The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.
As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
> expel them and they become another person's problem
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?
I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.
That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.
Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.
> child has to be in education until they turn 18.
> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal
These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
> So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
That becomes the parents' problem. Let them find a school willing to take their abusive kid - or have the state come after them for having children not in school.
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teaches are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually you pay with interest, and it’s not just that one person.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.
You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).
Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.
I think you misunderstand the premise - in fact I struggle to understand how you interpreted the GP that way. No one is arguing that parents should provide 100% of life and academic lessons or that kids should be locked up at home, but that they, rather than schools, should have the leading role.
I took my kids out of school when they were eight or nine and up to 16 (the end of compulsory school age in the UK) my experience was that they met a wider range of people, and had a lot more freedom. Instead of being locked up at school they were free to do more on their own or with friends and to go to a wide range of classes and activities. They have done well academically (conditional offer from Oxford for one, the other starting a PhD later this year) and I was complimented regularly on their social skills when they were children, and this seems to be continuing as adults (and my older daughter now has work responsibilities that require soft skills - I would assume she would not have them if her managers had not observed her as having the skills).
The problem is not the involvement of other people, it is the outsourcing of responsibility and decision making and the main part of parenting. Parents are frequently little involved.
I think the village would be a healthy model for sure. But that is something that was pretty much killed in the modern society as well as most people, especially lower/mid-income workers in larger cities, are spending exceedingly little time of their day in their local neighborhoods.
Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.
Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.
It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.
Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.
Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.
Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?
My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.
So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.
We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.
We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.
Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.
Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.
It was de rigueur for us, but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner. And no, it didn’t work, we’d just plot collective revenge on him, and collectively figure out how to escape the punishment.
It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.
I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.
Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:
This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.
The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.
Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.
Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.
Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.
I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools
In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.
This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.
I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.
If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.
Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"
Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.
> There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.
Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.
> "[...] nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs."
This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.
I don't agree with the notion of caning children, but... Why only males are eligible to be caned? That doesn't sound fair within the framework, girls can be bullies too.
I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.
I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.
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.
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.
Violence is not binary. A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven! Caning people for mistakes humiliates them, and creates in them, the desire for vengeance. Violence at that level, breeds violence. They will hit their children, who will hit their children in turn, and on and on it goes. This is also proven!
I say, remove the naughty children and put them in work/vocational training. Life will punish them enough, later on, if they do not change their ways.
Another way is to punish the parents of naughty children. They are, ultimately, responsible, and if they raised bullies, they should be punished.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> - 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?
> 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.
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).
>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
This is the way! It is sad that wokeism and socialism have created this post-truth world, where math and gender are what you want it to be. Utterly absurd, but this philosophy collapses when it crashes into reality who doesn't care about wokeism.
Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.
Hormones don’t raise kids in particular gender norms, don’t carve them a place in society, don’t feed them gender-based culture 24/7. They do have a physical impact, impact on sexual development, their sex, reproductive function, temperament, but gender is a human invention.
All those differences do impact roles in society. They let women breastfeed. They give men greater physical strength. Other biological differences make women become pregnant. These will affect roles in society.
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
Because it may be effective for boys but not girls.
Men have to deal with some form of violence in their lives, or at least the threat of it. Most male encounters has an undercurrent of violence. Offend another male and you might get assaulted.
So when you expose men to violence it's a matter of the world. Like Tyson said, social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.
If you expose women to violence they will acclimate to it and begin to see it as the norm. That means they'll accept it, from their teachers and eventually their partners.
Its entirely rational to only apply this to boys only.
You’re asking why an authoritarian hellhole that routinely murders people who had drugs stuffed into their suitcases by criminals engages in gender discrimination?
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.
It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.
I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.
I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
Not the right approach as classifying someone as a bully is left to someone's subjective perception. This makes caning legal in the hope it would reform those boys and leaves room for misuse. Once bullying is proven in front of PTA group then other formal methods should be used, starting with counselling-> monitoring for improvement -> separating them from their peers and moving them up seniors, that might turn the tables -> community service with final recourse being termination from school and in worst case / rarest or rare scenarios the country would already have a juvenille justice system to reform.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
You might not have noticed what you've done here, but you've not only agreed to corporal punishment for children but also for harsher corporal punishment for criminals across the board. Read the whole conversation chain and reflect on how bad the optics are. There is a reason why your stance is unpopular.
"Spanking looks like an 8/10 on the subjective harmful scale, but actually on the objective harmful scale its closer to a 3/10. We must rectify the bad reputation of spanking!" is not the type of motivation that should drive pedagogy research.
If you're saying we should pretend that spanking is worse than (we currently know) it is, then I don't agree.
