Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/06/singapore-caning-school-bullies

by rustoo • 3 months ago

403 633 3 months ago

theguardian.com

lioeters• 3 months ago

Solution against bullies: a bigger bully.

euroderf• 3 months ago

So, a regulating force must necessarily be of the same nature ?

yetihehe4• 3 months ago

I would like to know your opinions on a better one, if you have one that doesn't require several sessions with a school psychologist (I had a school psychologist at my school and she didn't do anything meaningful about bullying).

stubish2• 3 months ago

This is the last resort punishment, so no, not necessarily. I'm surprised the last resort punishment isn't expulsion though, like it is in most places. I guess education is a right that can't be taken away?

rvnx4• 3 months ago

Works really well, and doing nothing is exactly why western societies are fucked up.

New generations do whatever they want and do not face any consequences.

Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?

lava_pidgeon5• 3 months ago

Why are western countries fucked up?

Arodex2• 3 months ago

Have you seen how much of a shithole France became due to street criminality and teenagers attacking people ?

Are you a time traveller from 1900?

https://libreo.ch/revues/sjsca/20232/sjsca-29-2023/sans-foi-...

Note that it was a time of widespread caning and death penalty...

hkpack• 3 months ago

Have you seen how much of a shithole France became

No, how far away should I be to see that?

userbinator4• 3 months ago

Many decades ago when I was still young, I was bullied and reported it to the authorities, but they didn't care beyond giving the usual empty "be nice and get along" verbiage. Ended up fighting the bully and gave him a few deep bleeding cuts with my nails. I got in trouble for it, but he never dared to touch me again.

bitlax2• 3 months ago

This but unironically.

CM302• 3 months ago

I'm no fan of caning or physical punishment for crimes, but isn't that how a lot of bullying ends? The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up or injured in some way and the latter finds an easier target to go after?

At the end of the day, a bully picks on those they perceive to not be a threat, whether that's a school bully using physical violence or a copyright/patent troll harassing individual creators and small companies. Being forced to go against someone with more resources or who can inflict serious damage against the aggressor is how a lot of bullies get shut down.

ergocoder3• 3 months ago

The victim snaps, the bully gets beaten up

The unspoken rule is that the victim must only do hand-combat. They cannot use weapon in any way. If the victim uses weapon to defend themselves, they will be in the wrong.

Life is hard for victims. They are often bullied because they are weaker. And the only way out is to do hand-combat.

gramie3• 3 months ago

I would suspect that the vast majority of bullying ends when the victim is able to escape from the bully -- by changing schools, etc.

We hear about victims snapping and beating up their bullies because that makes a good story. How about victims who snap but then are beaten up (because the bullies are often bigger and more used to violence) even more? Probably much more common.

NotGMan2• 3 months ago

You can never fight against a bully with words.

The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.

Nothing else works.

jancsika• 3 months ago

The only real way for a kid in school to stop being bullied is for him to challange or beat up his bully.

Why is this always painted as one individual victim having to fight/challenge their particular bully?

I remember a bunch of us kids spontaneously self-organizing in the fifth grade. After an older kid bullied a few kids at recess, a group of ten of us-- most of whom hadn't been bullied, but who obviously could be bullied-- suddenly realized we could walk over to him as a group.

He did a double take as we meandered over mumbling to each other about what our intentions were. When we got close, he then looked down nervously at his shoes. We didn't do or say anything to him. After about five seconds, we all dispersed.

I don't remember him bullying anyone after that.

reenorap2• 3 months ago

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.

trextrex• 2 months ago

That's literally how the real world works. State violence or super power violence is exactly this playing out.

thijson• 3 months ago

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.

srean• 3 months ago

It's a matter of degree.

Life time physical or emotional scarring would, to pull out an example, be US slavery degree.

I grew up when corporeal punishment was a thing in schools. No physical or emotional scars.

Wish this is extended to white collar crimes.

ergocoder3• 3 months ago

It depends. For some, yes. For most, no.

Not that I support caning by random teachers; this happens a lot of developing countries. A random teacher becomes the judge, the jury, and the executioner.

