>Finally, one winter morning on the school bus, he turned on his tormentors. Curling his fingers in the shape of a pistol, he said, “I hope you all die.”
> Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said. Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.
> The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.
This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying for his emotional outburst and everyone who picked on him got away unscathed. This seems similar to the recent Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Both the series and the discussion around it focused on the main character rather than the bullying that caused him to kill.
>> This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying
That's standard practice for schools in the US. And I've heard from a relative who is a schoolteacher that during a mediation, the schools make both sides apologize to the other, requiring that the victim apologize to the bully.
When I was a kid, I quickly learned that most school administrators are lazy monsters. You only get in trouble if you make them do their jobs. You could literally get your ass beat by a crowd of feral children and then get suspended for being attacked and doing nothing in return.
Bullying isn't just condoned in schools, it is supported. If you try to report it to administrators you are more likely to be punished than the bullies because YOU are the pain point for them.
Exactly. They don’t even question how all this bullying went on for so long without any adults noticing or doing anything about it. For "horrible things, like nonstop" to be going on without anyone noticing or doing anything about it is absurd levels of negligence by the parents, teachers, and administrators. It should never have reached this point.
Bus drivers have to focus on driving safely. Expecting them to maintain bully free interactions among 20+ kids is absurd. Pay for an adult monitor on the bus.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc. Schools can probably do more, but I doubt they can fix bullying alone. And certainly not with the resources they're given today.
You know how women often don’t report sexual harassment and assault? It’s because if they do report it, they will suffer further victimization and their chances at any just outcome are too low.
Same thing with bullying in schools. Kids don’t report it because if they do so, they will be opening themselves up to further victimization, and the people they report it to will not take sufficient action to stop it.
All schools need to do is make it safe to report bullying, prioritizing the victim’s safety. Then with a report they don’t need blanket surveillance, they can just do targeted surveillance to verify the reports. Once verified, they should take immediate action to put a permanent stop to it.
I agree with the problem you identify. I was both a bully, and a bullied person at times during my school days. For me the bullying of me brought on the bullying by me, I feel.
I don't see any practical answers in your comment. Recognising schools should "makes it safe to report bullying" is one thing. How though? It seems entirely intractable - you seem to suggest blanket surveillance of all children everywhere?
You don’t need surveillance if you have relationships and trust. Bullying is intractable because traditional schooling is essentially and structurally exactly that: the bullying of kids by adults. It’s only logical that it results in the bullying of kids by kids.
Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.
Kids understand justice from a very early age. It's one of the things they need out of parenting. But things that go on at school are not entirely within the remit of the parents, because the school is in loco parentis.
You missed the part that says "viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus". The evidence is already available. The problem is that no one was bothering to look at it to check the kids were OK.
Kids will find ways to harass each other: between classes, lunch times, recess, etc.
This is true, but in most countries it doesn't escalate to mass murder. That's specifically a US thing (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...). So while you're right, I don't think it's fair to suggest it's hard to stop this problem or to resign to it being typical kids behaviour. The shooting aspect bucks the global norm.
No there isn't. America has 120 guns per 100 people.
The closest runner-up country, the Falkand Islands, is almost exactly half of that - at 62 guns per 100 people [1]. There's a sharp decline from there.
That said, I've long shared the belief that despite the absurd number of guns in the USA, and how they literally outweigh the population; the average person ought to re-calibrate have more faith in humanity and respect for their access to firearms, because the stats for gun violence are not nearly as high as you'd think if they're that accessible.
Guns per capita isn't a good measure because some people own a lot of guns. Gun owning households is a better way to test how many kids potentially have access to a gun - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_gun... - America is still top at 42%, but the next country is at 37% and there are several above 20%.
This is a generation removed, at this point, but my younger sister and I went to the same small private, "good" Christian high school, and when Columbine happened we both looked at each other, and were like, "yeah, makes sense". Bullying was so endemic at our school that we could identify kids in each class around the both of us whom, had they had arrived with a gun and opened fire, we'd have been shocked, of course, but in no way surprised. Teachers (verbally) ridiculed and bullied students, and turned blind eyes to "high status" students bullying (including violently) odd, or even just poor, kids.