I haven't said anything about corporal punishment for criminals, and I don't know of any evidence for or against it - that strikes me as a very different argument, partly because the level of violence is likely to be much greater.
I (think) many bullies have bad home lives. I wish parents would be held accountable instead of taking it out on the kids that are struggling to process their emotions / hormones in a healthy manner.
And parents are acting out for myriad of reasons. There's a never-ending chain if you go that way. At the end of the day, bully victims end up holding the short end of the stick. And they frequently become bullies themselves. Maybe stopping bullying at the visible link is not the most right solution... But is there anything better that does not lead to eternal finger pointing?
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
> My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now
You can't have this. Have a one-to-one conversation with your kid and tell them you can't have this. If they continue... well, I'm not saying "whoop their ass", but you can't have this.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
There's no denying a broken nose and some lost teeth will make many bullies twice about trying again.
Problem is it's often illegal or against the rules to do it since deliberately beating the crap out of a bully isn't self defence in the traditional sense. And in the cases where it doesn't work, the situation may escalate or the victim might end up being punished harder than the bully.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
In a friends school in Denmark the teacher could decide that your family had to host a party for all the kids at the family home, so they could get to know each other better, and that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
Good when all parents are able to host such party. I would say that in Poland, most of parents with a misbehaving kid are barely able to throw a party for their kid and several of his/her friends. Many times people complain about the cost of school supplies for their kids already.
Just like I thought. I'm sure your solution would work when majority are nice people. That won't work on people who are from "lower social circles". We still have a lot of them in Poland and don't know how to make them behave better, because trying to make them behave better typically results in defensiveness about their way of life and a lot of excuses about their circumstances. They only dig their heels and start being more aggressive.
Most humans are nice people.
Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
That general observation, for me at least, describes the world from rural Pakistan to backwater Tschechia.
The only exception were groups that had a very strong in-group out-group separation. These people always treated me with too much suspicion to express passing kindness.
> Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
I agree, but bullies actually come mostly from that last group. Putting pressure on overwhelmed, self-absorbed or excuse-prone people in order to educate their children better won't work. I think bullying is because of lack of proper emotional education of children, it would be better to educate those parents and children in how to behave and why, but that requires resources most schools won't have and I've never seen anyone actually teaching this in schools.
Then it is an even bigger deterrent. And maybe it forces people to ask their neighbors for help, which can also improve the social dynamic. People bond over helping each other.
>that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
The canning would vastly shorten the time span on which all parties stop misbehaving while the bullying continues. I was bullied as a kid and the school didn't do anything. When my father tried to reason with the bully's family he discovered they were just awful, violent people, bullies, all of them. When he came home, frustrated, he sat me and said something like "uhm, well, ok, listen, I went to talk to the boy's parents and... well... the next time he bothers you just beat the shit out of him. I'll deal with the school" and the quoted the motto of my country: "by reason or by force". Some things just works faster than diplomacy and all shit get sorted out without extending the suffering for most parties involved.
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
You'll notice that my carefully chosen link does not look favorably upon this practice, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't paid to do a job that they've been trained to do with some consistency, unlike school officials.
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
In my jurisdiction prison sentences and imprisonment for public protection are different things, and only the latter is to protect innocent people. It is also pretty rare. Most prison sentences are, because society 'thinks' the aspiring prisoner deserves it, not because the public needs to be protected. Also penalties also fulfill the desire of the society for vengeance.
I think, being locked in isolation or with very dangerous individuals can leave deeper scars than a short period of violence. It's also not, like people in general never have any injuries, so it's not the pain itself that is an uncommon experience, but more the knowledge of it being linked to your actions. People don't have traumas just because they walked through nettles, feel from their bicycle or broke their legs.
> And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
That's nice, but I think he still has an amount of accepted violence by the state, because the policy of 'I don't give a fuck, let the strongest do what he likes' doesn't actually lead to less violence.
I just want to point out, how it is not necessarily a black or white thing, I'm not arguing for child abuse.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
No, I don't think it is different. Both are applications of state violence for enforcing laws. I think it would be reasonable to use (public) caning as a judicial punishment in the US for certain kinds of crimes, for the same reason I think it is reasonable to use incarceration as a judicial punishment in the US for other types of crimes.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear.
In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.
People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.
In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.
> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments
Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.
Singapore also has
1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.
2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.
3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.
I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...
Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.
Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.
A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.
> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent
> not think of consequences
> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead
Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.
Yet somehow, people aren’t that deterred if they keep executing people at a 20x rate than the U.S.?
I’m confused about that because the executed obviously are not deterred anymore, but the the not-yet executed people still are getting caught at the higher rate than in the U.S.?
Maybe the prison population is much smaller, because people are either law abiding or dead?
This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.
I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.
Rest personal opinion.
I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.
Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.
Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.