A caning punishment with proper investigation from proper authority seems like a good middle ground. Bullies should be punished. We cannot just brush it off as "they are just kids".

riffraff2• 3 months ago

This is not that kind of caning, it's basically a harder form of slapping kids, not the one they give criminals that breaks the skin.

eastbound2• 3 months ago

For minors, caning is with half-inch cane, which is the only one available in supermarkets. Only judicial caning is with the inch cane.

oompydoompy743• 3 months ago

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.

noworriesnate3• 3 months ago

Pain is a highly evolved way of telling humans to change their behavior. Why would we choose not to use such an excellent tool, within reasonable boundaries? Also, do you think the victims of bullies have a pleasant experience? Being merciful to the bullies enables them and is cruel to their victims.

altmanaltman2• 3 months ago

Yeah its so evolved. But then why limit it to children? Why shouldn't your boss be allowed to beat the shit out of you so it sends a signal you need to change your behavior?

There is a massive leap between "let them bully other kids" and "we have to cane them" and pretending like only pain is the solution, especially in case of children where bullying is often a second order effect, is sick.

moralestapia• 3 months ago

beating children
I find this abuse horrific
barbaric behavior.

Absolutely! We're all against bullying here.

cedws3• 3 months ago

After seeing with my own two eyes how soft touch policing and parenting leads to a shitty society for everyone I’m completely in favour of this. Singapore, Japan, among other Asian countries are safe and prosperous for a reason - if you do no wrong, you have nothing to fear. In London we recently had a swarm of youths raid supermarkets and shoplift. Most of them got off scot free. Even tenured criminals are getting out after a few months of jail time in the UK now because the prisons are full. I’m done with the pathetic soft touch approaches. I want to live in a high trust society. Second, third, and fourth chances aren’t the way to get there. You have to make them learn the first time.

everforward4• 3 months ago

It won’t work, we have literal piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent, and to an incredible degree for children. They tend to either not think of consequences, or have youthful hubris and be certain they won’t get caught (even when they have in the past, I got spanked numerous times for the same exact things).

I would go so far as to bet it will have the opposite effect. Nothing legitimizes using violence to affect the behavior of others like the state doing it to you. I doubt they have the introspection to recognize the difference between state and personal violence, the message they’ll get is “might makes right”.

Those countries have structurally different cultures, economies and governments. Eg Singapore has a median household income that rivals or exceeds the US, in a part of the world where that makes them fabulously wealthy compared to their neighbors. That alone is a huge crime deterrent; why steal stuff you could just buy off whatever their Amazon is? They’re also a fairly small island, so it’s way easier to control drugs getting in.

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

RiverCrochet• 3 months ago

My sister had an interesting take on this:

"These countries also directly take care of their citizens, which I think is an important factor. Other societies will let you be homeless and say it is your fault for being broke even when employers terminate you purely for economic reasons or when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. That backdrop contributes to desperation and predatory mindsets."

I disagree with her though, because that sounds communistic and can only lead to empty store shelves, tattered housing blocs, and the state preventing me from listening to the same rock music songs I've heard since the 1970's.

AshleyGrant6• 3 months ago

I was in day care one day as a small child when another child threw a ball of clay and it hit the woman who was watching us. She did not see who had thrown the ball of clay but for some reason decided I was the one who had done it.

My mother worked at the day care but was away on a vacation that week. She had told the director of the day care that she was allowed to spank me if I acted up.

I was taken to a broom closet and told to drop my pants so that this woman who was not my parent and who was only going on the words of another adult could spank me.

I was then put in timeout for the rest of the day. I also was spanked again when my mother returned from her vacation and the day care center director explained what (she believed) had happened.

I did nothing wrong, but I was still subjected to corporal (and illegal) punishment because my mother wanted to make sure I "learned my lesson" or whatever bullshit excuses that adults like you seem to think will come of subjecting children to violent retribution for their transgressions.

The only lesson I learned that day is that I should never trust those who have power over me. They don't care if they are punishing the person who committed "the crime." They just care that they are punishing someone.

Adults who think that physical violence is the only way to change the behavior of people who break the rules or who commit violent acts are nothing more than bullies themselves.

Tell me something, if I came up to you, told you that I'm going to punch you in the face (or cane you, or literally any other form of painful physical punishment) until you learn that your viewpoint is incorrect, would it cause you to change your mind, or would it simply cause you to resent me and start working to find a way to hurt me back.

Why would you think that the threat of physical violence against miscreants, child or adult, would cause them to act in any way different from how you would react?

walletdrainer3• 3 months ago

A few days ago an older teenager tried to steal my phone on the street, I kicked the shit out of him.

What else should I have done? Just let the kid take the next guys phone?

If I’d called the police, they’d almost certainly have told me on the phone to let the shouting kid go. There would have been zero consequences for him, and possibly some for me.