I escaped most of it, personally, because I had sharp enough wits and enough self-confidence to turn ridicule back on most people who went after me that way - I even figured out at one point that if I used big words the PE teacher would leave me alone, lol - and was physically big enough not to be a target otherwise. We didn't complain, though, not even to our parents, because that was just the way things were - why would kids think anything should be otherwise, when authority figures saw it and didn't care, like, at all?
What I didn't do, ever, was stand up for anyone else. It was a survival strategy. I remember reading about Columbine that Dylan Klebold waved one kid out from under his gun because, he said, "you were always nice to me". I didn't bully anyone, and even had friendly conversations with some of the kids who were the most consistent targets, but, had they come to school with a gun, I doubt I'd have passed that test. I can't shake the feeling that had one of them committed violence that the school - and maybe even I, myself - would have deserved it.
Seriously. This whole article reads like people congratulating themselves for pathologizing this kid's behavior, while not actually doing much about the obvious cause of that condition. They say the kid was suspended, for making a hand gesture in response to bullying. Why weren't the bullies suspended, especially when the pattern of abuse became clear? Perhaps twice as long to send a clear message and let the victim reacclimate to the school when they're not getting bullied. Ultimately it seems like the school administration is still mainly concerned about things that might cause some problem for them, and so is quite content to let such situations fester until the victim reacts in a way for which they too can pile on.
Being harassed non-stop and only doing a gesture and getting suspended by a gesture when you get much worse is so unfair. Like "let's see if we can create school shooters" level of unfair.
I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
Understand, the teachers and administrators are not on the same team!
The admin is a political body, who basically gets their job by being voted in (or more exactly, they are hired by the school board, who is explicitly voted in). They will ignore teachers reporting problems because it's not politically expedient to actually deal with those problems.
In almost all towns, the school board serves the local Old Boys club, not the general public. Bob doesn't give a fuck that his kid is a bully, he still has the most pull in the town. He's not going to sit aside when you punish his kid, even if his kid is demonstrably a bully.
The parents of bullies will not pay attention to "your child is literally harming other kids" but you can bet, the second you suspend their child, they will somehow manage a media campaign that an entire mob will rally behind. "oh that's just what kids do" says the mob. They will then say "we need to bring spanking back into schools" and that will increase the size of the mob.
At no point did the admin help the teacher do their damn job.
>I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.
They don't misunderstand. They are incentivized by the system to behave this way. The ones that can't adapt their morals change their line of work. See also: cops.
You claim to be against X, but there is no X around, so you condition or bring someone to the breaking point to make X appealing to them, then you can claim that you were righteous all along. You create a problem and then "solve" it. In reality you did nothing, except wreck someone else's life, for the sake of your own grandiosity.
Based on what I've read, the bullies wanted the school shooting more than the supposed school shooter. Like, they genuinely wanted him to shoot them.
Considering how fked up the world is these days, I was expecting much worse than this. I was expecting imprisonment or psychiatric medication. I was really surprized (in a good way) they didn't even expel him from school.
The article does describe some of the subject's tormentors eventually apologizing to him, possibly more out of reflection and genuine remorse as opposed to being told to "Tell him you're sorry."
There should be consequences for bad behavior all around, but if one of the consequences is that a bully increases their level of compassion and self-regulation, it could allow the system to skip the punishment phase of creating consequences and still serve the goals of justice.
Also, while suspension for the subject sounds like a punitive and one-sided approach, he dreaded going to school and the suspension provided a mechanism to create an approach that would thoughtfully allow him and his tormentors to develop better behaviors.
Not to mention the fact that they let this go on for long enough to compile hours of video footage (meaning that they had a way to verify that it was indeed happening) and only for anything when the victim got desperate enough to fight back.
Spoler warning, but in the netflix show the kid is suspected of being a bullying victim but he turns out to be a bully. But interestingly the show hints at an online community believing him to be an innocent victim.
