> 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.