//complete and utterly worthless, mindless and ill-timed hijack, but I need to know//
Sarahfeena, I’ve always wondered, and if I may ask now, where does your screen name come from?
This (bolded) is precisely where the zero tolerance policy breaks down. The policy then becomes be a good little victim until the bully makes a mistake and gets caught. The bully knows this too. I had this issue come up a couple of years ago with one of my sons. Repeated assaults on my son, repeated visits and phone calls to the school. It didn’t end until my son knocked the snot out of the other kid.
Of course you may ask! It’s nothing too exciting. My name is Sarah, and my husband, being of Hispanic background, calls me Sarafina sometimes. I anglicized the spelling to go with the real spelling of my name, and to make it easier to get as a screen name (Sarafina is often already taken).
Turnabout it fair play…how about your screen name? 
First of all, the zero tolerance policy =/= same punishment for everyone. This is a simplistic and incorrect interpretation people are chosing to make to bolster their argument. In the example I gave, both kids were hitting, so both were suspended. The boy with the knife got a MUCH harsher punishment than the boy without one. I also think if a kid is clearly defending himself and there were witnesses, he would get a different penalty than a known or observed bully.
However, if you think the answer to violence is more violence, then I still think you should have consequences. The stubborn insistence that hitting is the only answer betrays a lack of imagination, not to mention moral development. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. If you cannot handle the situation any other way, then violence it is. I highly doubt this is usually the case when kids hit each other. I also don’t think this is the message schools want to give kids.
Those of you advocating hitting as a way of “ending” violence I’m sure would be quite on the other side of things if it were your little angel who was alleged to be the bully when he got punched in the face. Yeah, your kid is always right, the other kid is a monster. I bet the other kid’s parents think the exact same thing. What the fuck should the school do, have video cameras everywhere so that we can ascertain which kid is telling the truth? If people hit, they get punished. That feels right to me at least.
And I think you have issues and you’re a little creepy to make a statment like that. Yea, I guess the US is the only place where little kids hit each other. Read her post.
I hope you also prepared her for winning the lottery. You want your daughter to go around getting in fights to protect from something that has an infinitesssimally small chance of occurring? Or was your ex trying to get custody?
There really is no other policy the schools can have. They can’t allow fidtfighting. I taught my kids that they would probably have to get in a fight in school at some point, and that they would get disciplined for it. The school does not have the same role as the parents. The school is the government, or the church, and has its own interests.
OOPS ETA: My ex-wife fought all the time in grade school, and usually won. She was in two abusive relationships later on, bfore she met me.
So what’s the standard advice given to women in rape-prevention and self-defense seminars, then?
Sure, because he had a weapon, which is also treated more seriously under ZT policies. If the defending kid had grabbed a baseball bat, then my guess would be that the punishments would have been the same. Do you have any evidence that ZT policies are usually applied with more nuance than the wording of the rule suggests, or do you just have a bald assertion?
I don’t think putting gender into the equation is constructive. Girls can bully just as well as boys (often with more nuance), and the victims can be of either gender. Public schools are sufficiently hostile to boys as it is, without us inaccurately painting bullying as a gender issue.
Quiddity, unsurprisingly, can’t resist injecting national politics into a thread about little kids.
For those who advocate a nonviolent stance, how many of you were bullied or have a child who was bullied? High-minded idealism is easy to espouse when you don’t have to deal with the realities of the matter.
Why should someone defending themselves be punished?
I consider this to be stunningly naive, the statement of someone who has never been in a situation where the bullies won’t stop if you ignore them and the authority figures don’t care - or actively support the bullies.
Sometimes that doesn’t work out so well, and the kid who was reacting to the bullying gets the harsher punishment. In a good number of cases, the bullying party is not punished in a manner that would actually curb the bullying behavior. There’s just a lot of factors that go into these punishment decisions, and sometimes one of them is a teacher who favors the bullies and punishes the bullied. Zero tolerance doesn’t tend to fix things too well in those situations because after a certain point, the favoring teacher just ignores the bullies.
