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Comment by doctorwho | Hacker News Reader

The teacher has a responsibility to provide a safe environment THAT ENDS AT THE DOOR TO THEIR CLASS. If the harassment happened out of view, is the teacher still responsible? Are you responsible for harassment that takes place at your workplace outside your cubicle? Students have remedies, they all know what they are. I knew. If the child spoke up to a teacher, principal, janitor, or anyone and the school did nothing then I'd side with the OP in a heartbeat. Absent any real facts about what happened I'd have to guess (and it's only a guess) that the teacher wasn't the problem here.

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> The teacher has a responsibility to provide a safe environment THAT ENDS AT THE DOOR TO THEIR CLASS. If the harassment happened out of view, is the teacher still responsible? Are you responsible for harassment that takes place at your workplace outside your cubicle?

The teacher may be responsible, sure. The harassment happened; knowing that, it is an absolutely fair question to wonder if more could have been done by the teacher.

> Students have remedies, they all know what they are. I knew. If the child spoke up to a teacher, principal, janitor, or anyone and the school did nothing then I'd side with the OP in a heartbeat.

I feel it must be pointed out, and repeated if necessary, that someone does not need to report a wrong action for that action to be wrong. I know that's not exactly what you said. The author's daughter was harassed, and that is wrong. Full stop.

> Absent any real facts about what happened I'd have to guess (and it's only a guess) that the teacher wasn't the problem here.

If you are absent any real facts, why hazard a guess at all?

>The author's daughter was harassed, and that is wrong. Full stop.

IF the author's daughter was harassed THEN that is wrong. Full stop.

I have no idea what really happened. You have no idea what really happened. Neither one of us was there. Neither was the mom. Her version is still just hearsay and worth exactly nothing. The only one who knows what happened is the young girl involved.

People throw the word harassment around a lot. Being bullied is the new black. What if this kid is super-sensitive (we all know people who cry when they step on ants) and the other kids just laughed at her and called her a teacher's pet. Maybe that was enough to sour this kid? But... is that harassment? Are the other kids just evil? Maybe the teacher was a completely insensitive jerk. Maybe the teacher was in on it. Maybe the mom embellished the story in some bizarre modern day blogging version of Munchausen by proxy.

At the end of the day all we can do is speculate that if A happened then B should have been done about it. In a perfect world A would never happen, but we don't live in that world and everyone who tells a story brings their own biases to the conversation. It's fodder for discussion and not much else because it's a story with only one version of the "facts".

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