Good. And while I know Singapore already allowed this for other misbehaviour, it should have never been removed from schools in the West in the first place, and I say this as somebody who grew up with no lack of (in hindsight deserved) swattings from teachers and principals. No doubt many problems today can be traced back to a complete failure to disciple many children that has developed over the past 20-30 years.

I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]:

> In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a punishment for serious misconduct, often as a last resort.

> Based on first-hand accounts, the student typically feels moderate to acute pain for the first few minutes, depending on the number of strokes. This soon leads to a stinging sensation and general soreness around the points of impact, usually lasting for some hours; sitting down is likely to be uncomfortable. Superficial bruises and weals may appear on the buttocks and last for a few days after the punishment.

For comparison, criminals get:

> A report by the Singapore Bar Association stated, "The blows are applied with the full force of the jailer's arm. When the rattan hits the bare buttocks, the skin disintegrates, leaving a white line and then a flow of blood."

> Usually, the buttocks will be covered with blood after three strokes. More profuse bleeding may occur in the case of a larger number of strokes. An eyewitness described that after 24 strokes, the buttocks will be a "bloody mess".

> Men who were caned have variously described the pain they experienced as "unbearable", "excruciating", "equivalent to getting hit by a lorry", "having a hot iron placed on your buttocks", etc. A recipient of 10 strokes said, "The pain was beyond description. If there is a word stronger than excruciating, that should be the word to describe it".

> Most offenders struggle violently after each of the first three strokes and then their struggles lessen as they become weaker. By the time the caning is over, those who receive more than three strokes will be in a state of shock.

> The wounds usually take between a week and a month to heal, depending on the number of strokes received. During this time, offenders cannot sit down or lie down on their backs, and experience difficulties controlling their bowels.

I understand that many people feel that any form of corporal punishment is wrong. But I think it’s still important to point out that this is not the same type of caning that Singapore is (in)famous for internationally. And the BBC article, which also makes reference to judicial caning, makes no attempt to explain the difference - which to me feels rather sensationalist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore

Corporal punishment is brutal, inhumane, uncivilized. Hurting children is a barbaric practice, and inevitably attracts the attention of a very particular kind of person.

I was only punished like this once as a child. I don't remember what it was for, but I only remember the punishment. So anecdotally, it doesn't seem to work.

This is naïve. This will just lead to the victims of bullying getting caned after the bullies set them up.

A bad person sees such a punishment as an opportunity to intimidate others.

Reading a lot of the comments here is pretty depressing, I thought things had improved since I was a boy.

My school (posh, British) turned a blind eye to bullying and fighting, there wasn't a great deal but I distinctly remember walking past a teacher having recently been punched in the face, bleeding from my mouth, and him acknowledging that I looked in a state but doing nothing.

Since I never turned away from a scrap I never really encountered bullying, now I have boys of my own and hope that when they're of school age they don't have to run the gauntlet as I did.

I remember that Singapore caned an American teenager back in the 90's for vandalizing cars. It was a big event in the news at the time.

I read the article as defining bullying as kids posing physical threats to others. Yet, the memory that immediately jumps into my mind is of a boy who always wore a jacket and a hat with ear muffs inside school who would hold his books to his chest as he ran to/from classes in between periods.

Kids would always laugh at him and block his path or trip him or knock his books out of his hands. My sense is that this was widespread behavior, not limited to a small group.

I also seem to recall a group of kids who were picked on all eating at the same table during lunch and always being subjected to taunting and being picked on verbally or having their books knocked off the table, etc.

Sadly, I do not recall ever seeing anyone stand up for him or help him pick up his books. The memory makes me feel horribly ashamed because I have no recollection of ever helping.

As someone born substandard, who only became fully human as an adult, I was both the bully and the bullied as a youth. I've reflected on this throughout my years and see some virtue in this. Bullying can be extremely destructive to one's development, on either side. While I'm not 100% confident caning is the wisest option, personally I greatly value the experience of having my ass kicked for being a menace.

It's probably not for everyone. For the thinking type, it's a solid shortcut to empathy and effective antidote to hostile ego.

If it were up to me, there'd be an option for The Stick, or a brutal psychology session, at least initially. A bit idealistic though when the kinetic purity of the stick often just works.

As adults, I think we tend to forget about the difficulties of childhood bullying, some parents being obvious exceptions. For many, the experience is profound and the impressions lifelong. I get confused here, because I want children to be tough, or prepared to defend themselves, which usually is more effective with experience. But with so many personality types, that cannot apply to all.

There's also the eternal ghost of error and some children who did nothing wrong will inevitably be receiving the stick. That's a small but significant can of worms.

For me this is yet more evidence of humanity's aversion to holistic consciousness. One can argue violence is intrinsic. I think it is but do not agree that its manifestations necessarily are; or rather, we have the potential to change the the output if we really try. Idealistic, yes. The stick is real.

There's also the bizarre possibility that if humanity managed to develop an effective method of imparting empathy, respect, and consciousness to children, that it might break the present system. An awful lot of business wouldn't happen if both parties cared about each other.

I know bullies that claim that they get bullied by the person they bully. The bully stopped in the end, but the wrong person got pushed.

I understand that caning leaves lifetime scars, at least the type I heard about. It's not something you can put weight on for a while.