I genuinely did that kid a favour.

lava_pidgeon5• 3 months ago

In Germany you can force somebody to stay until police arrives but unnecessary violence is forbidden

davyAdewoyin3• 3 months ago

I find this attitude completely western and out of touch with culture and actual experience of people living in a society that operate differently.

In my own personal and shared experience; having grown up in a culture where corporal punishment is a given. You found out it can be administered in the most humane way possible. And as a matter of fact, a couple minute after the entire thing you are back to talking with friends and siblings and laughing it off.

Sure, I didn't love being caned, nor did anyone I knew, but I will say it was a more effective and better guide towards good behaviour than words alone or other approaches

Nobody I have met loved being canned as a child, and at the same time no one turned out worst from it. And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.

I'm certain the views of people who grew up in Africa and certain part of Asia, where caning is still practised, will be quite different from those of people who didn't.

P.S. My views are on parents and teachers caning kids or young teenagers.

Arodex2• 3 months ago

And as much as Africa seems to be a lawless place, schools are very orderly; bullying by peers is rare, students generally do not exhibit anti-social, rebellious or rude behaviors to teachers or parents.

And then, when they become adults...

Have you never wondered why those "perfectly fine" children become such corrupt adults?

17186274403• 3 months ago

Locking people in a room also isn't pleasant, yet we allow it, because we think it has a deterring effect. Hitting people with sticks or tear gas, forcing there limbs together with steel also isn't very nice. Neither is forcing people in a plane and sending them off into dangerous environments just because they happen to be born there.

Tadpole9181• 3 months ago

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

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.

ant_456• 3 months ago

sometimes not just unpleasant. i was locked in a storage closet hundreds of times as punishment while growing up and it caused irreparable damage to my psyche

i heard punishments where the parent stays at the timeout and are present but firm are better than abandoning them an hour at a time to cook or work out, sometimes your life is just tragic I'll say

dogleash• 3 months ago

I find this abuse horrific and you should speak to a therapist if you think this is okay.

This is unintentionally hilarious. You're not arguing the moral point, you're using the same kind of reasoning that leads to gay conversion therapy. It roughly equates to: "that's not in accord with my social norms, therefore you need professional intervention."

(Perfunctory disclaimer that I don't support caning. I am not arguing for it, I am only pointing out problems with a statement against it.)

rvnx4• 3 months ago

Well, think of it like this: these teenagers take pleasure harming defenseless animals.

They like to torture them psychologically and physically, precisely because they are defenseless.

Well, these animals are just big animals: human.

It means: they find it fun so they actually enjoy harming humans.

This is precisely the reason for bullying.

Punishing these behaviors early, and you might actually stop this pleasure-loop and send a signal to all people around that it is a not a good idea. In addition, you may prevent escalation to worse crimes. Once you do a crime, then crime+1 is maybe ok. If crime+1 is maybe ok, then crime+2, etc.

oompydoompy743• 3 months ago

Most bullies are responding to a poor home life where they are bullied and beaten.

BobaFloutist2• 3 months ago

Pithy version: Hitting kids to show them that hitting other kids is wrong?

Less pithy version: The message you send by beating kids, is that violence is wrong unless you're big and strong enough and have enough authority that nobody can stop you. This is not a good way to get kids to be less violent, it just teaches them to be more calculated in their violence.

dang2• 3 months ago

I'm sure there are a few such comments, since you say so, but I read most of the thread and didn't see any.

jrflowers2• 2 months ago

lmao the person you’re responding to didn’t say that anybody was breaking the rules, they just pointed out that there’s a lot of people here pontificating on the side of the merits of violence against children

You can post anything on hacker news if you phrase it right. Sometimes the mods will even pop in and interject unprompted that it’s all good so long as nobody is saying swears

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060620

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036265

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058102

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036672

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063728

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059347

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058265

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035671

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036627

ergocoder3• 3 months ago

who were pro beating children

Correction: pro beating abusers.

userbinator4• 3 months ago

What about the "barbaric" "horric" "abuse" these victims of bullying are being subjected to? Idiots siding with criminals and not victims is why society is so fucked up.

krackers• 3 months ago

Half-serious thought: Would giving them an appropriately sized dose LSD (with proper setting/supervision) or similar thing be a better alternative? If the issue is lack of empathy for others isn't this a much better solution that actually fixes the root cause instead of papering things over. Maybe caning might fix the superficial symptom, but those people may well end up as sociopath CEOs or something or find other ways to gain satisfaction from asserting their power (just look at the state of the world, you can be a "bully" in many other ways than physical ones).

