Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.

I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.

I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are willing to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.

The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.

Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.

With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.

I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.

>>Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere

Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.

Any source to share? I know most drug-related crimes get the death penalty but I haven't heard of potential innocents being routinely executed.

I grew up in Nairobi during the 90's, and corporal punishment was common. We had massive work loads (by grade 7, we had 13 subjects and like 50 books, and no locker system like in america so had to drag two bags everyday) and there was often some chance of us not being able to complete a certain piece of homework... so we got hit on the hands or the butt with a pipe. Not quite caning, but still very painful.

Not sure how it helped, I just lived in constant stress of homework. But more importantly, the 'naughty' kids got immune to it. If you pipe everyone for minor infractions, then people just took it in stride.

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Then we were posted in to Saudi in the early 00's, and I vividly remember an event. I was in an all boys high school by then (segregated because saudi, duh), and one day, just an hour or so before end of school, we were all ordered to assemble in the main ground. It was surprising since no event was planned, and the teachers were grim faced.

Soon a van came into the forefront, and out came the police (both the normal uniformed police and the religious police, remember this was saudi like 3-ish kings back) and a few kids.... who were caned in front of us. Not much, 3-4 strikes each, and their backs were clothed, but it was whole dramatic production nonetheless, with a speech in arabic and everything.

Turns out (explained by teachers after we came back to class) they were boys from our school who had loitered around the girls section, and upon the security guard's attempt to shoo them away, had bullied and hurt him badly.

Now THAT put the fear of god in the kids, at least for awhile. It didn't mean there weren't kids smoking in the bathrooms or other teenage bullshit even after, but the reminder that you could be caned in front of the entire school did put a damper on the amount of mischief that kids committed for some time.... until of course the kids who saw the scene graduated and the memory was lost, I guess.

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So, while there is some merit to public corporal punishment and the humiliation ritual... but even then, kids are stupid and will justify to themselves many things (hey I'm not going to the extent of going to the girls section, nah it's just me and the lads messing around with a fellow classmate, doesn't rise to the level of caning, does it?)

And secondly, teachers will react by lower the bar further and further down until they go back to corporal punishment for everything (when all you have a hammer...)

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One of the best way to control mischievous kids, imho, is to just kick them out.

Sounds brutal, but when you have a collective environment like a school, you can't waste the time of the overwhelming majority of kids for the very few who just don't want to 'fit the system'.

And yes, 'fitting the system' was a deliberate choice of words, because usually that terminology is used for kids who need guidance... but these aren't 'naughty' kids who just need a 'creative outlet', we are talking about bullies here; if you have reached highschool age and you still haven't grokked that you can't just hit fellow students just because you are miserable... then you need to spend time elsewhere and learn the costs of fitting in society.

Maybe very [south]asian-coded of me, but our parents put a lot of time and expense in our educations (literally the only source of social uplift for us), and if we can't study because some other parent is lacking in raising their child.... that should not affect us, the education market is already very competitive and we can't risk falling behind.

The question of course arises, what to do with the kids who have been kicked out? Can't let them roam around or the problem gets worse, nothing more dangerous than a teenager with no goals, they are walking loose cannons.

Honestly... I don't know. Caning will work for a bit... but how long before the shock value passes? Some sort of juvie? That again just gets them into the crime pathway. Maybe some special school for them? But isn't that a juvie by another name?

Bottom line of all these comments here is "because women are too innocent / fragile / weak / ignorant". It's entirely unrelated to how men view them, of course.