Parenting & Family

Zero-tolerance policies aimed at stopping bullying not working, experts say

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Deal Guru
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Jun 26, 2005
10111 posts
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Toronto

Zero-tolerance policies aimed at stopping bullying not working, experts say

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.5317251

I think we've all known this for ages. Canadians way of talk, talk, talk, and no real action, is failing all our children. Teachers are given no powers, restricted due to potential lawsuits.

In the end, lawyers win and children lose.
34 replies
Deal Expert
Aug 2, 2001
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I am curious why parents of bullied children do not actively sue the parents of the bully for their child's actions. Perhaps because it is difficult to estimate "damages" but it would send a strong message to parents about being held liable for the actions of their child if they were required to pay some bills such as therapist or something (yes I know most children don't go to a therapist for bullying but it's the only thing I could think of).
Deal Addict
Feb 16, 2013
1569 posts
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Toronto
Kids are violent lil chits.
The playgrounds might as well be the favellas.

You'd better learn to fight and fall into a clique.
It's part of growing up.

When I was younger in grade school, I was bullied by two older kids.
It stopped when i smashed one of their heads into the side of a rough cinder block wall.
....
Deal Addict
Jan 2, 2015
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NOT centre of Univer…
The problem with bullying is it can be very difficult to identify. There are several forms of bullying, most of them are subtle. Physical bullying is the easiest to identify. Sure, in this case, you fight back and it might be effective. However, most of the bullying is much more subtle and covert.

Parents often are biased towards their own kids (understandable) and they worry that their kids are going to be bullied so they teach them bullying is wrong. The terms bullying is overused, and that leads teachers and administration unable to act, this lends to a great problem of when there are true cases of bullying they are being missed, and then you can have dire consequences.

Parents will often say their kids are being bullied because little Billy or little Jane have had their feelings hurt or have been excluded because no would play with them at recess. This is very different than the child that has been targeted that by a bully that ensures that no one plays with the same kids. There is a lot of intention with bullying that is not seen by adults and it's difficult for kids to be able to tell the difference.

An example is a child finds out they are the only kid not invited to a birthday party, it sucks, but this incident is not bullying. Same scenarios, a child is intentionally told they are the only kid not invited to a birthday party. It's done to rub it in, most likely bullying or the start of bullying. What does the school or the parent do in this case? Force the kids to invite the one kid even with a zero tolerance? Maybe have the child not invited 'smash one of their heads into the side of a rough cinder block wall?

I don't have the answer to bullying, all I know is that parents need to know to ask the right questions. The first step is teaching the kids to help identify what is bullying vs. feelings are hurt, and giving them strategies to not make them targets, and if they become targets to help them.
On a 'smart' device that isn't always so smart. So please forgive the autocorrects and typos. If it bothers you, then don't read my posts, but don't waste my time correcting me. If you can get past the typos, then my posts generally have some value.
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Mar 23, 2008
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The kid that got murdered in Hamilton clearly specified to his mom that he is being tormented and was actually scared it going to school because he would be killed. His mom expressed her concern numerous times with no resolve. That right there is proof that it is identifiable and nothing is done.

Not saying that all scenerio are easily identifiable, but that story alone shows that schools are more focused on their legal protection at the expense of kids.

Something must be done.
Member
Apr 21, 2019
210 posts
143 upvotes
I'm sick of hearing people cry about bullying. Bullying is a normal and good thing. If your kid is a freak then bullying will tell them that and give them an incentive to change so they can make friends and integrate with their peers. If they don't do that, well then hopefully bullying will at least motivate them to work hard to be successful at something in their lives, if not socially. Yes, bullying is painful, but it's short term pain for long term gain. Sheltering your kid and giving them participation trophies is not going to make them a strong adult.
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Dec 27, 2013
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Woodbridge
monsterdon wrote: I'm sick of hearing people cry about bullying. Bullying is a normal and good thing. If your kid is a freak then bullying will tell them that and give them an incentive to change so they can make friends and integrate with their peers. If they don't do that, well then hopefully bullying will at least motivate them to work hard to be successful at something in their lives, if not socially. Yes, bullying is painful, but it's short term pain for long term gain. Sheltering your kid and giving them participation trophies is not going to make them a strong adult.
There's a difference between acting in a socially-unacceptable way and being subjected to reactions from your peers and being specifically targetted. There is also some middle ground between being a helicopter parent and "sheltering your kid and giving them participation trophies" and flat out encouraging bullying. Acting like an idiot and having people react to you does come with short-term pain and is a natural and normal way for society to adjust behaviour. Real bullying, on the other hand, can have long-term and sometimes permanent effects.