Not the right approach as classifying someone as a bully is left to someone's subjective perception. This makes caning legal in the hope it would reform those boys and leaves room for misuse. Once bullying is proven in front of PTA group then other formal methods should be used, starting with counselling-> monitoring for improvement -> separating them from their peers and moving them up seniors, that might turn the tables -> community service with final recourse being termination from school and in worst case / rarest or rare scenarios the country would already have a juvenille justice system to reform.

Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.

Have them make something difficult and time consuming to make, out of a flammable material, then as soon as it get's a pass from a supervisor they have to burn it.

About three decades ago, a student attacked me by poking my face with a pencil very hard, close to my left eye. I could have become blind, but fortunately I did not. Yet the student was not even punished in the kindergarten run by PAP.

Besides that, I was slapped hard across the face by my Primary 1 teacher (Miss Maisura, iirc... or might get zero marks for mispelled her name) at Queenstown Primary School because I unknowingly brought my spelling book home and had difficulty understanding the instructions. Years later, I happened to meet her on a public bus in Singapore, but she had no recollection of who I was.

I was also physically abused by classmates for months. Some stole my coins or manipulated me through social engineering.

Some teachers were ridiculous and unprofessional when caning students. I witnessed that many times.

Despite all these terrible experiences, a school belle, Lisa Huang Shu Shung, once became smitten with me. We lost touch after graduation — I was in the worst class while she was in the best class. Sometimes, I still wonder how she is doing now. But why should I post in HN?

I have become semi-disabled in my 40s, now living with night blindness and no love life.

Even after growing up, you can still encounter people who would beat others up. That even happened to me during NS, my phone was even stolen by one of them in our room but the officers could not do anything.

My view is that caning only provides a short-term solution; it does not solve long-term problems.

Of course, some of the naughty classmates (gangsters who loved causing trouble and making noise) were eventually sent to jail — one for voyeurism and another for assault — while others were expelled from school.

Years later, I came across some old schoolmates again, but we had become strangers on the street. We were no longer the students we once were.

So I hope the future kids would never have to go through the same expereince. Just don't be selfish and don't lose your empathy towards others, because we won't be reborn after billion years just as we did not experience the pain of waiting 13.6 billion years.

Humans are imperfect mammals.

What about girls? https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/11/us/michelle-carter-textin...

The only times I got hit were when I deserved it, was asking for it, and pushed that adult over the tipping point. So that was all completely just.

My peers learned they could trigger me in the same way, and were always careful to be subtle and passive, lest they also get punished. I suppose that is also, street justice.

I wonder how severe a caning in an educational institute compares to one administered by state justice.

People wonder why the state of the world is the way it is. Traumatized child expresses themselves the only way they know how? Let's beat them, surely this is the solution not creating a safe environment.

The cycle continues.

I read “caring” not “caning” and clicked on the url with hope.

Caring would be more effective than caning. But Singapore gonna Singapore.

Regardless of what side you take, time is the judge. It does not care about what you consider right or wrong. It will show which societies will prosper and which will go extinct.

Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones. It can be percieved, it can be reasoned over, it can be handled by institutions (the individual in natural dynamics will not) and it is not societal loadbearing bug.

Cane the parents first.

Singapore obviously shoulsnt be doing this. it is extrmeley evil to cane people.

This should be solved by nonviolence.

> My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now

You can't have this. Have a one-to-one conversation with your kid and tell them you can't have this. If they continue... well, I'm not saying "whoop their ass", but you can't have this.

In the USA it is not banned federally or in all state public schools. Find a school near you that associates with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, their school discipline policy likely includes corporal or physical punishment terminology.

You'll notice that my carefully chosen link does not look favorably upon this practice, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't paid to do a job that they've been trained to do with some consistency, unlike school officials.

To be clear, I don't think beating children and desensitizing them to violence is good, I was just arguing that there's a reason why it has been practiced throughout history. The modern era of relative peace and social order in vast tracts of the world has changed laws and norms profoundly for the better, not least in making such barbaric practices obsolete and unacceptable to most people.

I guess hitting girls with sticks makes them uneasy, huh. Maybe they should apply the same empathy to all children.

> From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones.

> I never said its nice or justifyable

Sir are you schizophrenic?

this does seem like an "I learned it from watching you" moment.

Maybe, give them estrogen injections too.

What a "lovely" country.

Why only for boys?

I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.

I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.

I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are willing to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.

The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.

Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.

With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.

I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.

beat the violence out of them, that'll show em?

I find the evolution of §1631 of the German civic code interesting from 1900 to the early 2000s it slowly moved from "the father has the right to chastise the children" to "the parents have the right and obligation to bring up their children. humiliation is no appropriate means for upbringing."

so no form of violence, psychological and physical, that goes beyond merely protecting the child or it's environment from harm, is appropriate. any such acts that are covered elsewhere in the code actually turn violent into a felony: insult, beating, locking in the room, even grounding? that's not how you turn a young human into a decent adult.

the turning point btw was Astrid Lindgren of Pipi Longstockings fame, and her acceptance speech "Never Violence!" for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a prestigious event with high reach in politics and intellectual elites. The speech was rocking the boat, indeed, she was asked to only hand out the prints and not actually give the speech, to not spill the event. Yet she insisted...

Never Violence! - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Violence!

Violence creates more violence. Singapore has a lot of these sick backwater policies in place.