ekaryotic• 2 months ago

James "Whitey" Bulger was given LSD in exchange for a reduced prison sentence after some low level crime. He went on to work as a professional hitman, taking out politicians and trafficking drugs. LSD does work for things such as alcoholism, but MDMA is usually used in treatment programmes as it doesn't have such life changing mental effects.

bluealienpie• 3 months ago

Sadly, I think you need to look at opinions outside where you live. I thought that a 6 foot 2 man smacking his child to ground so hard she couldn't hear would be a crime. Only to be told that it was only a crime if he closed his fist in Florida.

commandersaki• 3 months ago

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

lern_too_spel2• 3 months ago

Adult caning is done by trained professionals. https://transformativejusticecollective.org/2023/10/20/getti...

School caning is with a lighter stick and through clothing, so it will be less severe, but the reduction in severity will probably vary a lot with the person administering the punishment.

oompydoompy743• 3 months ago

Trained Professionals -> Goons exercising the states monopoly on force. Ftfy.

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

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.

lava_pidgeon5• 3 months ago

Btw, besides using violence on school children is barbaric this action is also sexism. Young boys generally suffer more from violence. Now the teacher can add it.

Besides, why is the teacher right? They make mistakes , they can be racist etc.

Just stupd

gramie3• 3 months ago

When I was a volunteer in Africa, my school's English teacher was furious because none of the students in his class had done the homework. His solution: to bring them into the staff room one by one, have them hold their hands in a "chef's kiss", fingertips pointing up. He then whacked their fingertips ten times with a short wooden rod (laughing as he delivered the final blow, "and one for Caesar!).

These were tough, hardworking teenagers, but very few of them were not in tears when they stumbled out of the room.

The next day we found out that he had forgotten to assign the homework.

So why should corporal punishment ever be considered appropriate?

(I'm not arguing with you, but agreeing with you.)

markdown3• 3 months ago

lol, standard practice in schools where I grew up, though not with a wooden rod but the wooden back of the blackboard duster.

Der_Einzige• 2 months ago

Behavior like this is why I unironically have lost the mythos of "teachers are good for society" as default thinking. I get why Mao/Pol Pot/Communists through history lined them up against walls.

Most, even in America, are little tyrants who has entirely far too much power to pick and choose the winners and losers of society. A single bad teacher acts like a whole bucket of crabs pulling down on soon-to-be-succesful youth.

quiet35• 3 months ago

I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment:

- it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution

- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)

So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable. And work with bullies to resolve/ease their life issues. I suspect most of them do what they do because of tough situation in family. In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation. Probably way better than showing ALL kids that violence is a fine casual way to solve issues.

Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.

davyAdewoyin3• 3 months ago

As I previously mentioned, if you actually grew up in a system where corporal punishment is carried out, you would find that point two is not such a bother. No one cares whether a parent or teacher can cane them except they were in the wrong of course, perhaps because it is a culture and a shared experience and I knew a lot of children growing up who prefer the canning to other form of punishment.

I think the issue lies in your conflating caning and other forms of corporal punishment with physical harm. It is not the same as hitting a student or throwing a bottle at someone; it can be done very humanely. Sure, abuse is inevitable, and I could point to many teachers who were terrible and took out their issues on students, but such cases were easily resolved by reporting them to the principal or bringing parents to school the next day to file a complaint.

gramie3• 3 months ago

such cases were easily resolved

Hah!

In any case, 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.

markdown3• 3 months ago

Yup. I and all of my peers would vastly prefer to get a caning, or belting, or piping (hit with a short length of garden hose), or any other form of corporal punishment over something torturous like extra homework.

We'd watch Hollywood movies and be bewildered by the misbehavior and lack of respect shown to teachers in classrooms.

Every class has square pegs, but with strict teachers, they'd stay in line and not ruin the learning environment for the rest of the class.

Part way through high school, corporal punishment by teachers was banned nationwide, with only the headteacher allowed to administer that punishment. Since then I believe not even headteachers are permitted to strike students.

Might have been as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Schools have gone downhill since.

maxloh3• 3 months ago

I think you’re missing the point.

A teacher’s like or dislike of a student is often irrational and based on personal emotion; they are human beings, after all. The real issue is that they wield significant power with very few checks and balances. They are essentially dictators. They work within a system where colleagues often cover one another’s works rather than questioning each other’s professional conduct.

