| Pretty Little Flower |
11-12-2013 10:24 AM |
Re: Towards A Virtual Williamsburg!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch
(Post 484335)
It's born of frustration with having to deal with these issues when "educate him" is the answer but no one really agrees on what that means. I live in a part of the world where gay acceptance has been methodically preached in schools since before the current students were born, so the bullying is perhaps slightly less directional than elsewhere, but it exists because people everywhere lust for power over other people and kids are no exception. But what to do in any given conflict is only clear to a smug outsider. Maybe the perp is a victim in another dynamic; maybe he's economically on the edge; maybe what we see this week really is payback for last. Hell, we've still got people saying anti-gay bullying measures are stifling religious expression in school. (We all can agree that they aren't but we, unlike the schools, have the luxury of choosing our friends. Imagine having to continue to engage with people who have horribly mistaken but unshakeable worldviews.)
Bullying as a manifestation of discriminatory animus against personal characteristics was not illegal and now is, at least in my state and, I think, yours, but the way this is done is by deeming it an effective denial of access and therefore a form of discriminatory denial BY THE AGENCY, which then becomes liable for the damages. In other words, there is no real legal remedy against the bully, only against the institution, which meanwhile is under an unqualified legal duty to educate BOTH victim and perpetrator. Not to mention the fact that federal courts are split on whether schools even have jurisdiction to impose discipline of any kind for off-campus (i.e. online) speech acts.*
*I'm curious: will everyone here concede that they do? Or will these boards, like the country itself, prefer not to state anything of any real substance on the issue of disciplining a verbal bully until AFTER they know whether their child is the victim or the perpetrator? We're stuck in a Rawlsian hell of everyone saying "do something," particularly after a death.
|
O.K., I get that you think that addressing the problem, legislatively or otherwise, presents thorny practical and intellectual issues. But that does not mean that attitudes about the issue are not changing. As I mentioned, it seems to me that, whereas there was once an attitude that bullying, or a certain amount of it, was fine and even healthy, there is now a recognition of the types of long term damage it can do and corresponding efforts, however imperfect, to address the issue and even to try to "prevent" the problem. Similarly, in the domestic violence realm, there was once a prevailing attitude that it was a family problem to be addressed behind closed doors. Attitudes on that issue changed, and resulted in legislation that many consider paternalistic, that undoubtedly had unintended negative consequences, and that failed to capture the nuances of mutual wrongdoing in many domestic violence situations. But I don't think we want to go back to a place where police refused to intervene in household violence situations because it is a "family matter." And if there has been a similar shift in attitudes about bullying, and if people are no longer content with a "kids will be kids" attitude, and if, as Thurgreed notes, cyberbullying has made the problem more acute, then I don't think it makes sense to throw up our hands and say "This is too hard, and it really sucks for school districts caught in the middle, and the tricky jurisdictional issues make my head hurt, so we'll soon realize what we learned the hard way before, which is that there is nothing to be done but allow the passage of time." |