This issue is so hard to address. If you actually do the math, kids aren't at school for that long. A child is in the school building for 6.5 hours per day and there are around 190 instructional days in the year. That's 1235 hours per year at school. There are 8760 hours in a year. Kids spend 84% of each year not in school. Much of the bullying with significant impact occurs online starting at around 10 or 11. It's impossible to actively monitor or observe, difficult to investigate, and tricky to address. Parents need to be on board.

I don't know what the solution is. Punishment doesn't seem to be working. Many kids know that there's nothing that the school can do and if they know their parents won't do anything, we're literally powerless. If a suspension means being home alone playing Fortnite for three days, well you can imagine how that student feels about it. Perhaps increasing police involvement might introduce the threat of real consequences that go beyond the school and parents. It's a very frustrating situation. It's almost easier to help the targets of bullying to develop skills to become more resilient than it is to stop the bullying itself but that doesn't work either. Maybe we need to work on developing a sense of community and teamwork? Maybe it's about explicitly teaching compassion and empathy? I have no clue, and it sucks.
Penalty Box
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Nov 13, 2010
7814 posts
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Scarborough
Everyone knows who does what in schools and whose selling drugs and who the bullies are. Nobody does anything about it though
Then there’s also the gang problems in schools too.
Soft on crime and coddling will only increase this. Its so bad that many choose to send their kids back home during those yrs to avoid shitty canadian public schooling.
Deal Guru
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Jun 26, 2005
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monsterdon wrote: I'm sick of hearing people cry about bullying. Bullying is a normal and good thing. If your kid is a freak then bullying will tell them that and give them an incentive to change so they can make friends and integrate with their peers. If they don't do that, well then hopefully bullying will at least motivate them to work hard to be successful at something in their lives, if not socially. Yes, bullying is painful, but it's short term pain for long term gain. Sheltering your kid and giving them participation trophies is not going to make them a strong adult.
It's Canada 2019. Didn't you hear all the "strange" "freak" people or thinking is 100% correct, and everyone else has to accept it. And change to show you accept it. That's how Canada is now.

You still believe in only a man and woman marrying?? That's wrong !! You are homophobic!

You think police uniform should stay and not change due to a religion? Wrong!!

Canada is bending over backwards to accommodate everyone from outside Canada.

Diversity is what makes us strong!! Mankind has to change, oh sorry, I mean human kind!!

So if your kid dresses weird, talks and acts weird, that's not wrong, all the other 99% of the kids are wrong. We need to celebrate the strange acting kid.
Deal Expert
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Jan 9, 2011
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"Zero tolerance" response to bullying is meaningless the way it actually plays out. If it were actually true, the the bully would be made to change schools, and the targets would get to stay. But it's always the other way around, and always has been.
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Dec 26, 2007
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rfdrfd wrote: It's Canada 2019. Didn't you hear all the "strange" "freak" people or thinking is 100% correct, and everyone else has to accept it. And change to show you accept it. That's how Canada is now.

You still believe in only a man and woman marrying?? That's wrong !! You are homophobic!

You think police uniform should stay and not change due to a religion? Wrong!!

Canada is bending over backwards to accommodate everyone from outside Canada.

Diversity is what makes us strong!! Mankind has to change, oh sorry, I mean human kind!!

