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Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

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Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#151

Post by jancsika »

NotGMan wrote: post #94
lioeters wrote: post #4

Solution against bullies: a bigger bully.

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.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#152

Post by eastbound »

thijson wrote: post #10

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.

For minors, caning is with half-inch cane, which is the only one available in supermarkets. Only judicial caning is with the inch cane.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#153

Post by samuell »

BrenBarn wrote: post #146
danpalmer wrote: post #129

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 student…

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.

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).

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#154

Post by dash2 »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #122
invalidSyntax wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#155

Post by squibonpig »

avazhi wrote: post #147

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

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#156

Post by danpalmer »

BrenBarn wrote: post #146
danpalmer wrote: post #129

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 student…

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.

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.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#158

Post by iammjm »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #127

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…

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

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#159

Post by squibonpig »

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.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#160

Post by Haven880 »

squibonpig wrote: post #159

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.
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