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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.'"
In discussions like these, it is important to remember that children - people under 18 - are not full citizens, in that they do not have all the legal rights that adults do. They are in school to be taught, but also to be socialized. They are _learning_ how to behave in society. Yes, parents have the first responsability, but schools also - if only by dint of the fact that students spend 25 hours per week in their care - carry a responsibility as well.
Thus, it is right and proper that students in grade schools are denied certain rights if they are not yet able to responsibly exercise those rights. For the same reason, children are prohibited - on the basis of age alone - from voting, driving, drinking, smoking, and so forth.
So arguments against the law referred to in TFA which are based on a putative right to free speech are invalid. Kids say many stupid things, and it is proper to censor them until they are capable of being aware of the consequences of their actions.
Why do schools feel this need to control every aspect of students' lives? What occurs outside of school grounds shouldn't be their problem. Besides, "cyberbullying" is a lot easier to ignore than physical bullying, and the playing field is a lot more level. I've always thought of the internet as a "revenge of the nerds" arena. The government is not your nanny, and school is not your daycare. Suck it up. If you're oversensitive to the point that you take stuff over the internet to heart, I think you have bigger things to worry about anyway.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
I believe that there should be a law against purposely and maliciously attacking someone who didn't attack you first. This applies to verbal attacks as well as physical attacks.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Anyone here that has NOT been the target of the school bully? Reaction? Zero. "Deal with it", at best.
Why all of a sudden a reaction? Because it's no longer brawns but technology that does the "beating"? Because it no longer matters whether you have the necessary physical attributes but only whether you have the necessary equipment? What changed? That it's a teacher now who gets his virtual nuts kicked?
Personally I'm all for limiting a bully's 'freedom'. Though maybe we should first of all find out what makes a person a bully. I kinda doubt that anyone gets up in the morning and suddenly gets the bright idea to make someone else's life miserable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Was listening to the CBC on the way home from work yesterday, and they had the minister of education on.
She indicated that their plan for the cyber bullying is to gather students and ask them what THEY would consider to be cyber bullying. That will start the discussion about what constitutes cyber bullying.
Having read about some cyber bullying, I'm glad to see that this action is being taken. There are cases of people getting 100's of text messages abusing them, of myspace/facebook/etc pages being overrun with people harassing kids. Pictures/videos spreading, either real or modified, to harass kids.
How is this a bad thing? This should help tackle a problem that parents and teachers, who are mostly unaware of technology and how it's used. And, since it's actual kids who are helping guide the rules, it should actually mean something more than some government official.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
I can guarantee that if there were cell phone videos when I was in school, I could point you to a web page with a video of a truckload of boys throwing rocks at me as I walked home from school. Naturally, these were the big strong tough guys who thought it was amusing to pick on a little (5'3") girl. Maybe a video would have been what it took to get an adult to do something about it, but it would have made the rounds before anything action was taken, and I probably would have taken more abuse first because of it. I was told at the time that the school could not discipline students for anything not taking place on school grounds, which is kinda funny since they had a policy suspending kids from sports if they got caught at a party with alcohol. (They didn't have to be drinking, just in the same building as the alcohol.) Nobody offered to call the cops, or suggested that I file a police report. Nobody's parents were called. I wasn't offered counseling. Nothing happened. This was in a "good" school district in a small "progressive" town. I suspect that they thought that I couldn't possibly be having problems with anyone since there weren't even any minorities in our lovely little town to cause trouble. *Their views, not mine! *
Not only did the adults never do anything, they participated in the emotional bullying. I recall one incident where a female friend had suffered a loss and I was taking her to the school pshychologist. As we sat in the front office waiting, I was hugging her and doing the supportive friend thing, and one of the office ladies made some remark to another office lady about us being lesbians, which we heard. When we complained to the principal, we were basically told he couldn't do anything about it since he didn't hear it. So I don't know why I thought they'd care about the damn stoning.
I applaud the effort to have some repercussions for *any* type of predatory behavior. I only hope they don't zero-tolerance policy the thing into persecution. I know TFA said they're taking out the ZTP, but sadly I see this potentially devolving into kids getting suspended for posting something on Myspace like "Jenny's a bitch she stole my boyfriend," or "I hate Mr. Smith, he's such a tool."
As far as just "getting over it," or developing a "thick skin" from it, as someone mentioned, I'll say this: My skin might be thicker for the experience, but it's scar tissue.
yes, thats right, shut the hell up and take it, bitch!
Is that really the best way? I think not. I would love to have had a reasonable and open way to have the bully punished.
the real world? I have been in the real world for 25 years, and I ahve yet someone to bully me with violence.
Yes, sometime the 'think of the children' is waved around too nuch, but not in this case.
Children do need protection. Yes they should be allowed to make mistakes, but getting the crap beat out of you in school isn't a mistake, it is an act of violence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, in junior high (about 23 years ago.. ugh) we had a kid catch a bully on the way out of a door by himself and cracked him in the knees with a 2x4. It seemed to work pretty well because a) if you catch a bully without his entourage he tends not to be so tough, b) admitting that the little guy got the best of him even with additional hardware is a no-go amongst his peers, and c) if said bully kicks the kid's ass, there just my be a repeat performance.
I'd never been bullied in school (thankfully I was vaguely athletic and able to socialize despite being a geek), but in the army I had some so-called gang banger from DC (he was about 6'2", I'm 5'9") keep screwing with me and trying to steal my gear (dumbass had lost half of his field issue). One night after hours in the field I crawled over to his foxhole with my e-tool and explained to the motherfucker that he had to sleep sometime, and when he did I'd take him out in a most gruesome way. I was serious, too. It was never a problem again.
The danger nowadays is that more kids, for whatever reason, will not just escalate like we did in school with either jumping somebody or using a single blow off of a blunt object, it's that they'll grab a semi-auto and get busy. Which of course is usually final in its outcome. I don't have a solution, as there always have been bullies and there always will be.