It is far too dangerous to grant them the power of corporal punishment while simply hoping they will remain fair. I believe that in every school, there is at least one teacher who would abuse it.

vidarh6• 3 months ago

This is just a defense of violence and abuse.

naasking9• 3 months ago

it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution

Bullies are generally not very intelligent. Deterrents absolutely do work if applied consistently. A society that applies corporal punishment at multiple levels, as Singapore does, strongly ingrains the idea to straighten yourself out, because there's always someone with a bigger stick.

In severe cases, I can think of suspension or exclusion from school or another kind of isolation.

In my experience, this isn't the deterrent you think it is.

zarzavat2• 3 months ago

Bullies certainly can be intelligent. Intelligence and sadism are orthogonal traits.

The only thing that unites bullies is the willingness to inflict misery on others. A bully could be a simple thug who uses violence because they have nothing else going for them, or a popular kid at the top of their class who manipulates others for their own amusement.

cortesoft• 3 months ago

because there's always someone with a bigger stick.

This is certainly not true. Someone has the biggest stick, and if they abuse that power, it can be horrible.

vidarh6• 3 months ago

Teaching someone that using violence and abuse as ways to exercise power is not a lesson I want people to learn.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

- the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy)

Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and can be just as bad bullies as the other students. They should be able to strike my kid with "trust me bro" as proof that she did wrong? No fucking way on Earth.

strken• 3 months ago

Teachers where I live need, and have, the ability to apply violence to students. This is phrased as "physical restraint" and comes with extensive limitations and paperwork, the most important of which is that it is only allowed when protecting someone else.

What if one child wraps a skipping rope around another's neck and begins to choke them? Do you expect the adult staff to stand off to the side and do nothing?

Violence as punishment is different, of course.

blks10• 3 months ago

This comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?

InsideOutSanta3• 3 months ago

Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.

beng-nl• 3 months ago

Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.

einichi• 3 months ago

People respond differently to different things. One bully who gets punched back will stop, while another will escalate. Trying to fix bullying requires a solution tailored to each individual bully.

Fernicia• 3 months ago

I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.

latentsea2• 3 months ago

There's entire classes of people who base their employment centrally around an occupation that enables their worst vices. I'd wager there's a group of people who have no interest in becoming a teacher but put corporal punishment on the table and suddenly they're interested.

defrost• 3 months ago

Tenuous at best in many school systems where it's typically not teachers that apply corporal punishment but headmasters.

The notion that people train to be teachers followed by spending ~10 years in the system holding out for the chance to be a headmaster just so that they can beat people is a stretch.

Bound to be one or two, but there are surely better paths for a sadist - prison guard, et al.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

Applying violence to kids is not the way to make them stop applying violence to others.

When I was young me and two of my brothers were one-day really misbehaving. My grand-father, who had been capture on the first day of WWII (well on the first day Germany invaded Belgium) and spent 5 years in a PoW prisoner camp in Germany, wasn't a little wuss.

He spanked our three arses so bad I remember it to this day.

It was an amazing lesson.

Something has to be said about peaceful time that create weak men who then find all the excuses towards abusers. The issue with the "well-thinking" mindset is that when pushed to its logical end, rapists are walking totally free after having been caught (UK) and people can break a female police officer' nose at the London Heathrow airport and walk totally free too. With weak judges from a weak society ruling that: "In their culture/countries men don't know that you're not supposed to rape women".

We then end up with people, in the west, who genitally mutilate women and non-sense like that.

When, on the contrary, you decide to take the psychopaths who ruin society for everyone by the scruff of the neck and put them in chain, you get the homicide rate slashed, in ten years by 100.

That's not being decimated: that's being decimated and then being decimated, again.

1/100th.

So what is the possible solution then? Protect those who are vulnerable

That's typical victimization, which create more weak men. Weak men who then, for example, become politicians who vote ultra-lax laws and weak judges who then let rapists walk free, making the streets unsafe.

If bullies getting spanked by an authority figure don't get the lesson, it's their problem. Not society's problem. Society, as a whole, is supposed to have the monopoly of violence. Instead of that in many countries (like France and the UK), the government gives up and gives the monopoly of violence to drug dealers and rapists. Drug dealers and rapists who learned, since a young age, that were exactly zero repercussion when being a bully.