Hurt kids hurt kids.

As I understand it, a lot of bullying, especially physical bullying, stems from physical abuse at home. The plan is "hey let's try double-or-nothing" on the child abuse. Great fuckin plan. When people are into this shit I hope they don't have kids man.

I grew up in Nairobi during the 90's, and corporal punishment was common. We had massive work loads (by grade 7, we had 13 subjects and like 50 books, and no locker system like in america so had to drag two bags everyday) and there was often some chance of us not being able to complete a certain piece of homework... so we got hit on the hands or the butt with a pipe. Not quite caning, but still very painful.

Not sure how it helped, I just lived in constant stress of homework. But more importantly, the 'naughty' kids got immune to it. If you pipe everyone for minor infractions, then people just took it in stride.

____

Then we were posted in to Saudi in the early 00's, and I vividly remember an event. I was in an all boys high school by then (segregated because saudi, duh), and one day, just an hour or so before end of school, we were all ordered to assemble in the main ground. It was surprising since no event was planned, and the teachers were grim faced.

Soon a van came into the forefront, and out came the police (both the normal uniformed police and the religious police, remember this was saudi like 3-ish kings back) and a few kids.... who were caned in front of us. Not much, 3-4 strikes each, and their backs were clothed, but it was whole dramatic production nonetheless, with a speech in arabic and everything.

Turns out (explained by teachers after we came back to class) they were boys from our school who had loitered around the girls section, and upon the security guard's attempt to shoo them away, had bullied and hurt him badly.

Now THAT put the fear of god in the kids, at least for awhile. It didn't mean there weren't kids smoking in the bathrooms or other teenage bullshit even after, but the reminder that you could be caned in front of the entire school did put a damper on the amount of mischief that kids committed for some time.... until of course the kids who saw the scene graduated and the memory was lost, I guess.

____

So, while there is some merit to public corporal punishment and the humiliation ritual... but even then, kids are stupid and will justify to themselves many things (hey I'm not going to the extent of going to the girls section, nah it's just me and the lads messing around with a fellow classmate, doesn't rise to the level of caning, does it?)

And secondly, teachers will react by lower the bar further and further down until they go back to corporal punishment for everything (when all you have a hammer...)

____

One of the best way to control mischievous kids, imho, is to just kick them out.

Sounds brutal, but when you have a collective environment like a school, you can't waste the time of the overwhelming majority of kids for the very few who just don't want to 'fit the system'.

And yes, 'fitting the system' was a deliberate choice of words, because usually that terminology is used for kids who need guidance... but these aren't 'naughty' kids who just need a 'creative outlet', we are talking about bullies here; if you have reached highschool age and you still haven't grokked that you can't just hit fellow students just because you are miserable... then you need to spend time elsewhere and learn the costs of fitting in society.

Maybe very [south]asian-coded of me, but our parents put a lot of time and expense in our educations (literally the only source of social uplift for us), and if we can't study because some other parent is lacking in raising their child.... that should not affect us, the education market is already very competitive and we can't risk falling behind.

The question of course arises, what to do with the kids who have been kicked out? Can't let them roam around or the problem gets worse, nothing more dangerous than a teenager with no goals, they are walking loose cannons.

Honestly... I don't know. Caning will work for a bit... but how long before the shock value passes? Some sort of juvie? That again just gets them into the crime pathway. Maybe some special school for them? But isn't that a juvie by another name?

the problem is what if the victim fights back, then they might be misconstrued as the bully and get caned.

the point. of course. is to teach. that nothing is good or bad. consequences.

I didn’t expect to open the comments and find people who were pro beating children on Hacker News. I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay. Absolutely barbaric behavior.

I wonder how many would get accustomed to the pain, or may even develop a liking for it. BDSM is a thing, after all...

The best way to handle a bully is to fight them tooth and nail even if you're going to get beaten up or you get suspended from school. If you keep fighting them the bullying will stop, and you will also gain some self-esteem.

Singapore works as a multi-ethcnic multi-cultural society because of measures like this and an understanding that you cannot have a functional democracy in a multi cultural, multi racial and a multi-ethnic society: each race/culture votes for his own and against others on racial/ethnic lines.

>We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids.

This is false. The evidence is not overwhelming; it's actually extremely poor quality. And the research question is one of the most difficult to resolve in social science. I wrote on this here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma.... See also this guy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=2HtqmZ0AAA...

Yeah my bad. I was the getting bullied side of students, but the current punishments are something that should be ended.

> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.

In my jurisdiction prison sentences and imprisonment for public protection are different things, and only the latter is to protect innocent people. It is also pretty rare. Most prison sentences are, because society 'thinks' the aspiring prisoner deserves it, not because the public needs to be protected. Also penalties also fulfill the desire of the society for vengeance.

I think, being locked in isolation or with very dangerous individuals can leave deeper scars than a short period of violence. It's also not, like people in general never have any injuries, so it's not the pain itself that is an uncommon experience, but more the knowledge of it being linked to your actions. People don't have traumas just because they walked through nettles, feel from their bicycle or broke their legs.

> And I'm pretty sure the type of person speaking out against outdated, abusive child rearing doesn't support the use of cudgels or tear gas in law enforcement or unsafe/cruel deportation.

