Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc. Schools can probably do more, but I doubt they can fix bullying alone. And certainly not with the resources they're given today.
You know how women often don’t report sexual harassment and assault? It’s because if they do report it, they will suffer further victimization and their chances at any just outcome are too low.
Same thing with bullying in schools. Kids don’t report it because if they do so, they will be opening themselves up to further victimization, and the people they report it to will not take sufficient action to stop it.
All schools need to do is make it safe to report bullying, prioritizing the victim’s safety. Then with a report they don’t need blanket surveillance, they can just do targeted surveillance to verify the reports. Once verified, they should take immediate action to put a permanent stop to it.
I don't see any practical answers in your comment. Recognising schools should "makes it safe to report bullying" is one thing. How though? It seems entirely intractable - you seem to suggest blanket surveillance of all children everywhere?
Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.
As I said, parenting is more important so one learns right from wrong and morals for when they are not at home and how to lead proper lives.
When it comes to children we usually call it supervision.
Not that I think all children need to be supervised all the time, but large groups of unsupervised children can create mayhem very quickly.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc.
This is true, but in most countries it doesn't escalate to mass murder. That's specifically a US thing (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...). So while you're right, I don't think it's fair to suggest it's hard to stop this problem or to resign to it being typical kids behaviour. The shooting aspect bucks the global norm.
The closest runner-up country, the Falkand Islands, is almost exactly half of that - at 62 guns per 100 people [1]. There's a sharp decline from there.
1 - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-owner...
That said, I've long shared the belief that despite the absurd number of guns in the USA, and how they literally outweigh the population; the average person ought to re-calibrate have more faith in humanity and respect for their access to firearms, because the stats for gun violence are not nearly as high as you'd think if they're that accessible.
I escaped most of it, personally, because I had sharp enough wits and enough self-confidence to turn ridicule back on most people who went after me that way - I even figured out at one point that if I used big words the PE teacher would leave me alone, lol - and was physically big enough not to be a target otherwise. We didn't complain, though, not even to our parents, because that was just the way things were - why would kids think anything should be otherwise, when authority figures saw it and didn't care, like, at all?
What I didn't do, ever, was stand up for anyone else. It was a survival strategy. I remember reading about Columbine that Dylan Klebold waved one kid out from under his gun because, he said, "you were always nice to me". I didn't bully anyone, and even had friendly conversations with some of the kids who were the most consistent targets, but, had they come to school with a gun, I doubt I'd have passed that test. I can't shake the feeling that had one of them committed violence that the school - and maybe even I, myself - would have deserved it.
This shit's been going on a long time.
They did, at leat say that^ when talking about why they shouldn't just move him to a new school.
But overall I agree. If this is supposed to be the success story, just imagine all the other cases of silencing/boxing-out the socially outcast.
There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.
Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
They don't misunderstand. They are incentivized by the system to behave this way. The ones that can't adapt their morals change their line of work. See also: cops.
Understand, the teachers and administrators are not on the same team!
The admin is a political body, who basically gets their job by being voted in (or more exactly, they are hired by the school board, who is explicitly voted in). They will ignore teachers reporting problems because it's not politically expedient to actually deal with those problems.
In almost all towns, the school board serves the local Old Boys club, not the general public. Bob doesn't give a fuck that his kid is a bully, he still has the most pull in the town. He's not going to sit aside when you punish his kid, even if his kid is demonstrably a bully.
The parents of bullies will not pay attention to "your child is literally harming other kids" but you can bet, the second you suspend their child, they will somehow manage a media campaign that an entire mob will rally behind. "oh that's just what kids do" says the mob. They will then say "we need to bring spanking back into schools" and that will increase the size of the mob.
At no point did the admin help the teacher do their damn job.
You claim to be against X, but there is no X around, so you condition or bring someone to the breaking point to make X appealing to them, then you can claim that you were righteous all along. You create a problem and then "solve" it. In reality you did nothing, except wreck someone else's life, for the sake of your own grandiosity.
Based on what I've read, the bullies wanted the school shooting more than the supposed school shooter. Like, they genuinely wanted him to shoot them.
The school system is designed to remove and punish the families like that.
That's standard practice for schools in the US. And I've heard from a relative who is a schoolteacher that during a mediation, the schools make both sides apologize to the other, requiring that the victim apologize to the bully.
Bullying isn't just condoned in schools, it is supported. If you try to report it to administrators you are more likely to be punished than the bullies because YOU are the pain point for them.
Any idea what the idea is behind this?
What more do you want?
People often say they'll know torture when they see it, but in practice most people are completely blind and they don't properly or rigorously compare torture with abuse, nor do they know how it works so they don't recognize it.
All it takes is a select set of elements, a set of structures, and a little clustering, and even you can be made to do horrible things, solely as a matter of sufficient exposure.
Those elements are isolation, lack of agency, coercion with perceived or real loss. Structure are trauma loops where you have alternating strict and lenient stages (push pull). Clustering include specific items that dramatically increase suggestibility to induce psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect. These include psychological blindspots we all have which occur beneath our perception when triggered. There are 6 or 7 in total, most are covered by Robert Cialdini, and when they are used to create an inconsistent internal mental state that's stress you can't perceptually recognize. Coping can be done for some if you know the patterns but there is no coping with distorted reflected appraisal. The pariah effect, which is enforced through social media and other material. The Stasi called this Zersetzung. Its been used and originates with many Communist/Marxist based groups, but recently includes many corporations. Sad times.
If you as a group degrade a human being, destroying their mind to the point where they are no longer sane; that's quite an evil which is not having consequences enforced. When the law defends such destructive and evil behavior by not stopping it; the rule of law no longer exists. Its a rule by law. Violence is what naturally follows.
If you want to prevent violence, you need to reform and correct the deficiencies that have now failed to allow non-violent conflict resolution. Any choice that does not lead to that resolution is a choice for the support of violence, albeit indirect.
These things were commonly known at one point in time, but education of such has been withheld and we see the effect that has had. Shock doctrine being used to push narratives and solutions which are not in fact solutions; towards ever greater control. A lot of which is intolerable taken to a long-standing logical conclusion.
Most people today seek a delusional view of the world, they are willfully blind, and have sought a world where bad things don't happen, and knowledge of such bad things actually happening is the same as acting to do those bad things. Communication of such things is the same as doing those things, or supporting those things. The author's right to depict horrible things to promote a common good being stripped from literature/media citing it induces (when it may not). This line of reasoning is obviously fallacy but they follow the "What they don't perceive, doesn't exist." dogma.
This may work right up until an out-of-context problem arises from chaos and forces extinction, or a collapse.
Evil starts with complacency (sloth) and the induced choice towards willful blindness of the consequences of each persons individual choices.
It's well documented that you don't argue with Evil, it can't be reasoned with, you can only stop it from harming others, and that is a good thing when properly/rigorously identified and action taken.
For example, you won't see any good person defending the Nazi Holocaust. Edit: Simple reasonable, and well known things, and the bot swarm is already busy downvoting it out of view. Goes to show you why people are being induced towards blindness. Evil people simply don't want you to know about these things, and the biggest problem with such people is they don't realize they are evil.
> Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said. Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.
> The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.
This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying for his emotional outburst and everyone who picked on him got away unscathed. This seems similar to the recent Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Both the series and the discussion around it focused on the main character rather than the bullying that caused him to kill.