You've got your opinion, I got mine: putting gang members in chains in El Salvador slashed the homicide rate by 100x. Ponder that.

likeclockwork• 2 months ago

Okay, so you're a chump with a slave mentality who can be broken by a spanking but you think other men are weak. Got it.

All these corporal punishment societies and families have the people they don't talk about who were hardened or driven insane by beatings.

ncr100• 3 months ago

Singapore has 30% or more families using corporal punishment, according to this

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10311744/

nekusar3• 3 months ago

And when it is permissible to say that a society is trash? Cause 30% who think beating children is OK, is frankly abhorrent.

And yeah, Singapore society as a whole is pure trash. When you have monikers like, "Disneyland with the death penalty", you know it's a real authoritarian shithole.

https://thediplomat.com/2026/05/is-singapores-legal-system-b...

vidarh6• 3 months ago

30% engaged in child abuse is grotesque.

maxloh3• 3 months ago

Those are valid arguments.

I believe a better approach might be installing surveillance cameras in classrooms and hallways, then expelling bullies once their actions are confirmed by footage.

Perhaps we could establish "special schools for confirmed bullies," where students who show improvement could eventually be "promoted" back to mainstream schools.

Only then can we truly protect innocent victims.

PythagoRascal2• 3 months ago

I think they call those prisons. /s

But seriously, I don't know how much I'd trust society to care / keep funding such schools, or people working there to that with enough empathy and motivation for too long.

The sentiment that (even low-level) criminals in prison are trash, that deserves the worst instead of rehabilitation, is I feel too wide-spread for me to think it would be different.

But yeah, I might be too cynical here.

tintor• 3 months ago

I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically!

How is this different from being in city where "police officer" has the power to shot you?

nekusar3• 3 months ago

We're not required to be in a cop's room for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

We ARE required to be in an authoritarian's room for 8 hour a day, 5 days a week for 12 years.

A whole lot more would be arrested, assaulted, and executed if we were in cops' sight like this.

no_no_no_yes• 3 months ago

Point taken on the power being abused point.

But to the first point, it seems like Singapore has a strong reputation for being low in crime while high in severity of punishment.

William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" and all that.

bji9jhff2• 2 months ago

On the other hand, I got bullied a lot less after one lose a few teeth. Violence does work.

NotGMan2• 3 months ago

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.

dooglius• 3 months ago

Singapore already uses caning in schools, so it sounds this just extends it to be used in cases of bullying

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore?useskin=ve...

freetime2• 3 months ago

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

invalidSyntax2• 3 months ago

Seems like they just get what they did. To be honest, I think it should be less milder.

jasonwatkinspdx• 3 months ago

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

As someone that was on the receiving end of that kind of violence due to growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical family, I will not mince words: the view you have expressed is pure evil. I simplly cannot imagine the mentality that kids need to be physically tortured to learn how to behave.

riffraff2• 3 months ago

Yeah this seems like the kind of punishment that was also common in the west in 1800-1900.

I remember my parents still talking of getting hit with a ruler in the 50s tho the practice was technically forbidden since 1860 or so.

ifwinterco• 3 months ago

I'm not sure when it was formally banned but my dad talks about boys in his school getting "slippered" and that was in the 60s, so caning was gone but you could still hit kids with slightly less painful objects.

And throwing the heavy wooden blackboard rubber at boys who were goofing around or not listening was also considered completely normal

blks10• 3 months ago

If they like it so much, they should apply it to all kids, not just boys.

bitlax2• 3 months ago

They like it as a punishment for boys exclusively.

userbinator4• 3 months ago

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

froh2• 3 months ago

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!

alephnerd• 3 months ago

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

It does in Singapore - a province and later country that was historically rife with civil, religious, ethnic, and political instability.

Westerners may not like it, but there's a reason LKY elucidated on "Asian Values" [0]. What do you care anyhow - it's not like you'd be given PR let alone citizenship.

[0] https://time.com/archive/6732416/in-defense-of-asian-values-...

decimalenough3• 3 months ago

Singapore "rife with political instability"? We're talking about the same country that has been ruled uninterrupted since 1968 by same party, which has also retained an absolute supermajority in Parliament during that entire time, right?

The party line is that Singapore was a miserable fishing village before LKY & the PAP stepped into rescue it, and LKY doubled down on "Asian Values" to justify his iron-fisted rule: better not take any chances with that dangerous democracy! But in fact pre-WW2 Singapore under British rule was already a prosperous, advanced trading metropolis and widely considered the second wealthiest city in Asia after Shanghai.

froh2• 3 months ago

Singapore signed the UN CRC Convention on the rights of the Child

So Singapore committed to protect children from violence

https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rig...

