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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

#651

Post by gambiting »

chr1 wrote: post #624
gambiting wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn. It's actually neither of those things, because we discovered hundreds of years ago that having an educated population is good for everyone. No, it's not a prison, but it's not a privilege either - you have to be in school until certain age. Work is not substitute for education.

Being in school does not make one educated. Keeping disruptive child in the same room with normal children, means we get fewer educated people, not more.

Which is exactly why I advocate for not keeping them in the same classroom as other kids.

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

#652

Post by odiroot »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #188

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

Well, how many reportedly liberal and democratic countries have obligatory draft for just one gender?

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

#653

Post by CM30 »

gramie wrote: post #104
CM30 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after? At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small co…

I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc. We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.

That's a fair point. The challenge is that a lot of the time, it's hard to escape in that way. The ideal would be that a bully is expelled or forced to change schools to get their victims away from them, but the system seems very reluctant to do that. Same with letting the victims find a new school to replace the old one.

It works really well for bullying in workplaces and communities though.

And true, the bully might win. But the thing is that it puts the victim from an easy target to a slightly harder target, and a bully may decide it's not worth the hassle/risk when others aren't going to fight back at all. It's like that old joke about outrunning a bear; you're not trying to outrun the bear, you're trying to outrun the people next to you. Or perhaps the old adage about home burglaries. A lock won't stop a determined thief, but they'd usually rather find an easy to break into house than go through the effort of defeating a security system.

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

#654

Post by sebastiennight »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #631
sebastiennight wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven! Can you share any reference or scientific study affirming this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. > hysterical children out of tantrums In my humble experience, children throwing tantrums are likely experiencing overstimulation or emotional overwhelm, and fixing the causes could eliminat…

Reference: Craske, M. G., et al. (2009). Anxiety disorders. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 5, 18033. Covers mechanisms of panic and how sudden cognitive or sensory interventions can interrupt ruminative or panic loops.

I'm afraid I can't find this reference:

https://www.nature.com/search?q=anxiety+disorders&author=cra...

There is a paper from Craske in 2009 I could find elsewhere on anxiety disorders, but without this conclusion.

There is a 2017 piece in Nature Reviews Disease Primers, but the abstract does not mention such, nor do any of the references (I couldn't access the full text): https://www.nature.com/search?author=craske&order=relevance https://www.nature.com/articles/nrdp201724

Also, how did we go from a child throwing a tantrum, to diagnosing this as an anxiety disorder or a "ruminative or panic loop"?

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

#655

Post by threethirtytwo »

selcuka wrote: post #644
threethirtytwo wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair they said "I can think of only 3 times [...] and made it stop", implying that there were comparatively more cases where it didn't stop.

Yes I think the implication didn’t fully materialize in his head. If he stop to think about it he doesn’t actually have any other cases.

Which sort of explains why there’s no subsequent response.

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

#656

Post by yowo »

blks wrote: post #215
yowo wrote: post #192

I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandali…

You’ll be happy to meet him to do what? Hit him with a ruler multiple times?

No, give him a handshake and thank him for being a good teacher who didn't let me and my colleagues turn the class to a zoo and teached us discipline.

Corporal punishment is not bad when its fair, not arbitrary, unjust, nor physically damaging.

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

#657

Post by baobabKoodaa »

dash2 wrote: post #641
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you define absolutely anything as violence I didn't define "absolutely anything" as violence. I didn't even reach for some contested definition of the word. Just the normal everyday definition that is broadly accepted in western society today. > Or you can say what I think many people throughout history would have seen as common sense (rightly or wrongly): violence against children is wrong, but spanking them do…

I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherent…

So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.

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

#658

Post by AshleyGrant »

forshaper wrote: post #456
AshleyGrant wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it. My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up. I was taken to a broom clos…

It is the threat of competent violence that keeps me from, say, sunbathing in a park without clothes on, on a nice day. Our world runs on violence, but we mostly try to deny it, because it serves the few that control the many to keep the many divided. Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.

> Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.

That's a rather flippant attitude when given the details of what we're talking about. "Oh well, some folks get caned, whatcha' gonna' do?!"

Also, if the only thing that keeps you from sunbathing nude in a public park is the threat of someone kicking your ass, then that says a lot more about you than you might think. It's not "oh, I shouldn't expose myself to others who have not consented to being exposed to my naked body," it's "someone will inflict physical violence on me, thus I won't do this."

"Our world runs on violence..." Yeah, and there's plenty of us who think that is not something we should be proud of and should instead work to rectify instead of blindly accepting it as fact.

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

#659

Post by AshleyGrant »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #196
AshleyGrant wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice? Looks to me like you should be pissed off at the police in your locale for forcing you to fend for yourself against criminals.

> So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice? Yes; under those conditions vigilante justice is a reasonable way to 1) protect society from criminals, and 2) encourage the state to correct its failures of policing.

You and I have completely different definitions of "reasonable."

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

#660

Post by AshleyGrant »

walletdrainer wrote: post #250
AshleyGrant wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, because there is a failure of policing in your locale, we should simply resort to vigilante justice? Looks to me like you should be pissed off at the police in your locale for forcing you to fend for yourself against criminals.

It'd be silly to blame the police, this kind of crime can only be addressed at a much higher level. I'm not even too inclined to blame government, as I consider this minor loss of security a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in return for their economically beneficial pro-immigration policies. This is just what living in a big city is like, unless you're in a police state.

It's silly to blame the police for not stopping petty crime?

And what does immigration have to do with any of this?

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