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Ontario Proposes School Cyber-Bullying Law
nursegirl writes "Ontario announced today a proposal to change their education act to add both physical bullying and cyber-bullying to the list of behaviors that can get a student suspended or expelled. Posting comments, pictures, or videos attacking other students or teachers outside of school hours will carry the risk of school punishment, if the incident is believed to have an 'impact on school climate.'"
Laws are always a bit heavy-handed, but still, it's good to see the authorities taking the first few baby-steps to combat bullying.
As someone wiser than me has pointed out, having to "grow a thick skin" shouldn't be the price of living in an information-based society.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Not sure about Canadian law, but here's my view on this matter.
Can a school legally (or morally) get away with punishing a student for an action committed outside of school grounds if the action isn't illegal in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to seek legal action and then the school take action based on whether there is a conviction or not?
Has anyone ever heard of a restraining order up there in Canada?
If people actually are documented attacking others on video or in a picture, then they deserve to be charged with assault and dealt with accordingly.
A specific statement regarding "cyberbullying" potentially could trample om free speech.
While its good to see that something is being attempted, I fear that this like other anti-bullying schemes is more about the feel-good factor than really changing anything. Given the trouble teachers have in stamping out bullying in the school yard I don't think they will fare well on the Internet. Kids will be better off getting karate lessons.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Many bullying victimes are gays, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Oftentimes schools do nothing to help the victim or punish the bully; much of this inaction is due to homophobia on the part of the school authorities.
What's good about these kind of laws is that they force school administrators to ditch their own homophobia and go after the bullies and perhaps support the victims.
Cleara
From the grade and high schools I've gone to, bullies are usually good at what they do, because punishments can't affect them for one reason or another. Besides, it's not that hard to figure out how to shield yourself from punishment, even while doing some of the most prohibited things in a school. You can shield yourself using threats, you can shield yourself by counter-accusing others, you can shield yourself using politics and parents, and most of all, you can obscure any evidence that would justify a weighty punishment.
Harsh rules usually end up working rather well for bullies. Bullies can threaten other children with false accusations just as well as they always have with a plausible "he started it" claim in the case of a fight. And if this ends up anything like fights were handled at schools I've went to, that means the victims stay quiet, because they know they get punished at a much higher rate than any rule-savvy bully.
This seems functionally more of a rule to punish technically-oriented non-bully kids who happen to anger faculty. I don't know of any kid who didn't constantly insult other kids, especially their friends, so technical kids are virtually guaranteed as targets here because of the visibility of online interactions for bullies or angry teachers to report. From living right on the Canadian border for my last high school years, I don't think Canada is any different.
Ryan Fenton
Maybe in Canada, but in America children do not surrender their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. Tinker v. Des Moines, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).
None of those things you cite are constitutional rights. You may think voting is a constitutional right, but the right to vote is phrased in the negative: you cannot deny the right to vote on the basis of race, sex, ability to pay a poll tax, or age *over 18*.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
So, then under this law people could theoretically be suspended or expelled for being involved in arguing that K&R rocks (or sucks)?!?!? I mean seriously, just look at any mailing list/news group/web forum/etc. They're all full of people flaming each-other. But, if this law passes, and the people involved are students, they can be expelled for arguing /bracing style/.
/is/ a problem) is about getting the ability to cope with adversity. It's a necessary life skill and those that don't develop it are going to have *serious* problems in life. Furthermore, when people learn to deal with bullying in appropriate ways (e.g. ignoring the bully), then that bully will have to change tactics (or most likely stop as the person in question isn't really a target anymore). The cycle continues until the bully "grows out of it".
This is sickeningly politically correct and does NOTHING to stop this problem. Just like other "methods", the bully will be smart enough to move his/her efforts to another "solution space" that it's unlikely they'll get caught in. It's this sort of reactionary thinking that let this stuff get out of hand in the first place. Seriously, is suspending or expelling the student going to make them stop posting on MySpace? If anything, they'll have more time to do that!
Basically, no law will stop bullying. No law will "pull in the reigns" of the bully. The solution is the same simple one that it always has been; the parents must actually parent there child. This alone will put this back to a healthy level if society actually does it.
