking about laws specifically, not their application.
It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.
Yes, girls can be bullies too, etc..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore?useskin=ve...
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
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:
But is that research of high quality?
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.
I will reiterate. If you, or others, want to hit children then that's something you need to justify with cold hard studies. Not me. The default is not hitting people.
Acknowledge the reality: if I do these punishments to another adult man, I will:
1. Probably get my ass handed to me.
2. Go to jail and be prosecuted for assault and battery.
Given that, why then does it magically become okay to do it to kids?
The answer is it doesn't, fucking obviously. So, if you want to do that, justify it. And it better be a good justification backed by science, not some pussy-footing "reasoning" I'm sure you're going to bust out.
I will do that, because as you stated yourself you are planning to ignore arguments you don't like:
> you won't convince me otherwise
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
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.
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.
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?
You don’t seem to have answered my second question.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll convey your admiration to my local sinaloa confederate.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
As a child I went to a well funded Catholic school in Chicago. Fighting was discouraged by priests who would put the two kids in a boxing ring - we were made to use gloves (but I don't remember helmets). Both kids would have a priest in their corner, but really for their own amusement. Then they would ring the bell and the two combatants would have at it.
What those who don't box don't know is that unless you are trained, boxing exhausts you almost immediately and the gloves very quickly become so heavy you can hardly lift them to punch. At the end of the first round, the priests would ask us if we wanted to continue, we would exhaustedly decline.
My only introduction to the ring ended with my opponent becoming a best friend, and most bouts ended the same.
Again, I'm not condoning this practice, and I'm not nostalgic about the period, but it seemed to have positive effects in a milieu that seems no longer to exist (I'm 73).
"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).
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.
- 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.
Corporal punishment is not bad when its fair, not arbitrary, unjust, nor physically damaging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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...
No, how far away should I be to see that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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] -
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
Just stupd
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
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.
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.
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.
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.
A bad person sees such a punishment as an opportunity to intimidate others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
It is exactly as I said. Please don't spread misinformation.
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.
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.
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.
The cycle continues.
Caring would be more effective than caning. But Singapore gonna Singapore.
Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.
> I never said its nice or justifyable
Sir are you schizophrenic?
This should be solved by nonviolence.
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...
Never Violence! - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Violence!
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-...
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.
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.
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.
____
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.
>I find this abuse horrific
>barbaric behavior.
Absolutely! We're all against bullying here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Oh, come on, stop whining. Skrewdriver is still on Spotify.
You're such a snowflake, posing as the victim of government oppression.
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?
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.
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.
Looks to me like you should be pissed off at the police in your locale for forcing you to fend for yourself against criminals.
The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.
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.
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.
And what does immigration have to do with any of this?
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 then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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
Correction: pro beating abusers.
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.
If you told authorities and they coddled you that experience might get imprinted on your personality.
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.
Judging from your description you didn't lay out any examples of where fighting back failed.
Which sort of explains why there’s no subsequent response.
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.
Obviously your personal conclusion is different but I would say it’s not an empirical or strictly logical analytical conclusion.
You will also note that I was able to guess and predict where you’re coming from. Not only did I ask for the full metric, I asked for it partly because I can predict it would be 3 out of 3. My response to the other persons reply predicted what was going on in your head quite accurately. Because of this I would say that I have knowledge about this context that you don’t know about it and that you can learn from. It’s natural for you to you to fight for your point but that would be a form of bias.
So here’s something that you can agree with. If the victim wanted to he can go to the kitchen grab a knife bring it to school to try to kill that bully. Another option is to follow that bully home and attempt to slaughter his family.
No matter how small a victim is… any bully will back down if he knew the victim was willing to raise the violence level to these insane extremes.
The point of that example is to show you a level of resistance that will cause nearly 100 percent of bullies to back down. And to also show how extremely possible it is for anyone to do. Anyone can go to the kitchen and grab a knife and raise the stakes. The point is that most victims just don’t have the balls to do it.
From a practical standpoint you only need to go a fraction of that distance in order to cause most bullies to back down. Are you willing to get violent with a bully? Maybe don’t get a knife but be willing to smash his face in with your fists. Or bring a bat to school and try smash down his legs to get him to kneel if your fists are truly too weak. If you don’t do shit then the bully won’t back down and that is primarily what the bully takes advantage of as shown with the 3/3 statistic you presented me with.
The victim definitely has choices. But he’s too scared take charge or even follow through with the right choice. Weakness is not a realistic excuse because the victim has choices in weaponry (rocks, bat) that can even the odds or even bend the odds to extreme levels (knife).
Sorry but this reads like some pompous peak redditor stuff. I'd say it would be a bad look if you're trying to convince someone or transfer and idea but the other person you agreed with wasn't right about the supposed cases nor did you draw some point we disagree on or draw out some conclusion.
>From a practical standpoint you only need to go a fraction of that distance in order to cause most bullies to back down.
Yes because for most bullies it's social posturing. The whole group dynamic doesn't often make sense if there's expected resistance. Even if the victim can be beat, few bullies feel like getting into a tussle over it let alone repeatedly. Exceptions can be notable of course and probalby bullies trend towards those escalation exceptions a bit more than others.