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Comment by quiet35 | Hacker News Reader

I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:

- 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.

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Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.

Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.

My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.

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 think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying

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.

How about when the perpetrators are also victims? If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home (as is often the case), don't both kids deserve help and support? Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.

At the point a parent is beating up their own kid I wonder what options are available. If they're removed from the family then placing them in foster care almost always leads to worse outcomes than leaving them with the abusive family. The state doesn't know how to raise children.

Then surely the focus should be on solving that problem? Just clamping down on the proximate cause doesn't really help - as others have pointed out, it seems likely to incite revenge attacks rather than stopping the bullying.

That's the thing, it's unclear if it's a problem that can be solved. It has to do with fundamental benefits of staying with biological family, and avoiding the extremely negative consequences of lack of attachment.

https://nccpr.org/the-evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-...

> If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home

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.

> Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others

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.

> 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?

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.

Do you have any personal experience with this?

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.

People respond differently to different things. One bully who gets punched back will stop, while another will escalate. Trying to fix bullying requires a solution tailored to each individual bully.

I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.

As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.

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.

> such cases were easily resolved

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.

> 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.

Conversely, it also ingrains the lesson that it is ok to abuse anyone weaker than you A) if you know you can get away with it (because someone stronger is not always around/aware/inclined to intervene), or B) because that is just normal / the way the world is.

I don't see how that follows. In an environment in which physical correction has no reason, and is doled out unfairly (as with alcoholic parents), then sure, someone would ingrain the idea that the world is callous and unfair and they should get theirs at the expense of others if they can. If they instead only experience physical correction due to specific reasons that are deemed far outside the bounds of acceptable (such as inflicting violence on others), that's a whole different lesson.

Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.

That’s called training a person to live in the real world and not be a criminal.

Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.

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.

I think you’re missing the point.

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.

This is just a defense of violence and abuse.

> - 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)

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.

Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.

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 comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?

In theoretical land - if my son had beaten some other kid to pulp, and he got a slap from teacher to stop that (on top of probably being expelled)? Absolutely, the least of the issues in such problem.

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.

There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.

Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.

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.

Give this a watch - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070649/

On the other hand, I got bullied a lot less after one lose a few teeth. Violence does work.

Singapore has 30% or more families using corporal punishment, according to this

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10311744/

And when it is permissible to say that a society is trash? Cause 30% who think beating children is OK, is frankly abhorrent.

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...

You should travel more.

30% engaged in child abuse is grotesque.

> 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

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.

Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.

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.

A bully is not necessarily a sadist

And neither a sadist or a bully are necessarily bad people.

yes they are, bullies some of the worst of humanity

"Bully" is an archetype.

> because there's always someone with a bigger stick.

This is certainly not true. Someone has the biggest stick, and if they abuse that power, it can be horrible.

Nobody has the biggest stick forever, and time is implicitly included in the adage "someone always has a bigger stick".

Teaching someone that using violence and abuse as ways to exercise power is not a lesson I want people to learn.

Good thing that's not the lesson then. Of course if you see any use of physical correction as violence and abuse, then you're just assuming the conclusion.

I see any use of violence as violence, yes, and find it abhorrent to see people justifying violence against children. I'm happy I grew up in a civilised country where it was and is a criminal offense

Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence. It's not much different than kidnapping and that's usually considered violence. How about a time-out for a child?

> Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence.

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.

A time-out can still be considered violence and something you approve for children.

And oranges can be considered apples. If you're going to redefine terms in the attempts at a gotcha all you're achieve is looking silly.

> 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.

The state's monopoly on violence is literally the only way to enforce their perceived legitimacy

> I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically!

How is this different from being in city where "police officer" has the power to shot you?

We're not required to be in a cop's room for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

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.

Point taken on the power being abused point.

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.

> Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.

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.

Okay, so you're a chump with a slave mentality who can be broken by a spanking but you think other men are weak. Got it.

All these corporal punishment societies and families have the people they don't talk about who were hardened or driven insane by beatings.

Those are valid arguments.

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.

I think they call those prisons. /s

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.

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