To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.
In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths.
Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.
Most if not all the terrorist-related deaths are attributed to The Troubles that ended in - you guessed that - 1998. It is not possible to attribute the deaths or lack thereof to corporal punishment.
The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.
Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.
But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.
Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.
The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?
Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.
> Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net
The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.
What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
Applying physical force to counter in the moment someone that tries to rob you is not vigilante justice. That would be more like if you had your phone robbed, and a few days later you went with your buddies to beat him up and get your phone back.
The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.
> So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Yes; under those conditions vigilante justice is a reasonable way to 1) protect society from criminals, and 2) encourage the state to correct its failures of policing.
It'd be silly to blame the police, this kind of crime can only be addressed at a much higher level.
I'm not even too inclined to blame government, as I consider this minor loss of security a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in return for their economically beneficial pro-immigration policies.
This is just what living in a big city is like, unless you're in a police state.
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
another take: some people are emotionally “dumb” and have a really hard time feeling empathy for others. This is just another way to force the bully to be in someone else’s shoes…literally.
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
I do agree we shouldn't limit it to children! But I don't think the boss/employee relationship should involve violence though because firing someone is simple and effective. But if someone is doing something bad for their community that has no obvious other consequences? Then yeah, it absolutely should be an option.
These rules should be implemented locally at a town or city level. No need to enforce the same set of rules across all society.
And it's interesting you bring up that bullying is a second order affect. If one of the parents is abusive, that should be something that has physical consequences. Solve the problem at the source, stop wringing our hands and getting lawyers / police involved for everything. That's not scalable and as a result there are a bunch of unsolvable problems in our society today.
I don't understand your view here. You want people to take care of problems/injusitice by violence but you also want this violence to be limited to "someone doing something bad for their community"? How can that be enforced at all. Like if you are doing something good for your community, the other community feels slighted and gets a free pass to... beat you?
Like I dont understand what you're saying at all because it seems like you want the social contract but also give anyone the agency to conduct violence and both cannot exists at the same time. We live in communities and created the police and law precisely because personal grudges and fights cannot scale and work to be a functional society. God i hope you are trolling
There ought to be an understanding that the school has leeway to use a ruler on misbehaving children without the police being involved. That's what I meant when I said stop getting police involved in everything. I'm not talking about vigilante justice.
An example that requires police to be involved: Small Town A has a law stating that anyone dealing drugs must be caned for the first offense. Someone deals drugs in Small Town, so police catch them and cane them.
Yes, because it is a well-known fact that police never use their power to bully others. It's also an established fact that nobody is ever wrongly accused of crimes by the police.
I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it.
And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
I'm pretty sure the proportion of corrupt people in any country will be pretty similar if the right structures are put to place. I think people give in to corruption when the system favors regardless of the country or continents and as a matter of fact a lot of people in government and places of power in my country were foreign schooled or bred.
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.
Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.
As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
Expel the kid
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
If it’s effective, yes.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
> expel them and they become another person's problem
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
Two problems:
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?
I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.
That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.
Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.
> child has to be in education until they turn 18.
> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal
These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better?
We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.
The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teaches are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually you pay with interest, and it’s not just that one person.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
That can be just fine to me.
I still live in my hometown, and while I was never bullied, a bully a year or so above me killed himself in his late 20s.
lol lmao was my reaction xD
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
> outsourcing
It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.
You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).
Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.
I think you misunderstand the premise - in fact I struggle to understand how you interpreted the GP that way. No one is arguing that parents should provide 100% of life and academic lessons or that kids should be locked up at home, but that they, rather than schools, should have the leading role.
I took my kids out of school when they were eight or nine and up to 16 (the end of compulsory school age in the UK) my experience was that they met a wider range of people, and had a lot more freedom. Instead of being locked up at school they were free to do more on their own or with friends and to go to a wide range of classes and activities. They have done well academically (conditional offer from Oxford for one, the other starting a PhD later this year) and I was complimented regularly on their social skills when they were children, and this seems to be continuing as adults (and my older daughter now has work responsibilities that require soft skills - I would assume she would not have them if her managers had not observed her as having the skills).
The problem is not the involvement of other people, it is the outsourcing of responsibility and decision making and the main part of parenting. Parents are frequently little involved.
I think the village would be a healthy model for sure. But that is something that was pretty much killed in the modern society as well as most people, especially lower/mid-income workers in larger cities, are spending exceedingly little time of their day in their local neighborhoods.
Community service perhaps?
Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.
Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.
It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.
Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.
Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.
Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?
My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.
So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.
We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.
We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.
Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.
Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.
It was de rigueur for us, but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner. And no, it didn’t work, we’d just plot collective revenge on him, and collectively figure out how to escape the punishment.
> most schools don't do that
It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.