Furthermore, the schools have absolutely no right to start parenting children; which this basically amounts to. The schools rights begin and end during school hours. The schools rights also only apply to what happens on school property. Everything outside that is the jurisdiction of the parents, police and society in general.
I'm sorry, but unlike others, I acknowledge the reality that bullying (_not_ the ridiculous hazing bullying that
It must be noted that this will benefit both the victim AND the bully. The victim gets the ability to cope with adversity whereas the bully (hopefully) learns that violence and/or intimidation is not the answer (that is, if the victim was able to cope). Most likely this is a form of learning to deal with his/her own stress in a productive way rather than taking things out on someone else.
Also, the fact of the matter is that bullying of this type was extremely rare until very very recently. Recently though, that ratio has started to flip; hyper bullying is getting far more common. So, to see what the problem is, we must look at what has changed in society recently. IMO the list would look something like:
- parent treating the child as a burden. something that you have and then just have to "deal with"
- kids being brainwashed to thinking that they're the best at everything when they're obviously not.
"All I know is that no-one is better than anyone else and everyone is the best at everything."
- Assistant Grounds Keeper Skinner, Simpsons
- getting away with treating there parents like crap (similar to the hyper bullying)
- repercussion if the get caught are constant slaps on the wrist or disproportionally rough (i.e. basically no repercussions or so brutal it doesn't matter what you do, you'll get the same harsh punishment, so you might as well go all out).
- teacher becoming apathetic and letting the student talk back, show massive disrespect in class, etc without repercussions.
- teachers not challenging the students academically because god forbid the student will fail and effect there massive ego and get yelled at by the parent(s).
- administration being disciplinarily impotent.
- students having problems with realizing what is reality
One could continue, but I think that the point has been made.
But, I find it stunning that if we dialed back the clock one or two decades with regards to discipline and parenting, it would actually be some major leaps forward.
Stupidity in action.
One - school has no business regulating how students behave outside. They're students, not slaves.
Two - most bullies have a second favourite game: Gaming the system. The more rules you create, the more interesting (and rewarding) you make it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Heh. Oh please... Is cyber-bullying some made-up thing? No, it's not. We're in the age where employers routinely google their employees, neighbours google each other, and the village gossip googles the whole damn village for gossip material. We also live in an age where people might glue posters to your door just because someone found a sex offender by the same name via googling (yep, it happened) or run you out of town just because your business card says "paeditrician" (hint: it's a doctor for kids, not a paedophile.) Someone can do a _lot_ of harm that way.
E.g., if someone were to poison the web and the boards with some fake "I love fucking pre-teen boys" fake homepage for you, or troll a lot of boards with stuff like "melikamp said he's working hard to overcome his kiddy-porn addiction" or "read melikamp's guide to surfing the porn from work and using the corporate app server as a warez ftp site", it would cause a lot more damage than you seem think.
It might come to bite you in the ass at the next time you're looking for a job, for a start, and you might not even know it. Noone does a thorough search to filter libel from actual info, and put it all in the right context. You're not worth that kind of effort. They're just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to trim the candidates pool before they even start. They'll just google until something bad comes up, then stop.
Even if they suspected it's bogus, a lot of people and companies are basically just prom queens anyway. It would be unfashionable for them to be associated with someone with that kind of a reputation. They have some PR image of being a responsible family-friendly company, and it's just not worth the effort to answer once a week, "then why do you associate with that pervert?" protests.
More importantly, it does cause real grief. It's not as simple as "then don't go to that MySpace page." When your friends start avoiding you, or asking "wow, did you really do _that_?", it's damn hard to just blissfully ignore it.
As for the "free expression" rant... well, basically I'm just going to say, "pfft... who cares?" The _spirit_ of those liberties was to provide a possibility for _political_ change. (See the "petition for redress" part.) It was not supposed to be a god given right to slander the neighbour, bully the classmates, troll the boards, cheat on WoW, and whatever else some people imagine. If it ends up used just as an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll put some limits on it. It's that simple.