The bully was suspended at first and then we he returned to school warned again to stop bullying. Is that not enough? The article explained that the bullying stopped and the bullies apologized.
The simple fact of the matter is, everyone breaks with sufficient exposure to unending abuse. In the literature, this is rightfully called by its real name, torture. Everyone breaks with sufficient exposure, they may break by dissassociation, or they may break psychotically, but its semi-lucid psychosis seeking annihilation (capable of planning). This has been known since at least the 1950s, and ignored through willful blindness of the people in positions of responsibility and accountability.
People often say they'll know torture when they see it, but in practice most people are completely blind and they don't properly or rigorously compare torture with abuse, nor do they know how it works so they don't recognize it.
All it takes is a select set of elements, a set of structures, and a little clustering, and even you can be made to do horrible things, solely as a matter of sufficient exposure.
Those elements are isolation, lack of agency, coercion with perceived or real loss. Structure are trauma loops where you have alternating strict and lenient stages (push pull). Clustering include specific items that dramatically increase suggestibility to induce psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect. These include psychological blindspots we all have which occur beneath our perception when triggered. There are 6 or 7 in total, most are covered by Robert Cialdini, and when they are used to create an inconsistent internal mental state that's stress you can't perceptually recognize. Coping can be done for some if you know the patterns but there is no coping with distorted reflected appraisal. The pariah effect, which is enforced through social media and other material. The Stasi called this Zersetzung. Its been used and originates with many Communist/Marxist based groups, but recently includes many corporations. Sad times.
If you as a group degrade a human being, destroying their mind to the point where they are no longer sane; that's quite an evil which is not having consequences enforced. When the law defends such destructive and evil behavior by not stopping it; the rule of law no longer exists. Its a rule by law. Violence is what naturally follows.
If you want to prevent violence, you need to reform and correct the deficiencies that have now failed to allow non-violent conflict resolution. Any choice that does not lead to that resolution is a choice for the support of violence, albeit indirect.
These things were commonly known at one point in time, but education of such has been withheld and we see the effect that has had. Shock doctrine being used to push narratives and solutions which are not in fact solutions; towards ever greater control. A lot of which is intolerable taken to a long-standing logical conclusion.
Most people today seek a delusional view of the world, they are willfully blind, and have sought a world where bad things don't happen, and knowledge of such bad things actually happening is the same as acting to do those bad things. Communication of such things is the same as doing those things, or supporting those things. The author's right to depict horrible things to promote a common good being stripped from literature/media citing it induces (when it may not). This line of reasoning is obviously fallacy but they follow the "What they don't perceive, doesn't exist." dogma.
This may work right up until an out-of-context problem arises from chaos and forces extinction, or a collapse.
Evil starts with complacency (sloth) and the induced choice towards willful blindness of the consequences of each persons individual choices.
It's well documented that you don't argue with Evil, it can't be reasoned with, you can only stop it from harming others, and that is a good thing when properly/rigorously identified and action taken.
For example, you won't see any good person defending the Nazi Holocaust. Edit: Simple reasonable, and well known things, and the bot swarm is already busy downvoting it out of view. Goes to show you why people are being induced towards blindness. Evil people simply don't want you to know about these things, and the biggest problem with such people is they don't realize they are evil.
> Mike Carinci, the school resource officer — a member of the sheriff’s office who worked in the school — viewed and listened to hours of video from the bus, seeing the level of abuse directed daily at the student. “Just horrible things, like nonstop,” he said. Mr. Carinci summoned the students and told them that the bullying had to end. The superintendent told them that they could be suspended or expelled.
> The school traced the “hit list” rumor to a girl who admitted making it up. This quieted the community.
This article makes it sound like the only one who was punished was the victim of the bullying for his emotional outburst and everyone who picked on him got away unscathed. This seems similar to the recent Netflix miniseries Adolescence. Both the series and the discussion around it focused on the main character rather than the bullying that caused him to kill.