And it seems Singapore (like some other countries) struggles to figure what that actually means, come to think about it.

Liftyee• 3 months ago

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.

stodor892• 3 months ago

I was only punished like this once as a child. It was because I beat another kid and took his crayons. It worked like a charm. So YMMV.

bamboozled2• 3 months ago

I'm going through this now, we don't smack our child but I do remember getting smacked when I was especially naughty, and yeah, it set me straight. I don't hate my farther for it or anything, I just understand he had to do something.

My wife is getting basically beat up by one of our kids now, she doesn't believe in smacking so basically she just puts up with it and tries to talk to them about it and uses various strategies. Some work for a while, some don't. Sometimes she blows up anyway, which is completely normal human behavior.

I guess we're running a potentially very high consequence experiment with our children to see if talking through them and using other strategies turns them into better / equivalent humans to us without the smacking, let's see.

dyauspitr• 3 months ago

Who knows? Maybe it fixed the problem but you don’t remember and now it’s just a part of your ethical framework.

Only time I got corporal punishment was when I stole a small amount of money out of someone’s backpack in school when I was 8. I haven’t stolen a thing in my life since then, like not even candy or a towel from a hotel room.

t-32• 3 months ago

Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.

noufalibrahim2• 3 months ago

Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake.

I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think of a way that can have a positive effect.

cineticdaffodil3• 3 months ago

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.

iammjm2• 3 months ago

No, it’s not a nice one and it can and in fact does ruin whole societies and generations of people. Here one case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

cineticdaffodil3• 3 months ago

I never said its nice or justifyable. I wish there was a grown up to talk with here. I know the russian bully culture.

Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.

ivanb2• 3 months ago

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.

danpalmer4• 3 months ago

The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.

It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.

The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.

BrenBarn• 3 months ago

The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.

samuell2• 3 months ago

Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.

Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).

danpalmer4• 3 months ago

Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.

It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.

armchairhacker5• 3 months ago

Expel the kid

I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.

jonathanlydall• 3 months ago

Community service perhaps?

Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.

Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.

danpalmer4• 3 months ago

It is a sad state of affairs if there's nothing a kid cares about at school.

cherryteastain• 3 months ago

Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.

rusk• 3 months ago

Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.

HPsquared• 3 months ago

The school, and every other student.

iso1631• 3 months ago

That moves the problem elsewhere, it doesn't solve it.

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).

He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.

spankibalt3• 3 months ago

"The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."

Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.

"The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."

There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.

tommit• 3 months ago

Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.

Seems like a slippery slope fallacy? Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit? What an odd argument.

Seems like a decent approach to me tbh.

armchairhacker5• 3 months ago

Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.

Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.

There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.

There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.

Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.

kakacik2• 3 months ago

Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.

Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.

madaxe_again6• 3 months ago

I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.

It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.

Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.

Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.

We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.

Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.

roysting3• 3 months ago

Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?

roysting3• 3 months ago

most schools don't do that

It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.

I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.

Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:

https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...

lompad• 3 months ago

This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.

The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.

Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.

Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.

Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.

bsenftner2• 3 months ago

Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.

kdheiwns• 3 months ago

As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"

threethirtytwo7• 3 months ago

It's not always straight up immaturity. A lot of it could be other issues related to the bullies environment/household or many other issues.

Classical stereotypical case is that the bully himself has an abusive/alcoholic father. There's a lot of complexity in what's involved here, but society is only equipped to deal with the "immaturity" case which is real but not the only story.

throw_await• 2 months ago

Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

sholladay2• 3 months ago

Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.

I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.

doubled1124• 3 months ago

That’s “zero tolerance” hard at work.

Wouldn't want a kid who is being bullied to think about retaliating.

Also, because the bully can time the bullying, the initial event is often missed, but the victim is caught retaliating.

It sounds fair on paper, but punishing everybody involved does not work.

ubermonkey• 3 months ago

If your parents didn't make a serious stink about this, they failed you.

As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.

aleph_minus_one3• 3 months ago

But I became fixated on how unfair it was.

I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it.

If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything else that school teaches you.

dtj1123• 3 months ago

I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us.

These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, which seems to skew hard towards an unmet desire for respect/authority coupled with a relatively dull intellect. Most just aren't equipped to take charge of children.

newsclues• 3 months ago

I stopped a kid from hitting me and the school tried to punish me for another kid attacking me, and I non violently grabbed his fist and stopped the attack.

