# Bullying. \[should parents be held accountable?\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 7, 2019, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712 "2019-03-07T17:58:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Beckdawrek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beckdawrek/32/3647_2.png) [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/41 "2019-03-08T03:22:38Z")
I was at a summer camp when I was Jr. high aged. An activity we did for the whole 2 weeks was a separation of classes. I guess it was to teach us how awful class bias is. Some kids were designated in a high group. There were 2 other groups in descending order. The choices were completely arbitrary. They drew numbers and your number put you in a group and you wore a colored armband.You couldn’t change groups, or so they said. It broke down into chaos when kids were buying and stealing armbands. Faking armbands. Refusing to wear their bands. It was bad. The camp counselors put a stop to the experiment. It didnt stop. The kids who were designated in the highest group ruled the campground. They bullied kids and one girl was slapped around a bit. I never felt safe the whole time I was there. Nope. Kids can’t be held to an adult standard and decide the fate of any peer. That won’t work at all. Hell, some adults can’t be held to that standard. Clearer heads must prevail. The hope is the school admin. and parents will do the right thing. Man, I’m glad my kids are adults. Social media is doing a number on kids today. ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 5:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/42 "2019-03-08T05:10:59Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Uh, _ **what** _?? > > 1. Students of that age often aren’t mature enough to render juror decisions. > > 2. Do you know how kids that age often make decisions? They may rule against So-and-So just because “she is a fatty,” or some guy “acts gay,” etc. I don’t know about middle school students, but I can tell you that the high school where I taught implemented just such a program, and the students were fair and made excellent decisions. They were consistently harder on other students, even those in their same peer group. than administrators, who were generally much more likely to go easy on kids lest their parents get angry at administrators. There was a mechanism for appealing the teen court’s decisions to administrators, but as I understand it, it wasn’t used. Nor were there complaints that the teen court was biased or unfair. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/43 "2019-03-08T05:19:45Z")
> [@Beckdawrek](#): > > I was at a summer camp when I was Jr. high aged. An activity we did for the whole 2 weeks was a separation of classes. I guess it was to teach us how awful class bias is. Some kids were designated in a high group. There were 2 other groups in descending order. The choices were completely arbitrary. They drew numbers and your number put you in a group and you wore a colored armband.You couldn’t change groups, or so they said. It broke down into chaos when kids were buying and stealing armbands. Faking armbands. Refusing to wear their bands. It was bad. The camp counselors put a stop to the experiment. It didnt stop. The kids who were designated in the highest group ruled the campground. They bullied kids and one girl was slapped around a bit. I never felt safe the whole time I was there. > Nope. Kids can’t be held to an adult standard and decide the fate of any peer. That won’t work at all. Hell, some adults can’t be held to that standard. Clearer heads must prevail. The hope is the school admin. and parents will do the right thing. Man, I’m glad my kids are adults. Social media is doing a number on kids today. What kind of camp was this?!?!? I could see doing that for a day, but the whole two weeks? Anyone heard about, or remember this? Fifty years later, the teacher is still living. > **[Jane Elliott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott)** > > Jane Elliott (née Jennison; born on November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class\[a\] on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the local newspaper led to much broader media interest in it. > The classroom exercise was filmed in 1970, becomi... > **[Lesson of a Lifetime](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/)** > > Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage ---
**Author:** ![Beckdawrek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beckdawrek/32/3647_2.png) [@Beckdawrek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beckdawrek)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/44 "2019-03-08T05:52:36Z")
^^It was an outdoor adventure camp. Similar to girl-scout camp. We did all the camp-y type things. Swimming ,crafts, cook outs, hiking. The experiment was a big failure. Before the end of the first week it was supposedly cancelled. It had taken on a life of it’s own. Every night before being sent to our cabins we gathered in an outdoor seating area and they lectured and hammered us to stop doing it. But kids just kept doing it. It was brutal. I was in the middle group and was able to lay low. My friend was put in the lower group. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other. She called her Mom and went home early. She was the only reason I went to that camp. We had met our first year there and were pen pals. I never went back or wrote her another letter. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/45 "2019-03-08T06:23:42Z")