So if your kid dresses weird, talks and acts weird, that's not wrong, all the other 99% of the kids are wrong. We need to celebrate the strange acting kid.
That’s some persecution complex you’ve got there. No one’s forcing you to “celebrate the strange acting kid”, you just can’t torture them physically or emotionally. It’s really not that difficult a concept.
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Dec 26, 2007
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Kiraly wrote: "Zero tolerance" response to bullying is meaningless the way it actually plays out. If it were actually true, the the bully would be made to change schools, and the targets would get to stay. But it's always the other way around, and always has been.
Yes, follow through with actual consequences has always been a problem for bullying (or for inappropriate behaviour in general) in schools. Administrators don’t want to rock the boat if they don’t have to, and the parents of the little angels that are terrorizing the other students and staff are to quick to threaten lawsuits/violence/media. It takes documentation of really extreme and repeated behaviour to actually hold a child to account for anything in schools these days. And since a lot of bullying is unreported or doesn’t occur in the school, it makes it even harder. We need to do better.
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Aug 17, 2009
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People need to accept bullying as a part of life. It's not going to stop after grade-school, or high-school. It's going to keep happening throughout a person's life, be it at workplace, spat with a neighbor, etc.

Instead of "stopping" bullying, which is not possible, efforts should be made on how to fight bullying in a meaningful way. For ex., in grade school, I fought (physically), which only landed me in trouble. In high-school, I joined the track team and started hanging out with a group of athletes, which stopped bullying without me getting into trouble (turns out bullies are also cowards, who knew?).

That aside, there's also a political factor that our dear media outlets don't like to publicize: who are the bullies? If they're WASP, they're publicized and shamed. If they're from a "specific" category of refugees, then not much will be done, save to give them a "talk." Because doing anything else would be considered racist.
Corvus oculum corvi non eruit.
Deal Fanatic
Aug 31, 2017
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"Zero" anything doesn't seem to work. Look at Toronto, "Vision Zero," ineffective and lazy policy.

All these bullying campaigns are great, but they are useless if people don't actually practice it. Unfortunately, part of the bullying starts at home (isolation, abandonment, bad upbringing, family 'views'), and manifests its way into the school.

The hardest challenge is changing mindsets. If your parents don't believe in say same-sex marriage, and practice that belief at home, it's going to be hard for the child to go to school and not express those same homophobic views. Tolerance is alright, but until we move towards accepting and understanding others, then things aren't going to change.
Last edited by Guest8827364441 on Oct 28th, 2019 7:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Dec 26, 2007
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MyNameWasTaken wrote: Unfortunately, part of the bullying starts at home (isolation, abandonment, bad upbringing, family 'views'), and manifests its way into the school.
Very true, but I’d also add “entitlement” to the list. I agree that kids who feel inferior will often bully to make themselves feel powerful, but we’ve been seeing a disturbing trend lately where kids will just bully because they can, and know they will face no real consequence.

We have kids blatantly hurting other kids and then smirking at staff because they know that they’ll get sent to the office and maybe get a phone call home (or just as likely a talking to from the principal and some iPad time to “calm down” before being sent back to class) but, that’s pretty much it. There’s no real incentive not to misbehave, these kids feel entitled to do what they want, when they want. We’ve had kids as young as 4 start throwing things, and when staff try to stop them, say “You’re not allowed to touch me, I can do what I want”, and unfortunately they’re right, all staff can do is evacuate the rest of the class, leaving the misbehaving kid with all the power to control the situation. If kids are already articulating this at four years old, we’ve got a real problem. These four year olds grow into teenagers who think nothing of hurting or even killing a classmate, because they’ve never learned how to be part of a community, and have never been taught that there are consequences for their actions.
MyNameWasTaken wrote: The hardest challenge is changing mindsets. If your parents don't believe in say same-sex marriage, and practice that belief at home, it's going to be hard for the child to go to school and not express those same homophobic views. Tolerance is alright, but until we move towards accepting and understanding others, then things aren't going to chance.
This is why I love the public education system. Kids learn a different perspective to what they might be being exposed to at home. If you’re being taught at home that Jews are terrible and evil, but your Jewish teacher is fair and fun and you love being in their class, it’s going to create just enough cognitive dissonance to eventually open that door to acceptance. We can (and should) expect tolerance as part of giving basic respect to those who are different than you, but it’s being holistically exposed to new people and ideas that will eventually combat bigotry (which is one of the reasons intolerant religious parents fought the new health curriculum so hard, they didn’t want their kids to even be exposed to ideas that may lead them to challenge their dogma).
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Jul 13, 2012
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I think what epitomizes the problem more than anything else is that school staff are now being issued bite-resistant clothing. As in, you have to let the person bite you instead of forcefully repelling them.

