Sure, if the kid is a chronic problem, that’ll be taken into account. I don’t know how many times I have to say that.
When you said the other kid “put his hands on you,” did you mean he hit you? Pushed you? Poked his finger in your chest? It does matter. If you bust his nose and not a mark on you, though, what do you really expect the school to do?
No one wants anyone to take a beating. Or give one. I cannot say that enough, apparently, since I’ve said it a billion times already.
I assert, yet again, that you can defend yourself without busting someone in the button, as you put it.
Stop putting words in my mouth. I never said there was no way to know who was the aggressor. Sometimes you can know, sometimes it’s not cut and dry. What world do you live in, where everything is always so easy?
The school has a legal obligation to protect all the kids and do due diligence figuring out who did what.
Actually, if you look at the histories of “externalizing type” mentally ill kids, they have problems from very early on in the school setting – very often in the form of violence to other kids and teachers. Childhood mental illness prevalence runs around 10% in the teen years between both sexes, so even if we split externalizing and internalizing types down the middle (which isn’t really fair due to differences in what provokes seeking care, but I’ll do it out of generosity), that gives you around 5%, or on a nice small playground of about 300, that’s 15 little externalizers. And you don’t know who they are? And there are enough other kids busy smacking each other that the picture is completely blurred, more often than not?
And particularly if those little externalizers find that they are not effectively intervened with, and additionally find they can get away with shit by exercising a modicum of cunning (lying, arguing, apologizing while plotting revenge), they have a fine chance of acquainting themselves with the criminal justice system not so far down the road. So it’s all good for them.
The “internalizing types,” well, sometimes those are manmade (like in meenie7’s instance), in the educational analog to iatrogenesis.
When you post something like this, it seems as if we’re in agreement, but I suspect we are not. Do you believe a kid who punches back to protect himself from physical violence, in a situation where the administration is certain who started the exchange, should be punished to some extent? Let’s set aside the “sometimes you can’t be sure” scenarios for a moment. What’s your position regarding an unambiguous situation?
Why does that matter? Are you saying that if a kid is bullied and takes a swing at the bully but the hit is ineffective, you might let him go, but if he managed to land a good one and break the bully’s nose, then he’d be in trouble?
Let me put it to you this way: if a kid’s nose gets broken in school, do you think the school has any choice but to give consequences to the nose-breaker? Consider it logically, and from a legal standpoint. Then imagine the kid with the broken nose is your kid. What do you think should be the result?
Post #184: “If a kid thinks he’s in real danger, he should defend himself and hope that he can prove it was self-defense.”
And how do kids go about filing suit against the school for failure to meet these obligations? And until that gets sucessfully resolved, or more likely gets unsucessfully resolved, the kids are to do what? Just take the abuse?
Post #168.
The school definitely has a choice… but they’re too busy teaching the kids that it’s more important to roll over in the face of liability than stand up for what’s right because that’s hard.
Sounds to me like the more effective the self defense is, the more likely it is to result in punishment.
How is this any different from not punishing an adult who defended themselves from attack? If the mugger gets a nasty bite in his neck, do the cops give consequences to the neck-biter?
What I was taught about defending yourself is that it is acceptable to use enough force to get the person who is attacking you to stop. If that meant breaking the nose of the kid who was pummeling me, that’s what was acceptable force. What you can’t do is continue to beat the shit out of someone who no longer poses a threat. If that bully is hitting you, and you land one good one and break his nose to end things, that is not wrong.
Please show where I ever said kids should just take abuse.
I’m really quite sick of this thread. It has been me, alone, repeating the same arguments over and over, making valid points that are ignored in the various emotional/kneejerk responses. I can’t convince you that there’s any other way than violence to resolve these issues. I can’t convince you that there’s complexity in these situations. I can’t convince you that there’s more than one point of view to be considered.
Please, rest in your ignorance and believe that violence is the answer. Teach your children that as well. I hope you are home-schooling them, because I don’t know too many teachers or administrators who are going to advocate that response, or who legally or morally can do as you all claim you want them to. Continuing to argue or repeat myself is just a waste of my time. Don’t take this as an admission of having lost the argument. Take as fatigue and having better things to do than engage in repetitive and futile argument with people who know they are right and can’t see it any other way.
Self-defense is not violence. Any human being is well within his or her rights to use enough force against an attacker as is necessary to stop the attack, no matter what kind of injury this causes for the attacker. It’s not violence, and it’s not wrong.
Er, sorry for the late reply, but I’m only 24 years old. And my little brothers (13 and 15 years old) appear to have more trouble with people getting violent at them than I did, and they’re pretty popular. (Of course, they’re also boys.) It’s weird to me that people say this stuff is unacceptable now, because the impression I get from them is that nothing much has changed.
I think it’s much more important that kids be able to judge the situation they’re in rather than being taught to react in one particular way all the time. Because my dad’s policy of “just ignore them” didn’t work, I ended up ignoring him instead. Of course, he really did come from the 50s, when perhaps you didn’t hit girls or guys with glasses.
Self-defense doesn’t just mean knowing how to fight back. It means being able to judge situations, being able to deescalate confrontations. I found that ignoring bullies meant they kept escalating to the point of violence. One punch and they’d find another target. Isn’t that good self-defense?
That might not work in high school as well, granted, but guys were generally hitting on girls, not hitting them, by then.
Apparently not if it forces the school administrators to judge who was in the right and who was in the wrong. That’s why we have Zero Tolerance now: It’s cheap, it’s easy, and if it were applied to adult crimes we’d be killing more people than cattle.
Now watch Rubystreak say people who get bullied ought to get a thicker skin and not bother their teachers about it.
This is a beast of a trainwreck, and I don’t much care which side of pig-headed obstinacy wins this one, but something’s been bugging me since I first saw the title. Namely, “Let’s Teach Girls to Put Up with Violent Boys” is odd construction. Makes me think it’s some strange mnemonic device on the order of “Every Good Boy Does Fine” for EGBDF. So what concept would LTGTPUWVB stand for (or LTGPUVB, I suppose, if you leave out the “to” and “with”)?