> [@Jamiedarke](#): > > Bullying in school and more especially online is totally vile. > > Should the parents of kids guilty of bullying have some sort of a charge laid against them by the police? Parents charged for physical bullying? In some cases I could see that being reasonable. Online? I’m not sure. ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/46 "2019-03-08T08:14:29Z")
> [@Beckdawrek](#): > > I was at a summer camp when I was Jr. high aged. An activity we did for the whole 2 weeks was a separation of classes. I guess it was to teach us how awful class bias is. Some kids were designated in a high group. There were 2 other groups in descending order. The choices were completely arbitrary. They drew numbers and your number put you in a group and you wore a colored armband.You couldn’t change groups, or so they said. It broke down into chaos when kids were buying and stealing armbands. Faking armbands. Refusing to wear their bands. It was bad. The camp counselors put a stop to the experiment. It didnt stop. The kids who were designated in the highest group ruled the campground. They bullied kids and one girl was slapped around a bit. I never felt safe the whole time I was there. > Nope. Kids can’t be held to an adult standard and decide the fate of any peer. That won’t work at all. Hell, some adults can’t be held to that standard. Clearer heads must prevail. The hope is the school admin. and parents will do the right thing. Man, I’m glad my kids are adults. Social media is doing a number on kids today. But with all due respect, isn’t that an entirely different situation? Putting teens into roles in a tightly regulated court is very different from a poorly conceived social experiment (or activity) run amok. Adults put into the same type of situation as the horrid one at that camp also get Lord-of-the-Flies ugly. The human tendency toward factionalism and violent power struggles is one reason we have the rule of law. I’m sorry you were subjected to such a stupid and dangerous program. What a nightmare! I imagine the camp got a slew of complaints. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/47 "2019-03-08T15:01:25Z")
> [@nelliebly](#): > > I don’t know about middle school students, but I can tell you that the high school where I taught implemented just such a program, and the students were fair and made excellent decisions. They were consistently harder on other students, even those in their same peer group. than administrators, who were generally much more likely to go easy on kids lest their parents get angry at administrators. There was a mechanism for appealing the teen court’s decisions to administrators, but as I understand it, it wasn’t used. Nor were there complaints that the teen court was biased or unfair. I don’t know… I’m not sure at all that anything like that would have been fair at my high school if it had been populated at random from the student body. First, they may not have taken it seriously- a lot of the time, bullying/hazing was just seen as par for the course and not a big deal, or in many cases, just funny. And even in an all boys high school of roughly the same socioeconomic class, you had enough divisions that a court like this would probably have been used to settle scores. This was the late 1980s/early 1990s, so we’ve learned since then, but I’m not convinced that high schoolers have really changed _that_ much overall. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/48 "2019-03-08T16:40:23Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I don’t know… I’m not sure at all that anything like that would have been fair at my high school if it had been populated at random from the student body. The system _could_ work if the faculty carefully vetted and choice the students allowed to participate on the panels. In HS, you could probably find a subset of students who could be relied on to be fair and serious about the courts. But that’s certainly not an unbiased jury of your peers, and it would require the faculty to essentially steer the entire process. ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/49 "2019-03-08T16:55:14Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I don’t know… I’m not sure at all that anything like that would have been fair at my high school if it had been populated at random from the student body. > > First, they may not have taken it seriously- a lot of the time, bullying/hazing was just seen as par for the course and not a big deal, or in many cases, just funny. And even in an all boys high school of roughly the same socioeconomic class, you had enough divisions that a court like this would probably have been used to settle scores. > > This was the late 1980s/early 1990s, so we’ve learned since then, but I’m not convinced that high schoolers have really changed _that_ much overall. I think people are envisioning unsupervised, power-hungry, vengeful young jerks who cry, “Off with her head!” if the poor defendant committed a fashion crime or hadn’t paid due homage to the popular kids. Perhaps I should give more details. The students were not chosen at random. There was a thorough application process overseen by a faculty advisor who took the job very seriously and was ever-present. Also, students who committed infractions had the choice of an administrator or the student court. I’m not trying to paint all teens as saints. I taught them for over 25 years, and like other teachers here on the SDMB, I saw snarking and bullying and had more than a few students with rap sheets. I also had students who were victims fo terrible bullying, especially LBGTQ students. But I’ve also seen how expectations and the culture of groups and activities affect attitudes and behavior. That’s as true of teens as it is of adults. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/50 "2019-03-08T17:25:01Z")