People like to complain when police use force or arrest kids in schools, but the reality is that the only reason that's becoming common is that the powers of teachers and other school staff to handle problems themselves is gone. In the olden days, if you were being disruptive in class and refused verbal instructions to leave, you could expect the teacher or someone else to drag you out of class. Nowadays, none of the school staff can do it, and the students know that.
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Dec 27, 2013
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ConsoleWatcher wrote: I think what epitomizes the problem more than anything else is that school staff are now being issued bite-resistant clothing. As in, you have to let the person bite you instead of forcefully repelling them.

People like to complain when police use force or arrest kids in schools, but the reality is that the only reason that's becoming common is that the powers of teachers and other school staff to handle problems themselves is gone. In the olden days, if you were being disruptive in class and refused verbal instructions to leave, you could expect the teacher or someone else to drag you out of class. Nowadays, none of the school staff can do it, and the students know that.
I've been issued such personal protective equipment as I'm on the response team should an esscalation occur in our autism classroom.

It's not so much that we let a bite happen, it's that we don't always see it coming. Staff that are issued such equipment also receive training in physical intervention. There are likely difference from board to board, but my board provides Nonviolent Crisis Intervention training from the Crisis Prevention Institute. It's a modified version of the training that is approved for use in our schools. Similar and more advanced training is provided to workers in treatment centres, group homes, or other environments in which they may need to physically intervene with an escalated individual. Only staff members with this training (we call it CPI) may physically intervene with a student in crisis. The circumstances in which it would be acceptable to put a hand on a student are very specific and very well-defined. Basically, there must be an imminent threat to the safety of the student (self-injurious behaviour, for example) or others (lunging, biting, kicking, headbutting, charging etc.). We're trained in ways to block a targetted strike and to get out of holds (arm, hair, clothing) and bites. Despite the training and equipment, bites do happen. I've had two colleagues this year receive medical treatment for bites and another had a fairly significant chunk of hair ripped out and was treated for a bleeding scalp.

Having said all that, what I'm describing above has nothing to do with bullying. These are not delinquent, violent or malicious kids who are bullying others. These are kids with significant developmental and cognitive disorders who need specialized treatment and support to keep themselves and others safe.
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May 12, 2014
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Markham, ON
OntEdTchr wrote: Having said all that, what I'm describing above has nothing to do with bullying. These are not delinquent, violent or malicious kids who are bullying others. These are kids with significant developmental and cognitive disorders who need specialized treatment and support to keep themselves and others safe.
Thanks. Shows me that ignorance, including mine is rampant and misinformation easy to spread when people only use talking points or take things out of context. It's all about context.
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Sep 1, 2005
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All of the bully discussions seem to overlook the fact that I see the media in general bullies ppl all the time. Back in the day, I don't seem to recall this happening like it is today. We also have a lot more "anonymity" behind twitter handles, anonymous comments - ppl do and say a lot more negative stuff online what they wouldn't do in person. When they do this over and over again, periodically they forget they're not always online.

Eg. Rob Ford - newspapers, media outlets made jokes of his appearance, his addictions etc.
Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, etc.
All of the jokes are forms of bullying.

It's one thing to "discuss" and disagree with policies but isn't it bullying when they make fun of appearances? Ppl are supposed to teach their kids that this is not right and yet it's an everyday thing that the media is doing exactly what we say not to do.
We're all bozos on the bus until we find a way to express ourselves...

Failure is always an option...just not the preferred one!

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