My class was advised to fight as hard and as dirty as you have to if you’re defending yourself, because once you’re in the position to need to defend yourself, you’re way past the point where you’re going to escape without injury.
The instructor advised us to use anything pointy to stab soft tissue, and anything blunt to hit hard tissue. Stomping insteps, biting, shoving a ball point pen in their eye.
He opened up with ‘There’s not one mother in this room who wouldn’t savagely kill someone to save her child. By the time you leave, I want you to think the same thing about yourselves.’
That was the advice. Fight like your life depends on it.
We are mixing two issues: School bullies, where you have no jury trial system vs. violent assault where a cop, judge & jury will work on determining if you acted in self-defense. In the real world you have the right to defend yourself. At the school your obligation is not to fight unless you truly are at risk.
Even then, with a lack of evidence, self-defense will often result in suspension since there is an authority figure in the immediate vicinity that you could go to.
Zero-tolerance rules came into play not through laziness, but because of he said / she said lawsuits hitting schools. In the old days the principal could take the two kids into a room and already have a good idea who started it. The good kid was let off, and the well known bum kid was nailed to the wall. Then bum kid’s mom hired an attorney and complained that just because she is poor/minority/working/less than perfect the school was discriminating against her little shit darling. The schools decided that it was not worth their time anymore to judge (or they would be judged). Hence ZT was born.
My under-sized son had a problem with a bully. He ended up in the principal’s office and got a warning. I then requested a meeting and discussed the problems with this particular student that extended outside of the playground. The principal stonewalled. I gathered additional information from playground monitors and teachers. I went back to the principal.
“I understand your need for a zero-tolerance policy on the campus. I want you to know that at this point if my son is bullied again by this student, I will consider it a violation of his rights to an violence-free education. I am also concerned about his safety, and have no choice but to teach him more advanced self-defense than he already knows (a lie - he already knew). I expect you to solve this problem without further interaction.”
When she attempted to respond, I told her that no response was necessary.
The bullying stopped. The boy was singled out by teachers and lost his recess priveldges. Sadly, he had been bullying others but no other parent had done a damned thing about it.
If the school would not have responded, then I was headed to his parents.
Fine. Teach your kids it’s OK to hit people. Please, go on. I’m obviously too naive (even though I’ve worked with kids for 8 years now) to have this conversation with all you victim/heroes or parents of same.
You’re probably correct that those policies don’t exist just because of laziness, but they allow for laziness, or even encourage it.
The thing is, you haven’t convinced me that it isn’t OK, if done in self-defense. Is there any circumstance in which you would consider it OK? What if there is no one in authority available, and there is danger of serious harm? At what point or in what situation is it morally acceptable to try to prevent yourself from being pummeled?
True - and I should have said that ZT did not come about JUST through laziness. I am sure that some laziness was involved as well.
I miss the good-old-days when cops & schools were allowed to make a few on-the-spot judgement calls.
Unfortunately, being human, one too many used their freedom to be racists, sexists, classists, etc. We responded by taking away their ability to use common sense and judgement.
What do we get? Sentencing limits on judges, zero-tolerance policies in schools, etc.
Sorry - mini rant thread hijack.
Have any useful advice on how to stop bullies? Because many of us have had to deal with schoolyard abuse, either physical or verbal, and found the old ‘tell the teacher’ or ‘ignore it and they’ll go away’ (one of my most hated phrases) advice to be useless. I don’t think anyone here thinks violence is the right answer, just the best, or even only, answer.
What does a kid do when the teachers know s/he’s being bullied, but aren’t doing anything about it? Soak it up?
They are called parents. You go to them to deal with the school when the school will not listen. Parents then need to be firm, controlled, and persistent.
I personally think it comes from, once again, school being nothing like the real world (or an adult), no matter how much the people in change want to believe it’s so. In the real world, if someone is harrasing you, you can get restraining orders and the like. In the real world, if someone jumps you, you have the right to defend yourself (to a degree of reasonable force, of course, though that can be very wide indeed.) There is HR to go to if it’s happening at work. The courts are there if needed. None of this exists in a school environment.