That's nice, but I think he still has an amount of accepted violence by the state, because the policy of 'I don't give a fuck, let the strongest do what he likes' doesn't actually lead to less violence.

I just want to point out, how it is not necessarily a black or white thing, I'm not arguing for child abuse.

> Locking criminals away to protect innocent people is different than caning and you know that.

No, I don't think it is different. Both are applications of state violence for enforcing laws. I think it would be reasonable to use (public) caning as a judicial punishment in the US for certain kinds of crimes, for the same reason I think it is reasonable to use incarceration as a judicial punishment in the US for other types of crimes.

another take: some people are emotionally “dumb” and have a really hard time feeling empathy for others. This is just another way to force the bully to be in someone else’s shoes…literally.

I'm pretty sure the proportion of corrupt people in any country will be pretty similar if the right structures are put to place. I think people give in to corruption when the system favors regardless of the country or continents and as a matter of fact a lot of people in government and places of power in my country were foreign schooled or bred.

Usually is headmaster or disciplinary teacher if in school. Otherwise will be the special trained prison officer for general adults.

Since we've been through this before I think I'll just link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47734762.

It is the threat of competent violence that keeps me from, say, sunbathing in a park without clothes on, on a nice day. Our world runs on violence, but we mostly try to deny it, because it serves the few that control the many to keep the many divided.

Your example says more about the costs of getting details wrong in punishment, than about punishment.

There are many western states with welfare state. Do you think otherwise?

Countries taking care of their citizens is communism? A social safety net leads to empty store shelves? Am I the latest victim of Poe's Law here?

Every advanced economy in the world except for the United States has a well developed social safety net, and I assure you our shelves are not empty and I can listen to all the Mötley Crüe I desire.

> the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's

Oh, come on, stop whining. Skrewdriver is still on Spotify.

You're such a snowflake, posing as the victim of government oppression.

And what’d be the point? The police will not be interested in the would-be phone thief, calling them would be of negative value to society.

I do agree we shouldn't limit it to children! But I don't think the boss/employee relationship should involve violence though because firing someone is simple and effective. But if someone is doing something bad for their community that has no obvious other consequences? Then yeah, it absolutely should be an option.

These rules should be implemented locally at a town or city level. No need to enforce the same set of rules across all society.

And it's interesting you bring up that bullying is a second order affect. If one of the parents is abusive, that should be something that has physical consequences. Solve the problem at the source, stop wringing our hands and getting lawyers / police involved for everything. That's not scalable and as a result there are a bunch of unsolvable problems in our society today.

How about the amount of times when the bully didn't stop? That's the useful metric here. When there was resistance, how effective was it?

Judging from your description you didn't lay out any examples of where fighting back failed.

You and I have completely different definitions of "reasonable."

It's silly to blame the police for not stopping petty crime?

And what does immigration have to do with any of this?

Yes, because it is a well-known fact that police never use their power to bully others. It's also an established fact that nobody is ever wrongly accused of crimes by the police.

I swear, some of y'all just dream of being able to cane people or something.

>Obviously your personal conclusion is different but I would say it’s not an empirical or strictly logical analytical conclusion. You will also note that I was able to guess and predict where you’re coming from. Not only did I ask for the full metric, I asked for it partly because I can predict it would be 3 out of 3. My response to the other persons reply predicted what was going on in your head quite accurately. Because of this I would say that I have knowledge about this context that you don’t know about it and that you can learn from. It’s natural for you to you to fight for your point but that would be a form of bias.

Sorry but this reads like some pompous peak redditor stuff. I'd say it would be a bad look if you're trying to convince someone or transfer and idea but the other person you agreed with wasn't right about the supposed cases nor did you draw some point we disagree on or draw out some conclusion.

>From a practical standpoint you only need to go a fraction of that distance in order to cause most bullies to back down.

Yes because for most bullies it's social posturing. The whole group dynamic doesn't often make sense if there's expected resistance. Even if the victim can be beat, few bullies feel like getting into a tussle over it let alone repeatedly. Exceptions can be notable of course and probalby bullies trend towards those escalation exceptions a bit more than others.

I can make a study that shows 0 wars in the region for decades despite having an army, and say that the logical conclusion should be to disband the army.

People often quote research to mislead and push their narratives. Widen the scope and their narrative falls apart.

In this case it's about going past this (often western-ish) belief that all children are born good and that something in their lives makes them bad. I'd like to propose a different take: that some children will often test their boundaries upon others and choose to say some threats are no big deal, until they actually go through the pain. Amongst those who go through it, even if there's 1 who remembers the pain and refrains from committing the same act in the future, it's worth it. Caning won't stop everything, but it is but one part of the whole net to tackle problem youths, and has effects down the road.

> TLDR Singapore and Japan have low crime rates that likely have nothing to do with severe punishments

Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.

Piles of western research. Eastern psych corpus suggest opposite. Well it's more nuanced, some combination of permissive / neglectful parenting styles. IIRC the rough TLDR is engaged tiger parents with mild CP vs hands off parents with no CP... guess who had better academic performance, social regulation etc. Something something kids find engaged parent with a little tough love = being cared for vs hands off = neglect. Anecdotal but you can see how this carries over in west between diaspora generations when the CP rates drop. East Asia is competitive, beating bad apples to be productive members of society due to entire layers of social cohesion/shame that is missing in west, hence why they can beat their way to high grades and low crime rates, but west generally can't, or at least not by 2nd diaspora generation. Of course I don't mean CP everyone, but CP tool for some kids (individual differences etc). Good argument for blanket condemning CP to prevent abuse, but at the end of the day, some would have benefitted from CP, which still preferable to silent treatment for many.