I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.
Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:
https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...
This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.
The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.
Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.
Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.
Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.
Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.
The school, and every other student.
I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
That moves the problem elsewhere, it doesn't solve it.
It returns the problem to the source: the child's parents or guardian.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools
In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.
This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.
I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.
If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.
Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Seems like a slippery slope fallacy? Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit? What an odd argument.
Seems like a decent approach to me tbh.
> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"
Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.
> There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.
Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.
> Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.
> "[...] nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs."
This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.
I don't agree with the notion of caning children, but... Why only males are eligible to be caned? That doesn't sound fair within the framework, girls can be bullies too.
I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.
I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.
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.
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.
Violence is not binary. A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven! Caning people for mistakes humiliates them, and creates in them, the desire for vengeance. Violence at that level, breeds violence. They will hit their children, who will hit their children in turn, and on and on it goes. This is also proven!
I say, remove the naughty children and put them in work/vocational training. Life will punish them enough, later on, if they do not change their ways.
Another way is to punish the parents of naughty children. They are, ultimately, responsible, and if they raised bullies, they should be punished.
Beat up their dad
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.
In
> 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.
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.
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/
> - 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?
> 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.
I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.
I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).
Bonobos are just as close and they're matriarchal. They're a very different species.
Yes, and that’s a good point too. Pretty big difference between the sexes with them as well.
>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
The big idea lately is to ignore all of that and just give everyone equal rights but unequal responsibilities.
> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
Which country is that?
It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.
This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.
This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
> This comment explains absolutely nothing
Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.
This is the way! It is sad that wokeism and socialism have created this post-truth world, where math and gender are what you want it to be. Utterly absurd, but this philosophy collapses when it crashes into reality who doesn't care about wokeism.
When you impose gender ideology, gender roles on them from age 0, yeah you will get vastly different outcomes for boys and girls.
Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.
Yes, but you also get vastly different outcomes when you don't impose these as well.
You may want to do some research on this thing called „hormones“ and how they differ in both genders.
Hormones don’t raise kids in particular gender norms, don’t carve them a place in society, don’t feed them gender-based culture 24/7. They do have a physical impact, impact on sexual development, their sex, reproductive function, temperament, but gender is a human invention.
All those differences do impact roles in society. They let women breastfeed. They give men greater physical strength. Other biological differences make women become pregnant. These will affect roles in society.
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
> gender is a human invention.
That is a tautology. It is by definition.
Singapore already uses caning in schools, so it sounds this just extends it to be used in cases of bullying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore?useskin=ve...
My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.
If they believe it's OK to cane the kids, why limit it to boys? Girls can also be extremely nasty to each other
Because it may be effective for boys but not girls.
Men have to deal with some form of violence in their lives, or at least the threat of it. Most male encounters has an undercurrent of violence. Offend another male and you might get assaulted.
So when you expose men to violence it's a matter of the world. Like Tyson said, social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.
If you expose women to violence they will acclimate to it and begin to see it as the norm. That means they'll accept it, from their teachers and eventually their partners.
Its entirely rational to only apply this to boys only.
What? Your argument is men should be used to violence, so it is ok to hit boys, but women should not be used to violence, so we shouldn't hit girls?
We hit boys, so it is ok to hit boys, but we don't hit girls, so it isn't ok to hit girls?
That's so very, very wrong.
You’re asking why an authoritarian hellhole that routinely murders people who had drugs stuffed into their suitcases by criminals engages in gender discrimination?
This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...
That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?
That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.
Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.
Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.
It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.
Posted more context here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059470
I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.
I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.
I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.
For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.
One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".
I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.
Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.
I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.
An actual cane works more like a whip and can break skin and leave permanent scars.
They are not going to perform a prison style caning ffs...it's going to be a light but firm tap on the knuckles.
These things only hurt emotionally when done wrongfully.
You’ll be happy to meet him to do what? Hit him with a ruler multiple times?
On this same topic, Texas leads the US in paddling!
> Spanking has greatly decreased in elementary schools but increased at high schools, especially in non-urban districts.
> Between 2010 and 2025, over 180 high schools reintroduced paddling —- often justified as an alternative to out-of-school or in-school suspension.
https://www.corpun.com/rtsd.htm
This is absolutely not going to teach a bully to be different; if anything, it may make them more cruel - and careful to avoid getting caught.
Valiant effort, but it won't change anything.
What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
I know bullies that claim that they get bullied by the person they bully. The bully stopped in the end, but the wrong person got pushed.
Not the right approach as classifying someone as a bully is left to someone's subjective perception. This makes caning legal in the hope it would reform those boys and leaves room for misuse. Once bullying is proven in front of PTA group then other formal methods should be used, starting with counselling-> monitoring for improvement -> separating them from their peers and moving them up seniors, that might turn the tables -> community service with final recourse being termination from school and in worst case / rarest or rare scenarios the country would already have a juvenille justice system to reform.
