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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

#441

Post by giraffe_lady »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #426
giraffe_lady wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret is maintaining a permanently impoverished underclass without labor rights or a path to citizenship! Much to learn here, indeed.

No, the real secret is an expansive list of capital crimes! Or maybe it’s the public flogging. It’s hard to tell.

Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.

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

#442

Post by threethirtytwo »

modo_mario wrote: post #332
selcuka wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can think of only 3 times where i or someone else confronted a bully and made it stop. In 2 of those cases the bully was stronger but such stuff can always carry risks that the bully might not like or scenarios they can't take. In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimperin…

How about the amount of times when the bully didn't stop? That's the useful metric here. When there was resistance, how effective was it?

Judging from your description you didn't lay out any examples of where fighting back failed.

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

#443

Post by maxloh »

gramie wrote: post #101
davyAdewoyin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> 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.

Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.

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

#444

Post by andsoitis »

madaxe_again wrote: post #405
andsoitis wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner What are you saying?

That the apartheid regime and its proponents were not terribly nice people. Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.

Stereotyping all Afrikaners with that brush is despicable.

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

#445

Post by everforward »

golem14 wrote: post #95
everforward wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

The incarceration rate is much lower. The US has an incarceration rate of 541 per 100k, Singapore is 178 per 100k. Singapore is just much more likely to execute convicts; in part because SG has a mandatory death penalty for some crimes, and in part because much of the US doesn’t have the death penalty in all.

It does not appear to be an effective deterrent. https://www.academia.sg/extra/death-penalty-research-appendi... This article has a criticism of the SG government report (Study 6 header) on the deterrent effect when they added the mandatory death penalty in the 90s. The big takeaway is that convictions didn’t drop notably (cannabis convictions dropped a single percentage point, opium convictions went up 2%. Average opium weight seized dropped a ton, but is still like 13 times the mandatory death penalty limit so hard to call it there).

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

#446

Post by dmoy »

joenot443 wrote: post #435
georgeburdell wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider

Can any Americans confirm this? Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?

Really depends on where, and what sport.

If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators.

If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as a regular thing. Especially if you're at one of the 50++ high schools that has a 10,000+ capacity stadium.

Edit: yea and as other replier mentioned, there's some regional tendencies too.

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

#447

Post by nephihaha »

leereeves wrote: post #314
nephihaha wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Schools make some of these issues worse. They are riddled with bullying, and until recently made little accomodation to people with learning or social disabilities.

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

#448

Post by TimorousBestie »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #441
TimorousBestie wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the real secret is an expansive list of capital crimes! Or maybe it’s the public flogging. It’s hard to tell.

Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.

Ah, sorry, I was being facetious. You’re right, of course.

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

#449

Post by DoNotMindMe »

ifwinterco wrote: post #164
riffraff wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the USA it is not banned federally or in all state public schools. Find a school near you that associates with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, their school discipline policy likely includes corporal or physical punishment terminology.

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

#450

Post by antics9 »

simgt wrote: post #399
AussieWog93 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I have girls and there's definitely a biological difference there even at a young age. They're much more sensitive to more subtle negative feedback in a way that boys just aren't.

You have some data point at home so you extrapolate on the entire population?

Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur.
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