Assuming these sociological studies are robust (which they're likely not as sociological studies have poor reproducibility) am I also supposed to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears? Families have been destroyed by terrorism in the UK, by terrorists who have been given second and third chances.

To link this back to the original topic: discipline of children is part of a wider topic of how as a society we discipline those who fall out of line. Discipline in society determines the kind of future we're shaping for ourselves.

The incarceration rate is much lower. The US has an incarceration rate of 541 per 100k, Singapore is 178 per 100k. Singapore is just much more likely to execute convicts; in part because SG has a mandatory death penalty for some crimes, and in part because much of the US doesn’t have the death penalty in all.

It does not appear to be an effective deterrent. https://www.academia.sg/extra/death-penalty-research-appendi... This article has a criticism of the SG government report (Study 6 header) on the deterrent effect when they added the mandatory death penalty in the 90s. The big takeaway is that convictions didn’t drop notably (cannabis convictions dropped a single percentage point, opium convictions went up 2%. Average opium weight seized dropped a ton, but is still like 13 times the mandatory death penalty limit so hard to call it there).

None.

Violence was, at best, counterproductive for all parties involved. It often led to further tit-for-tat killings and, more generally, piled up more layers of grievance that hardened attitudes and formed a barrier to de-escalation.

The cycle was instead brought to an end by a decade of trust-building and painful negotiation. Violence didn't help, and wasn't part of the solution.

Those are the numbers that relate to your chosen framing.

But even if you excluded the Troubles or anything even remotely related to them, you'd still end up more than three times as many deaths before as after.

Well, yes, obviously.

But it's even less possible to claim that the lack of severe punishment has increased terrorism, as cedws was saying.

Even when you exclude NI, terrorism is lower now than in the past yet punishments have not become notably more severe.

Sure, but that’s not deterrence anymore. The question there is less “will it work” and more “is this morally justifiable?” especially given the concerning proximity to eugenics (which started off as eliminating crime by eliminating people with “crime genes”).

The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.

> relatively dull intellect

You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.

Generally true, but the school's core protection responsibility is for its own students and staff - not the rest of the world. And the school's authority and resources are even more constrained.

At least in some places, school systems have "special" schools or other programs for the kids who they'd rather keep out of contact with the general student population.

It returns the problem to the source: the child's parents or guardian.

My daughter did the same thing. She actually “lost the fight” but no one messed with her ever since

"Bad" is a cool label, it marks you as dangerous. But the comment proposes "immature", "behind". So give then a neat, pink shirt, not a black one with a skull on it (not saying that this works either, just clarifying).

I was bullied, a lot. The only thing that really stops a bully is shaming them, treat them like they are a child that needs to be treated as younger than their age. Bullies are demanding and demonstrating dominance, and if that is turned around on them, the bullying stops.

Right?

There are lots of reasons this stuff happens, but one of them is definitely that some kids aren't acting out for school reasons but for attention from their parents.

> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"

Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.

> "[...] nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs."

This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.

Men have to deal w/ violence or threat of violence. For all of history this has been the norm. Women are protected from violence.

Let me give you an example. If a man called the police and told them his wife is hitting him, the police would come and arrest the man.

My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.

So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.

I was a class clown type, but not a bully.

> Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways

An ADHD diagnosis and treatment.

> outsourcing

It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.

You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).

Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.

>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools

In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.

If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.

Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.

This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.

I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.

I don't think this is something to laugh at. Whether or not you think it's necessary or a proper method of punishment, it isn't funny.

> Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.

I'll convey your admiration to my local sinaloa confederate.

In theoretical land - if my son had beaten some other kid to pulp, and he got a slap from teacher to stop that (on top of probably being expelled)? Absolutely, the least of the issues in such problem.

This is very far from organized canning as a punishment, but stating teacher should never ever use violence or they end up losing their job for good and getting dragged to courts with possibility of jail is just as extreme position as letting them be beaten at teacher's will.

Middle path folks, middle path. If you don't trust teachers at all in the first place, why do you give them your children to co-raise them? Schools should do procedural punishments, not corporal. But 100% is a fairy land, and some psychotic parents who never admit their child is doing something bad (and there are so many of those, aren't they just ask literally any teacher) take it as a gospel and go to jihad mode against anybody. World doesn't need more empowered Karens, do we.

Give this a watch - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070649/

Men bear greater physical risk (war, dangerous labor etc) and boys/young men have always been subject to violent "rites of passage" that prepare them for this.

Girls and women receive greater physical protection, as required to manage reproductive capacity and long‑term demographic stability.

Nobody has the biggest stick forever, and time is implicitly included in the adage "someone always has a bigger stick".

You should travel more.

School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.

In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education and they're often the source of really stupid policies that sound decent only if you know nothing about schools and/or are incapable of seeing second order effects, such as with zero tolerance.

In any case, the admins there probably wished the OP would have punched the bully back. That's what stops bullying, and oddly enough often even results in friends being made. At least among boys - girls that get physical with each other will hold a death grudge til the end of time, but also get physical far less often as a balance to that.

