My sister, making the mistake of Facebook posting some kind of support for a local (to her, not even me) political cause, has set me all thinking. The cause in question was some kind of Anti-Bullying Legislation being proposed for Minnesota.
Unfortunately, I fear the recent "bully awareness" trend might just yield more stupidities of this nature. It sounds like it's a new Zero Tolerance Policy waiting to happen.
The thing is anti-bully legislation is about as fine a plan as anti-murder legislation -- which is to say, it's unneeded as the act is already illegal as it is. Most things a bully does fall under various harassment or assault laws, which if some person were doing on the streets would get the police patrolling the area and arresting offenders.
What I wonder is why don't these things just get enforced according to regular laws? Why are teachers the ones who you're told you're supposed to report to, instead of the police? (Teachers, BTW, were never helpful to me back in the day when I had my own bullying issues. All they'd ever do was ask, in an annoyed tone, "Well, who's doing it?" which was unanswerable; anyone I'd been formally introduced to such that I would know information like a name, usually was a person I counted as a friend. And your average bully is at least smart enough not to answer such a question -- trust me, I tried it, in desperation.) Now, I know schools seem to think of themselves as their own little sovereign nations, and are full of rules that wouldn't be legal to enforce anywhere else in the US; but my only guess it it's some misguided effort to claim there's no crime in schools that makes them want to handle everything internally, and ineffectively, since a school has about as much law enforcement capability (and amusingly, similar laws) to the police in that movie Demolition Man. Maybe that's why they never have toilet paper in school bathrooms -- we're supposed to know how to use 3 seashells.
Unfortunately, I fear the recent "bully awareness" trend might just yield more stupidities of this nature. It sounds like it's a new Zero Tolerance Policy waiting to happen.
The thing is anti-bully legislation is about as fine a plan as anti-murder legislation -- which is to say, it's unneeded as the act is already illegal as it is. Most things a bully does fall under various harassment or assault laws, which if some person were doing on the streets would get the police patrolling the area and arresting offenders.
What I wonder is why don't these things just get enforced according to regular laws? Why are teachers the ones who you're told you're supposed to report to, instead of the police? (Teachers, BTW, were never helpful to me back in the day when I had my own bullying issues. All they'd ever do was ask, in an annoyed tone, "Well, who's doing it?" which was unanswerable; anyone I'd been formally introduced to such that I would know information like a name, usually was a person I counted as a friend. And your average bully is at least smart enough not to answer such a question -- trust me, I tried it, in desperation.) Now, I know schools seem to think of themselves as their own little sovereign nations, and are full of rules that wouldn't be legal to enforce anywhere else in the US; but my only guess it it's some misguided effort to claim there's no crime in schools that makes them want to handle everything internally, and ineffectively, since a school has about as much law enforcement capability (and amusingly, similar laws) to the police in that movie Demolition Man. Maybe that's why they never have toilet paper in school bathrooms -- we're supposed to know how to use 3 seashells.
Or, at least, you agree with me on this kind of thing.