You _can_ still affect plenty of change even without singling out and bullying individuals. You can campaign for a reform of the school system, or whatever. Attack the idea or the organization, not bully individuals. Or maybe you have a genuine problem with an individual? Well, we have courts of law, they have superiors, etc. If they're that bad, probably everyone else feels the same about them, and you have enough people backing you to go the civilized route. We don't need self-appointed thugs individually terrorizing and intimidating people, thank you very much. Online or offline. If you can't come up with anything better than bullying that teacher, then excuse me if I don't think you should be allowed to.
Yes, slippery slope, fascism, authority is doubleplus ungood, etc... who cares? Democracy isn't just a buzzword to whip people into a frenzy, it's really the ability to affect change. The notion that, basically, "article/ammendment X is sacred and beyond any meddling" is what theocracies do, not what a democracy is all about. If one liberty was poorly enough defined to end up just an excuse to bully, harrass and cause grief, we'll have it changed, thank you very much. We'll reword it or put limits on it, until it serves its original purpose, and stops being a liability.
Yes, we all like being free to say stuff like "we should pull out of Iraq already" or "the president is dumb" without fear. You know, _political_ stuff. No, we don't think that it should extend to "the principal said he likes to
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I agree that students need to be protected from bullying. I'm not wild about laws like this. They will surely be abused. But, I can't think of a better answer. So I'll stand with you in protecting the inmates of the educational establishment.
But teachers and the principal? The last thing the world needs is laws that shield those in authority from criticism.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Sorta off-topic, but methinks that Paul Graham misses the point by a mile, and just manages to add insult to injury.
The fact is, a number of kids (and adults) suffer from Asperger Syndrome. In a nutshell, it's missing the whole input circuitry for "body language". An aspie simply doesn't have the equipment to deal with those popularity games. He can go on for years talking about the wrong topics, or wearing the unfashionable clothes, or looking bored at the wrong time, and won't even know that he offended anyone. Or why is everyone else avoiding him.
Incidentally, Asperger Syndrome also creates "nerds". People with it end up more interested in stuff like maths, physics, programming, etc, for which they don't lack the input. If you will, "how the world works" as opposed to "how people work, and how to game it."
By the sound of it, Paul Graham wasn't one. If he _could_ tell who's popular, and who gravitates around whom, he probably wasn't. Good for him.
But then it's pretty stupid to tell one, basically, "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular." It's like telling a paraplegic, basically, "you're in a wheelchair because you don't want to walk." If the nerve connections aren't there, you can want it all day long, it just won't happen.
Yes, you can learn to function in society with it. But it takes a lot of time, and a lot of shooting in the dark, and whole days of acting based on guessing what the others would react to this and that. Because you just don't see the reactions. But you'll never be anywhere _near_ in the same class as the local prom-queen or jock. The best you can do is play it safe not to offend, and maybe tell a few non-offensive jokes and wisecracks, not go for being the popular kid.
You'll _never_ be in the A category of popularity, in his giving popularity grades to cafeteria tables. You can at most work your way to being tolerated in a C category instead of D. Or more practically, find yourself a group where you all like each other enough, and don't give a damn if you're all D grade as popularity goes
And it takes a lot of missing the mark and some outside help to even realize that you're doing anything wrong. E.g., in retrospect I used to go into whole tirades about how, say, a radio works, starting with the transformer and ending with the speaker. Good grief, how boring it must have been for the poor victims of it. It never occured to me at the time. Unless you have someone to tell you "dude, you bored everyone stiff" or "dude, wtf, you told that joke the 20'th time this week", you just don't even know that something was wrong. And most people will avoid telling you something like that.
And reading something like "you're unpopular because you don't want to be popular" is just blaming the victim, and frankly cruel. It just adds an undeserved helping of guilt and insecurity, to someone whose self esteem is taking kicks every day as it is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As a scrawny nerd in high school, being bullied by those larger and more popular than I taught me a valuable lesson. I learned to hold grudges and to plan and wait for the best moment to exact my revenge.
In today's society, this seems like a valuable skill to have. The legal system is too expensive for what you get, so you might as well DIY.
Blar.