That'll sure teach them not to abuse their power over their fellow humans with less physical strength.
I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:
> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.
> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.
For comparison, criminals get:
> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."
> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".
> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".
> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.
> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.
I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
Yeah this seems like the kind of punishment that was also common in the west in 1800-1900.
I remember my parents still talking of getting hit with a ruler in the 50s tho the practice was technically forbidden since 1860 or so.
I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.
And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal
If they like it so much, they should apply it to all kids, not just boys.
They like it as a punishment for boys exclusively.
I guess hitting girls with sticks makes them uneasy, huh. Maybe they should apply the same empathy to all children.
Seems like they just get what they did. To be honest, I think it should be less milder.
We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.
>We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.
This is false. The evidence is not overwhelming; it's actually extremely poor quality. And the research question is one of the most difficult to resolve in social science. I wrote on this here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma.... See also this guy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=2HtqmZ0AAA...
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
You might not have noticed what you've done here, but you've not only agreed to corporal punishment for children but also for harsher corporal punishment for criminals across the board. Read the whole conversation chain and reflect on how bad the optics are. There is a reason why your stance is unpopular.
"Spanking looks like an 8/10 on the subjective harmful scale, but actually on the objective harmful scale its closer to a 3/10. We must rectify the bad reputation of spanking!" is not the type of motivation that should drive pedagogy research.
If you're saying we should pretend that spanking is worse than (we currently know) it is, then I don't agree.
I haven't said anything about corporal punishment for criminals, and I don't know of any evidence for or against it - that strikes me as a very different argument, partly because the level of violence is likely to be much greater.
Yeah my bad. I was the getting bullied side of students, but the current punishments are something that should be ended.
I (think) many bullies have bad home lives. I wish parents would be held accountable instead of taking it out on the kids that are struggling to process their emotions / hormones in a healthy manner.
And parents are acting out for myriad of reasons. There's a never-ending chain if you go that way. At the end of the day, bully victims end up holding the short end of the stick. And they frequently become bullies themselves. Maybe stopping bullying at the visible link is not the most right solution... But is there anything better that does not lead to eternal finger pointing?
Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
Owning 500g is enough to get someone hanged. A proof of trafficking or selling is not necessary.
It is exactly as I said. Please don't spread misinformation.
Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
You can also to to jail for selling chewing gum. And you are legally required to flush a public toilet after using it.
Neither one is really enforced
They also seem to be one of the few countries that won the war on drugs, no?
This is naïve. This will just lead to the victims of bullying getting caned after the bullies set them up.
A bad person sees such a punishment as an opportunity to intimidate others.
I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.
I was only punished like this once as a child. It was because I beat another kid and took his crayons. It worked like a charm. So YMMV.
I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.
My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.
I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.
> My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now
You can't have this. Have a one-to-one conversation with your kid and tell them you can't have this. If they continue... well, I'm not saying "whoop their ass", but you can't have this.
Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.
Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.
I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.
Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.
Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.
Solution against bullies: a bigger bully.
Works really well, and doing nothing is exactly why western societies are fucked up.
New generations do whatever they want and do not face any consequences.
Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.
That’s generally the solution for bullies. I wonder whether that is also the solution for victims, making them strong enough.
There's no denying a broken nose and some lost teeth will make many bullies twice about trying again.
Problem is it's often illegal or against the rules to do it since deliberately beating the crap out of a bully isn't self defence in the traditional sense. And in the cases where it doesn't work, the situation may escalate or the victim might end up being punished harder than the bully.
>Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?
Are you a time traveller from 1900?
https://libreo.ch/revues/sjsca/20232/sjsca-29-2023/sans-foi-...
Note that it was a time of widespread caning and death penalty...
Not sure if I agree or disagree with you but that’s a really interesting article actually, so thanks for sharing!
> Have you seen how much of a shithole France became
No, how far away should I be to see that?
Why are western countries fucked up?
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?
At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.
I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.
We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.
> The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up
The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.
Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.
So, a regulating force must necessarily be of the same nature ?
This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?
I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).
In a friends school in Denmark the teacher could decide that your family had to host a party for all the kids at the family home, so they could get to know each other better, and that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
Good when all parents are able to host such party. I would say that in Poland, most of parents with a misbehaving kid are barely able to throw a party for their kid and several of his/her friends. Many times people complain about the cost of school supplies for their kids already.
I think the cost of doing this as well as the time you need to invest are what puts pressure on you.
I’ll have to ask what would happen if you do not comply.
The Danish are nice people, but they really do not like if you break the social rules, so I guess it would get intense verry fast.
