That’s “zero tolerance” hard at work.

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.

> It sounds fair on paper

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."

It isn't sold like this though, hence it working differently on paper and in practice.

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.

I don't know why you were downvoted to hell. You were not defending the school's disciplinary approach, you were just describing it.

Yeah, this is about avoiding a decision, not trying to even pretend to be fair. The administration is betting the parents won’t escalate the issue.

Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.

You can also use the school staff to help you bully other kids.

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.

Bullying via playing the victim can work after school too. Eg. some legal cases are like this.

It works too well. Especially with the "first to call" or "first to complain" gets automatically a 500 point boost in credibility. "Clearly if they called the police first, the to other party must be at fault".

My (private) school had the luxury of sorting this through a multi tier system. a) detention was 3 hours minimum on a saturday. It involved manual labor like mulching flower beds, picking up litter while rolling around 50 gallon drums, etc. b) if you liked manual labor you were made to do homework with someone paying direct attention or lecturing subjects you were bad at. c) if you attempted to opt out of that they would have you dig holes 3 feet deep with a post hole digger and fill them back in. d) if you attempted to opt out of that you got 2 options 1) the teachers thought you were redeemable. you pushed the dumpster around campus picking up the 50 gallon drums. 3 times during the circuit you'd come back and raise a 50 lb plate overhead and drop it to smash the garbage. Aroudn 30 times each round. One of the philosophy teachers would expound on your life decisions for the full 3 hours. 2) you were enrolled at your public school immediately, and truant the next day. your parents were called and told to pick you up and returned the balance of the tuition.

it was a large luxury of privilege.

> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored.

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.

So, what you’re saying is, HR department behaviours start long before HR department employment.

HR and school admin are the same in that many mistakenly think they are there to help the employee or the student. That is not true. They are there to protect the institution, to manage and mitigate risk and liability. Any assistance to employees or students is a side effect of that work.

This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.

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.

> This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.

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.

> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.

René Girard

I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.

> can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating

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.

That's 100% how it worked in practice. Hell, I've even heard of some parents encouraging their kids to do that if they get hit precisely because the notion of "no tolerance" is absurd

The next step is parents' lawyers going zero tolerance on the school system.

victims shouldn't be accountable for contributing to the problem.

If you punish a kid that didn't retaliate just because "he was involved in a fight" you remove every incentive for that kid to restrain themselves next time. If he's gonna be punished, he might just as well be punished for something.

If your parents didn't make a serious stink about this, they failed you.

As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.

Your 1st sentence is spot on.

Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.

Pretty sure the second sentence was meant to be ironic.

School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.

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.

> In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education

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.

> But I became fixated on how unfair it was.

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.

The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.

I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us.

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.

> relatively dull intellect

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.

I stopped a kid from hitting me and the school tried to punish me for another kid attacking me, and I non violently grabbed his fist and stopped the attack.

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.

Ten minutes ago my son came home from school and told me there was a fight and that the kid who started it has no punishment but the kid who finished it got a weeklong suspension.

I have no clue how they come up with this stuff.

And where were your parents in this? My school in USA tried this... Once. My dad went to have a talk with them. I do not know what was said, but the principal walked out of the room white-faced and they never tried that bullshit on me again.

Or, it was a pop quiz to stand up for yourself, which you then failed.

I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten.

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.

thats called collective punishment when persons aside from the offender are also punished for the crimes of that one offender.

a school being a government entity, cant be doing that malarchy.

That's exactly the kind of situation that made hateful as a teen. I'm so glad to be free of that now. Therapy works (over the long term, not a quick fix).