Your 1st sentence is spot on.

Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.

They may also have dyslexia, ADHD or social anxiety, which cause them difficulties in other areas and this is how it manifests.

Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.

Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider

Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnight. That's a common story in Bangladesh, and it used to be a common story in Singapore. But in my dad's lifetime, Singapore became richer than Europe, while Bangladesh is still mired in hopeless poverty.

The poverty and dysfunction in Asian countries feels inescapable and permanent. My dad wanted to take my kids to see his village, but they overthrew the government last year so those plans are on hold indefinitely. I have no confidence that Bangladesh will ever be a place I want to take my kids. Singapore somehow managed to escape that trap. If it took a brutal, regimented society and economy to achieve that, then so be it.

Bottom line of all these comments here is "because women are too innocent / fragile / weak / ignorant". It's entirely unrelated to how men view them, of course.

What mental gymnastics? Women that are abused often marry an abuser because it's just the way things are in relationships.

For boys, fighting or threat of violence is just a fact of life. They are taught at a young age not to use that violence against someone that's not roughly physically matched, which includes women. That's why we tell boys never hit girls.

Why do you pretend you don't understand?

> Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts

Why the hypothetical? In Israel, for example, women often serve in equal roles during wars, although neither at the same rate as men, nor are laws there completely gender-neutral. I would imagine in Northern European countries with actual gender-neutral military regulations they will be called up similarly to men.

That's a fair point. The challenge is that a lot of the time, it's hard to escape in that way. The ideal would be that a bully is expelled or forced to change schools to get their victims away from them, but the system seems very reluctant to do that. Same with letting the victims find a new school to replace the old one.

It works really well for bullying in workplaces and communities though.

And true, the bully might win. But the thing is that it puts the victim from an easy target to a slightly harder target, and a bully may decide it's not worth the hassle/risk when others aren't going to fight back at all. It's like that old joke about outrunning a bear; you're not trying to outrun the bear, you're trying to outrun the people next to you. Or perhaps the old adage about home burglaries. A lock won't stop a determined thief, but they'd usually rather find an easy to break into house than go through the effort of defeating a security system.

Not sure if I agree or disagree with you but that’s a really interesting article actually, so thanks for sharing!

Paris, rue Poulet is a good intro, but the rabbit hole goes deep if you choose to go to the North of the capital.

But that's literally what we teach.

Part of the reason men cause so much violence is because of people like you, your exact mentality. Which says that's its expected for men to be violence, so, c'est la vie!

Men are not just like... inherently violent creatures, that's a stupid and toxic mentality. No, they're socialized to be violent by other men, who were also socialized to be violent.

A bully is not necessarily a sadist

And neither a sadist or a bully are necessarily bad people.

> I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying

I don't think anyone is making that assumption, but being ok with corporal punishment likely comes down to three things:

1. We should care more about victims of violence than perpetrators, and all measures should be taken to protect victims and prevent victimization, even if it hurts perpetrators. Meaningful consequences for violent behaviour is critical.

2. The belief the physical deterrents work, if applied consistently and not abused to the point where it doesn't provide clear guidance as to acceptable behaviour.

3. That the primary job of schools and educators is to provide a safe and effective learning environment. Being therapists that get to the root of problematic behaviour is neither in their training nor in their job description.

My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.

Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.

Lot of places have a strong tradition of corporal & capital punishment for social transgression and aren't like singapore in other ways. Iran and China have the most similar policies and you don't see a lot of HN people singing their praises for it.

> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?

In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.

In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.

> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?

Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.

> Even if you were, conscript training is not equally distributed: 24% of conscripts in 2023 were women in Sweden, 32% in 2024 in Norway.

I know but OP was talking about laws specifically, not their application.

Good thing that's not the lesson then. Of course if you see any use of physical correction as violence and abuse, then you're just assuming the conclusion.

The state's monopoly on violence is literally the only way to enforce their perceived legitimacy

> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.

On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.

How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?

"but perhaps boys and girls are different" should be interpreted as a joke; specifically satire on people who actively push that there are no differences between the sexes.

---

To bring some context:

I have a friend who called up other friends in the group and repeats over and over that there's no difference between the sexes, that it's artificial, ect. He did this when he dated a trans woman, yet didn't seem to realize that his partner felt so strongly about their gender that they changed it.

> This comment explains absolutely nothing

Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.

Bonobos are just as close and they're matriarchal. They're a very different species.

>the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories

Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.

Yeah. Instead of teaching school bullies to respect others, we are reinforcing the value of power dynamics, where the one in power defines the rules, and the weak must accept and suffer.

> it is a curious argument that, in order to show that stronger people should not hurt weaker people, you think it's okay for stronger people to hurt weaker people

Not curious at all. Ingrains the lesson that, should you feel inclined to abuse your strength, there is always someone stronger. That's a clear lesson that even works on psychopaths who otherwise feel no remorse and cannot be influenced by other means.

I don't really get what point you're trying to make, but I'll answer your questions:

1. Yes, smacking your child on any part of their body, including the wrist, is violence. You're trying to make some kind of "a lot of violence might be wrong but just a little bit of violence can be useful" point? I don't get it.