> The Danish are nice people
Just like I thought. I'm sure your solution would work when majority are nice people. That won't work on people who are from "lower social circles". We still have a lot of them in Poland and don't know how to make them behave better, because trying to make them behave better typically results in defensiveness about their way of life and a lot of excuses about their circumstances. They only dig their heels and start being more aggressive.
My experience with humanity is:
Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
That general observation, for me at least, describes the world from rural Pakistan to backwater Tschechia.
The only exception were groups that had a very strong in-group out-group separation. These people always treated me with too much suspicion to express passing kindness.
> Most humans are nice people. Many are also overwhelmed, self absorbed and make excuses.
I agree, but bullies actually come mostly from that last group. Putting pressure on overwhelmed, self-absorbed or excuse-prone people in order to educate their children better won't work. I think bullying is because of lack of proper emotional education of children, it would be better to educate those parents and children in how to behave and why, but that requires resources most schools won't have and I've never seen anyone actually teaching this in schools.
Then it is an even bigger deterrent. And maybe it forces people to ask their neighbors for help, which can also improve the social dynamic. People bond over helping each other.
>that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.
The canning would vastly shorten the time span on which all parties stop misbehaving while the bullying continues. I was bullied as a kid and the school didn't do anything. When my father tried to reason with the bully's family he discovered they were just awful, violent people, bullies, all of them. When he came home, frustrated, he sat me and said something like "uhm, well, ok, listen, I went to talk to the boy's parents and... well... the next time he bothers you just beat the shit out of him. I'll deal with the school" and the quoted the motto of my country: "by reason or by force". Some things just works faster than diplomacy and all shit get sorted out without extending the suffering for most parties involved.
You can never fight against a bully with words.
The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Nothing else works.
> The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.
Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?
I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.
He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.
I don't remember him bullying anyone after that.
This but unironically.
I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).
Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.
"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).
Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.
Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.
No, it’s not a nice one and it can and in fact does ruin whole societies and generations of people. Here one case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
I never said its nice or justifyable. I wish there was a grown up to talk with here. I know the russian bully culture.
Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.
I understand that caning leaves lifetime scars, at least the type I heard about. It's not something you can put weight on for a while.
This is not that kind of caning, it's basically a harder form of slapping kids, not the one they give criminals that breaks the skin.
It depends. For some, yes. For most, no.
Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.
A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".
For minors, caning is with half-inch cane, which is the only one available in supermarkets. Only judicial caning is with the inch cane.
It's a matter of degree.
Life time physical or emotional scarring would, to pull out an example, be US slavery degree.
I grew up when corporeal punishment was a thing in schools. No physical or emotional scars.
Wish this is extended to white collar crimes.
Cane the parents first.
Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.
Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.
Just stupd
When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).
These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.
The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.
So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?
(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)
lol, standard practice in schools where I grew up, though not with a wooden rod but the wooden back of the blackboard duster.
I don't think this is something to laugh at. Whether or not you think it's necessary or a proper method of punishment, it isn't funny.
this does seem like an "I learned it from watching you" moment.
the problem is what if the victim fights back, then they might be misconstrued as the bully and get caned.
As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.
Caning proven to work.
For what, administered by who?
I wonder how severe a caning in an educational institute compares to one administered by state justice.
Adult caning is done by trained professionals. https://transformativejusticecollective.org/2023/10/20/getti...
School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.
Trained Professionals -> Goons exercising the states monopoly on force. Ftfy.
You'll notice that my carefully chosen link does not look favorably upon this practice, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't paid to do a job that they've been trained to do with some consistency, unlike school officials.
Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.
beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."
so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.
the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...
Never Violence! - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Violence!
> beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?
It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.
Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.
[0] - https://time.com/archive/6732416/in-defense-of-asian-values-...
Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?
The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.
Singapore signed the UN CRC Convention on the rights of the Child
So Singapore committed to protect children from violence
https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rig...
And it seems Singapore (like some other countries) struggles to figure what that actually means, come to think about it.
the point. of course. is to teach. that nothing is good or bad. consequences.
The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.
My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.
I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.
Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.
Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
In my jurisdiction prison sentences and imprisonment for public protection are different things, and only the latter is to protect innocent people. It is also pretty rare. Most prison sentences are, because society 'thinks' the aspiring prisoner deserves it, not because the public needs to be protected. Also penalties also fulfill the desire of the society for vengeance.
I think, being locked in isolation or with very dangerous individuals can leave deeper scars than a short period of violence. It's also not, like people in general never have any injuries, so it's not the pain itself that is an uncommon experience, but more the knowledge of it being linked to your actions. People don't have traumas just because they walked through nettles, feel from their bicycle or broke their legs.
> And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.