> [@Beckdawrek](#): > > YMMV, but in the lil’wrekkers highschool.it was taken very seriously. They very much monitored computer use at school. When they allowed for cell phones to be in school on students, there were many rules that had to be followed. One was, if you were suspected or found out to be bullying through your phone on school property or during school hours your phone could be confiscated and searched. Appropriate punishment was then dished out. **They were Nazis about it.** (bolding mine) I believe that’s called _cosplay_. Pics? ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/51 "2019-03-08T17:30:38Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > But that’s certainly not an unbiased jury of your peers, and it would require the faculty to essentially steer the entire process. That’s the problem- it wouldn’t be viewed as terribly legitimate by the student body either, because it would invariably be populated with a set of goody-two-shoes types and/or ambitious students who feel like being on the “Discipline Board” looks good on a resume. You would at least get away from popular stupidity, but you’d probably end up with something a bit more harsh than an actual interested jury of peers would come up with, if only because the goody-two-shoes types would probably have been bullying targets at some point and might have axes to grind. And yes, **nelliebly** I was imagining basically a randomly selected jury. And I was also extrapolating that a randomly selected jury at my high school wouldn’t necessarily be particularly impartial or compassionate. ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/52 "2019-03-08T20:18:31Z")
> [@bump](#): > > That’s the problem- it wouldn’t be viewed as terribly legitimate by the student body either, because it would invariably be populated with a set of goody-two-shoes types and/or ambitious students who feel like being on the “Discipline Board” looks good on a resume. > > You would at least get away from popular stupidity, but you’d probably end up with something a bit more harsh than an actual interested jury of peers would come up with, if only because the goody-two-shoes types would probably have been bullying targets at some point and might have axes to grind. > > And yes, **nelliebly** I was imagining basically a randomly selected jury. And I was also extrapolating that a randomly selected jury at my high school wouldn’t necessarily be particularly impartial or compassionate. Actually, it was viewed as legitimate by the student body. The consensus was that you couldn’t get away with BS-ing your way out of consequences as you sometimes could with an administrator. For that reason, some kids did choose to go the administrative route. But not all kids trust administrators to be fair (not an unreasonable assumption in some cases), and some kids just liked the idea of keeping admins out of it. There was a mixture of kids who participated. Yep, some goody two-shoes, but also a few , uh, baddy one-shoes? And yep, some undoubtedly saw it as good on a college app. That doesn’t mean they didn’t take it seriously. Also, there was what I suppose you could call a sentencing range, essentially the same one administrators used. What I saw when I attended a few sessions was good questioning (“How could you not have known the policy if this was the second time you’d been busted for this?”) and no condescension or malice. And the advisor sat quietly within the room. She only spoke up occasionally, mostly to answer questions like, “Mrs. X, when was that policy put in place? Do you know?”) I will say, though, that the court would be unlikely to work if the advisor is disinterested, had a bad relationship with students, etc. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2019, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/53 "2019-03-08T23:37:35Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > What kind of camp was this?!?!? I could see doing that for a day, but the whole two weeks? Um…maybe the camp was at [Robber’s Cave State Park](https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html)? ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2019, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712/54 "2019-03-09T03:27:00Z")
I have two young kids, if they bullied others I would want to know and be involved. I would hope the same for parents of children that bullied my children. But should I as a parent be held accountable? What? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bullying-should-parents-be-held-accountable/830712.md?page=2)