2. No, I don't agree that "imprisoning children is wrong". Sometimes children commit horrible crimes, like murder, and they need to be imprisoned. If you want to say that grounding your child is also a form of imprisonment, it feels like a stretch, but sure, we can call that imprisonment too. I don't get what the point is, though.

well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the other.

The fact that teenager boys can't tell that Andrew Tate is a characture of failed masculinity or that looksmaxxing is straight up idiotic is a pretty glaring example of that.

In a friends school in Denmark the teacher could decide that your family had to host a party for all the kids at the family home, so they could get to know each other better, and that was repeated until all involved parties stoped misbehaving.

That’s generally the solution for bullies. I wonder whether that is also the solution for victims, making them strong enough.

> https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-high-school-...

Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.

Then surely the focus should be on solving that problem? Just clamping down on the proximate cause doesn't really help - as others have pointed out, it seems likely to incite revenge attacks rather than stopping the bullying.

> Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others

I totally agree, but I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no? There are other punishment options if you still insist on inflicting some hardship.

> Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.

That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back? "Simply removing them" for a period of time simply perpetuates the problem, thus helping to ensure more violent crime in the future, not less.

That the apartheid regime and its proponents were not terribly nice people.

Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.

>What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?

Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.

As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with talking about gender differences but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the focus of your argument.

Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.

I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.

I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?

As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.

Retaliation is not self-defence.

> Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence.

Yes, I do. It should also be a last resort to mitigate worse consequences to society, and is severely over-used for many things where it has no proven benefit.

> How about a time-out for a child?

It can be cruel if over-used, but it is not the same as physically hurting a child.

Some Afrikaners resent British people and Anglophone South Africans, and this dates back to the Boer Wars and beyond. The British interned large numbers of Afrikaners and some of them died in their camps. They marginalised their language, and tried to replace it with English in administration (much the same as with the Québecois etc). The Afrikaners remembered all this, and the insecurity it gave them was partly what led to apartheid and attempts to reinstate Afrikaans as the main national language.

We tended to hear a lot about black-white relations in South Africa, and even fighting between different black African groups... But much less so about the split among whites. I'm told by white South African English speakers that certain Afrikaans speakers were very resentful of them. Some of them didn't like the rugby and cricket boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s either.

It is perfectly possible that some of what you experienced from that teacher came from all this.

I do not agree with this statement though "They were coming over for one reason only." Many South Africans came to the UK for economic reasons, or cultural ties much like Aussie and Kiwis. I had a white South African drama teacher at school and while I could criticise many of my other teachers, I always found him to be pretty easy going. Except in one area. Some of the children used to make fun of his accent and he didn't like that, which I can understand. He came over years before apartheid was dismantled by the way, but never gave any indication of supporting it.

I will just say you lack basic knowledge of history of Afrikaners and South Africa in general and that, coupled with your prejudice on display, is a pretty ugly sight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaners#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa#History

I'm sure that person must've been a pretty bad one. But to tie Dutch colonialism, apartheid and WW2 war criminals (centuries later by the way) together this way to excuse these discriminatory remarks is pretty daft. Needless to say, not everyone was/is like that.

Ethnicity and culture are not static concepts. They change over time. The culture in central Europe, North America, the Middle East etc. 500 years ago looked very different from today. The ethnicity too. People have always migrated and that's part of where ethnicity and culture are coming from in the first place. And that's a good thing.

Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.

The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.

Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.

> It sounds fair on paper

To who!? It doesn't sound fair at all. It sounds like an "authority" being embarrassed their precious system wasn't able to catch the perceived issue. "I can't see everything so, until I can (ominous foreshadowing camera angle), every suspect is guilty."

I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.

If you punish a kid that didn't retaliate just because "he was involved in a fight" you remove every incentive for that kid to restrain themselves next time. If he's gonna be punished, he might just as well be punished for something.

The next step is parents' lawyers going zero tolerance on the school system.

victims shouldn't be accountable for contributing to the problem.

Sometimes you don't need to make a study showing some number to act on something.

It can be a simple chain of logic saying: % of children try to test their boundaries. Of those children some get away with it, some don't. Of those who get away with it, they carry on doing it, and it has reprecussions down the line. If you look at the problem this way, it's a rational take on caning - to tighten the net against bullying.

Posted more context here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059470

I am as asian and I was at the receiving end of pretty severe (trust me you dont wanna know the details) physical abuse as a child. It did leave some lasting damage but surprisingly it didnt affect my academic outcomes and I dont feel like someone who would ever ever consider suicide for anything whatsoever.

I've read a lot of this literature. I don't believe there is any research that shows this with a credible research design. But I'm happy to be challenged on this, so go ahead.

> a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc

But is that research of high quality?

Nah, I have girls and there's definitely a biological difference there even at a young age. They're much more sensitive to more subtle negative feedback in a way that boys just aren't.

> The Danish are nice people

Just like I thought. I'm sure your solution would work when majority are nice people. That won't work on people who are from "lower social circles". We still have a lot of them in Poland and don't know how to make them behave better, because trying to make them behave better typically results in defensiveness about their way of life and a lot of excuses about their circumstances. They only dig their heels and start being more aggressive.

Yes, but you also get vastly different outcomes when you don't impose these as well.

I have kids. Children are not a tabula rasa. Boys and Girls act very differently almost right from Birth, and it becomes so much more pronounced as they grow.