That's nice, but I think he still has an amount of accepted violence by the state, because the policy of 'I don't give a fuck, let the strongest do what he likes' doesn't actually lead to less violence.
I just want to point out, how it is not necessarily a black or white thing, I'm not arguing for child abuse.
> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.
No, I don't think it is different. Both are applications of state violence for enforcing laws. I think it would be reasonable to use (public) caning as a judicial punishment in the US for certain kinds of crimes, for the same reason I think it is reasonable to use incarceration as a judicial punishment in the US for other types of crimes.
Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.
I'm sure there are a few such comments, since you say so, but I read most of the thread and didn't see any.
After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear. In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.
I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.
My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.
I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.
I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.
I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.
The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.
Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.
Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.
Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?
It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).
I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.
Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.
TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments.
I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.
People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.
In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.
> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments
Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.
Singapore also has 1. ~70% of residents living in public housing.
2. Onerous taxes on automobiles, leading to extremely high public transit usage.
3. Is a city with a controlled national boarde.
I would be very curious to see what would happen if you applied those three factors to any other major city in the world. But for some reason people nearly always only talk about the executions and spankings...
Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.
Got a link to a study or meta-study? I tried searching, but the results I can find from Singapore match Western research.
A notable divergence here is that Singapore leverages the death penalty _much, much_ more heavily than even the US does. Per capita death penalties were 20.3x higher in Singapore than the US. Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead. That's certainly a strategy, but it's going to make deterrent effects look a lot better because a lot more of the recidivist population is going to end up dead and no longer contributing to crime stats. I.e. it may not be that deterrence works differently there, but that they're more willing to just execute people who aren't deterred.
Putting your different points together:
> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent
> not think of consequences
> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead
Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.
Yet somehow, people aren’t that deterred if they keep executing people at a 20x rate than the U.S.?
I’m confused about that because the executed obviously are not deterred anymore, but the the not-yet executed people still are getting caught at the higher rate than in the U.S.?
Maybe the prison population is much smaller, because people are either law abiding or dead?
This 20+ years ago, I think look up "guan" / 管 (to govern) parenting style studies. For quick search, maybe research by Shek on HK school kids, only because name sounds familiar, I don't have access to psych journals anymore.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18047239/
I think look for east asian studies on behavior control / psychologic control and academic outcomes. Usually it was framed in kids raised by "invested" parents with (or without) CP will do better academically than kids who are neglected, i.e. hands off parents. Caveat those research shows CP can still lead to emotional regulation problems, but also higher academic achievement, which IMO what literature / or western rational misses, it's very east asian lens though, you raise kids do well in school, they will get decent opportunities in competitive east Asian environment -> integrate better with society -> have less chance of antisocial behavior.
Rest personal opinion.
I think studies even then say CP also reinforces entire generational violence cycle etc, shit west find horrid, but in east asia it just means strict parenting with optional CP -> prevent anti social behavior... so generation CP loop not virtuous or anything but functional. Like from memory the studies were not pro CP, or CP doesn't have negative effects, just CP effective corrective tool for some, which when applied to east asia society/social layer = if your kid going to have no future without CP, might as well as apply it, because beating a kid to pass national exams opens more opportunities for good life than not. Kids there have that context for "tough love". Asia diaspora with academic focus brings this with them to west. Same from other diaspora (i.e. first gen immigrants from poor countries) that beats kids for not trying hard enough to "make it" because they're socially disadvantaged vs locals/natives. Then subsequent generations adopt western soft parenting, grades / work ethic reverts to mean, which IS (generally) fine in advanced economy context since you can be pretty stupid in west and still do alright. Hence in west-minded find CP archaic, until west starts realizing soft parenting is generating soft populous that is geopolitically not competitive (current anxieties)... which was previously covered up via immigration... from diasporas that are not soft.
Singapore executes like 20 people a year, there are way more than 20 bad apples there. Either way, I think punitive state violence and corporal punishment as parenting instrument different topics. Should state beat people for deterrence, I don't know. Does it have affect on social order? I think statistically likely, maybe not worthwhile. And for some cultures mass catharsis from punitive justice is not... unuseful. Does it prevent individual recidivism? Broadly I don't think so, desperate people do desperate things. Should parents have CP as tool? Yes, shouldn't be universal but also not prohibited - some kids might need a slap or two early in life to shape behavior that correlate with social / upward mobility "success". Which matters in some society much more than others.
Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.
To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.
Corporal punishment was banned in the UK in 1998.
In the 28 years since, there have been 175 terrorist-related deaths. Compare that with the 28 years before, when there were 3,262 terrorist-related deaths.
Most if not all the terrorist-related deaths are attributed to The Troubles that ended in - you guessed that - 1998. It is not possible to attribute the deaths or lack thereof to corporal punishment.