You may want to do some research on this thing called „hormones“ and how they differ in both genders.

Perhaps, but they [imposed gender ideology] are all orthogonal to the thing that actually makes boys/girls different. And for most of them, that isn't changing.

I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherently bad", they are not necessarily thinking of smacking.

But maybe you're right. We both agree that killing children, or kicking them in the head, is inherently bad. You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?

It works too well. Especially with the "first to call" or "first to complain" gets automatically a 500 point boost in credibility. "Clearly if they called the police first, the to other party must be at fault".

HR and school admin are the same in that many mistakenly think they are there to help the employee or the student. That is not true. They are there to protect the institution, to manage and mitigate risk and liability. Any assistance to employees or students is a side effect of that work.

The institutions we force on our children often closely mirror the institutions we implement for ourselves. Conversely, the institutions we go through as children mold our perceptions of how they should appear in adulthood.

> This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.

The implication is that the system overreacts one way only, taking the word of the victim at face value and then applying "zero tolerance" towards the perceived bully.

Like I mentioned "if the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor". Think of it like a tree that's unbalanced and leaning heavily one way, well you can make it fall on someone by pushing it in the way it leans, it won't take much effort to do that, it's already leaning as opposed taking tree standing tall and trying to topple that down on someone.

You basically didn't address anything I wrote - this is one of the most worthless comments I've written in a while.

I will reiterate. If you, or others, want to hit children then that's something you need to justify with cold hard studies. Not me. The default is not hitting people.

Acknowledge the reality: if I do these punishments to another adult man, I will:

1. Probably get my ass handed to me.

2. Go to jail and be prosecuted for assault and battery.

Given that, why then does it magically become okay to do it to kids?

The answer is it doesn't, fucking obviously. So, if you want to do that, justify it. And it better be a good justification backed by science, not some pussy-footing "reasoning" I'm sure you're going to bust out.

Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.

Regarding that second question:

> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?

Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.

I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.

*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.

While I hold the same conclusion as you, individuals chiming in to concur based on their own experience is nothing more than a way to validate what certain people of the time & place commonly believe to be true.

E.g. if people were apt to believe girls preferred green peppers more often than boys, there will always be plenty who say "Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur". It could be true, it could be false, or the cause could be something else. E.g., because people think there are certain differences it shapes differences in development which lead to some of them actually being more common for nothing more than the sum of environmental factors - even if those biases only started as misconceptions.

Whichever it actually is, there will usually be large segments of the populations who would observe it to be conflicting things from an individual at-home view and it takes a lot of work & really good data to be able to make a meaningful claim about what and why differences exist.

Theory vs practice.

Where exactly is the physical strength of males necessary in modern society?

The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.

And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.

People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.

Nice insult. But what's your point? That women do not tend to have hormones-induced mood swings?

Two problems:

1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).

2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?

If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?

Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.

> Expel the kid

I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)

You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.

Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.

The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying Hitler and the communists were right for putting people in mental institutions or Reagan who didn't?

I think he makes a good point. Why do we let disruptive kids stay in the same class as the kids who want to study? The current state is terrible.

>It's similar to how prison is a deterrent to crime. But it doesn't change the fact that there are people who still do crimes and get into prison.

None of what you said contradicts the above.

One would be trading a chance of being murdered by psychopaths on the street for a chance of being murdered by psychopaths in the government.

There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?

I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.

We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.

Yes, that is a hard problem that society in general doesn't like dealing with, but the solution doesn't involve letting kids be abused. That's the point I'm making. Don't let kids get abused. I honestly didn't think that was very controversial.

The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it, leading to a death spiral of reduced enrollment and funding -- at least for SFUSD. I imagine the story is similar elsewhere.

I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.

12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.

Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.

  > And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work?

  > if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school?

> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?

I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.

> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.

That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.

Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.

> child has to be in education until they turn 18.

> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal

These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.

Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.

Right now, today, there are hundreds of millions of 15 year-olds with jobs all around the world. In the US this wasn’t uncommon two generations ago.

>I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?

I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds

  > So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?

That becomes the parents' problem. Let them find a school willing to take their abusive kid - or have the state come after them for having children not in school.

The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.

Ok, so answer the question then - what work program would there be for those 12 year olds that cannot function in the company of polite society. Like what kind of work would you have them do and how would you ensure compliance.

>>Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public schoo

I have to ask, what public school would accept adults taking classes along the rest of 15 year olds?

>> In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.

I'm sorry, but kids/teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons. If you're an adult, then sure, do whatever. But kids should be in school, whether they like it or not - it's really not their choice to make. We can argue that maybe 15-16 year olds are at the cusp of being able to do this - but I'd say the cut off should stay at 18. You're under 18, you go to school. There's no other option. The question is how does the state manage this.

>>The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study.

And I agree that it's an awful thing(that the schools are unwilling to do this)

For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_service. 12 year old would be pretty fine to spend 4-5 hours a day cleaning streets for a while.

Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.

> Parents don't have any choice in this either.

That's a very fucked up thing to say, governments or random strangers from internet do not have a right to decide how parent raises his child. Do you even have a child?

> I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds

It was just my own experience, if you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.

And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?

...how do you think we got to the literacy rates we have now?

And schools have been able to deal with "brats" for over a century without kicking them out of school.

Which is exactly why I advocate for not keeping them in the same classroom as other kids.