Well, yes, obviously.
But it's even less possible to claim that the lack of severe punishment has increased terrorism, as cedws was saying.
Even when you exclude NI, terrorism is lower now than in the past yet punishments have not become notably more severe.
The point of my reply was not that caning equals less terrorism. It was that lenience kills. Your cherry picked numbers also don't really demonstrate anything, much of that 3,262 figure was due to the Troubles.
Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.
But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.
How many terrorists had to be killed upfront in their country to reach that result ?
None.
Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.
The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.
My sister had an interesting take on this:
"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."
I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.
There are many western states with welfare state. Do you think otherwise?
Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?
Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.
> Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net
The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.
> the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's
Oh, come on, stop whining. Skrewdriver is still on Spotify.
You're such a snowflake, posing as the victim of government oppression.
> who were pro beating children
Correction: pro beating abusers.
What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.
A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.
What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?
If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.
I genuinely did that kid a favour.
In Germany you can force somebody to stay until police arrives but unnecessary violence is forbidden
And what’d be the point? The police will not be interested in the would-be phone thief, calling them would be of negative value to society.
So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Looks to me like you should be pissed off at the police in your locale for forcing you to fend for yourself against criminals.
Applying physical force to counter in the moment someone that tries to rob you is not vigilante justice. That would be more like if you had your phone robbed, and a few days later you went with your buddies to beat him up and get your phone back.
The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.
> So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice?
Yes; under those conditions vigilante justice is a reasonable way to 1) protect society from criminals, and 2) encourage the state to correct its failures of policing.
It'd be silly to blame the police, this kind of crime can only be addressed at a much higher level.
I'm not even too inclined to blame government, as I consider this minor loss of security a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in return for their economically beneficial pro-immigration policies.
This is just what living in a big city is like, unless you're in a police state.
Why do you think?
Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).
>beating children
>I find this abuse horrific
>barbaric behavior.
Absolutely! We're all against bullying here.
Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.
They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.
Well, these animals are just big animals: human.
It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.
This is precisely the reason for bullying.
Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.
Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?
Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.
another take: some people are emotionally “dumb” and have a really hard time feeling empathy for others. This is just another way to force the bully to be in someone else’s shoes…literally.
Most bullies are responding to a poor home life where they are bullied and beaten.
>I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.
This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."
(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)
Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.
Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?
There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.
I do agree we shouldn't limit it to children! But I don't think the boss/employee relationship should involve violence though because firing someone is simple and effective. But if someone is doing something bad for their community that has no obvious other consequences? Then yeah, it absolutely should be an option.
These rules should be implemented locally at a town or city level. No need to enforce the same set of rules across all society.
And it's interesting you bring up that bullying is a second order affect. If one of the parents is abusive, that should be something that has physical consequences. Solve the problem at the source, stop wringing our hands and getting lawyers / police involved for everything. That's not scalable and as a result there are a bunch of unsolvable problems in our society today.
I don't understand your view here. You want people to take care of problems/injusitice by violence but you also want this violence to be limited to "someone doing something bad for their community"? How can that be enforced at all. Like if you are doing something good for your community, the other community feels slighted and gets a free pass to... beat you?
Like I dont understand what you're saying at all because it seems like you want the social contract but also give anyone the agency to conduct violence and both cannot exists at the same time. We live in communities and created the police and law precisely because personal grudges and fights cannot scale and work to be a functional society. God i hope you are trolling
There ought to be an understanding that the school has leeway to use a ruler on misbehaving children without the police being involved. That's what I meant when I said stop getting police involved in everything. I'm not talking about vigilante justice.
An example that requires police to be involved: Small Town A has a law stating that anyone dealing drugs must be caned for the first offense. Someone deals drugs in Small Town, so police catch them and cane them.
Yes, because it is a well-known fact that police never use their power to bully others. It's also an established fact that nobody is ever wrongly accused of crimes by the police.
I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.
I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.
In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.
Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches
Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it. And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.
P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.
>And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.
And then, when they become adults...
Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?
I'm pretty sure the proportion of corrupt people in any country will be pretty similar if the right structures are put to place. I think people give in to corruption when the system favors regardless of the country or continents and as a matter of fact a lot of people in government and places of power in my country were foreign schooled or bred.
I wonder how many would get accustomed to the pain, or may even develop a liking for it. BDSM is a thing, after all...
Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.
That's pretty dumb
Violence creates more violence. Singapore has a lot of these sick backwater policies in place.
If that were true Singapore would be a particularly violent place, it's not. Source: I lived there.
Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.
> Violence creates more violence
Citation needed (specifically in the case of discipline)
The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.
This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.
It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.
That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.
I don't fully disagree, but the bullying will not stop if they see that they can beat you up easily. It might even get worse.