When I learned I'd be punished the same as the attacker, or if I had hit back, I told the school, "Next time, I will knock him out."

I don't recall if the policy was changed, but I was not punished, and no one bullied me when they realized I would defend myself and was prepared to fight back. Don't pick on the quiet fat kid.

rpdillon• 3 months ago

Ten minutes ago my son came home from school and told me there was a fight and that the kid who started it has no punishment but the kid who finished it got a weeklong suspension.

I have no clue how they come up with this stuff.

dmitrygr• 2 months ago

And where were your parents in this? My school in USA tried this... Once. My dad went to have a talk with them. I do not know what was said, but the principal walked out of the room white-faced and they never tried that bullshit on me again.

kordlessagain• 2 months ago

Or, it was a pop quiz to stand up for yourself, which you then failed.

anarticle• 2 months ago

I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten.

I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.

Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.

Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!

It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.

I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.

2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.

She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.

I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.

I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.

rolph• 2 months ago

thats called collective punishment when persons aside from the offender are also punished for the crimes of that one offender.

a school being a government entity, cant be doing that malarchy.

alsetmusic• 2 months ago

That's exactly the kind of situation that made hateful as a teen. I'm so glad to be free of that now. Therapy works (over the long term, not a quick fix).

watchful_moose• 3 months ago

this can only be effective if the school isn't counting on the bully to help the school win various sports competitions over the next few years.

often the school is in a tough spot because the only reason some jocks are there is for their sport ability, that the school needs.

triceratops2• 3 months ago

American colleges I can understand. But other than bragging rights, why should a high school give enough of a shit about championships to look the other way on bullying?

danpalmer4• 3 months ago

In this case it was at roughly age 8-10. It was a sporty school and I don't think it prioritised that above student wellbeing, not at the level of one individual player anyway.

That said, I know school sports is a way bigger deal in the US than most other countries so YMMV.

eviks• 3 months ago

teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.

Oh common, threatening to take something a kid loves away is the most bland/generic policy there is, there is exactly zero "understanding" required, though some care would be required to actually trying to do anything

FireBeyond2• 3 months ago

The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that

Or actively don't want to do that. There have been cases in Ohio where football players have done things that should have them suspended or expelled (or more) and the school has literally gone on record that "we didn't remove him from the team as that would be unfair to the other players on his team, who are having a great season".

novaleaf• 3 months ago

I think many people who wouldn't be disincentivized by demerits/expulsion/etc would find the threat of intense physical pain highly motivating.

Caning is no joke.

ASalazarMX2• 3 months ago

I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved.

There was one though, small kid that probably had a harder life at home than us, he wasn't fazed by the caning, didn't even flinch. Even him avoided getting in trouble too frequently, so caning still kind of worked.

Edit: I think the most terrifying thing wasn't the pain, but the sharp SLAP!.

bdangubic3• 2 months ago

the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.

kstrauser• 2 months ago

This worked for us. A little thug was bullying my kid until I taught my kid how to land a punch to the mouth. That was a one-shot solution to that problem.

Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.

saghm2• 2 months ago

You think that a child being bullied should have to suck it up until they commit forced violence against another child? Maybe beating up a bully is something that happens when adults abdicate all responsibility, but it's insane to claim that's better than "the adults should just do their fucking jobs".

grogenaut2• 2 months ago

I have a peruvian (not athletic/nerdy) friend who moved to the us a while ago. (I played through college) his son randomly started playing football his sophmore year after getting beaned by a baseball and felt baseball was more dangerous.

About junior year the kid was having some issues at home. Dad didn't know what to do. I said email the coach. He's like what will that do. I was like coach can make him run (corporal punishment) and take away things. Emailed the coach. Coach was like "I'll have a chat with him".

Next day he said son came home and apologized to him. Cleaned up amazingly instantly (great kid). Pretty sure it was literally just a talk from another respected figure (who likely said maybe you should play less or miss practice while you sort this out.

dzonga• 2 months ago

this is why those mandatory military programs for youth work. & at times boarding schools.

in boarding school - if I know where you sleep & I have always access it incentivizes you to behave better.

one system - where all the aggression is channeled through. you can't bully - a bully ie drill instructors.

saghm2• 2 months ago

The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.

Most schools just care more about their sports teams are doing, so they'd have no interest in a punishment that involved removing a player who otherwise was good enough to make the cut. Look at how many people looked the other way for stuff way worse than bullying at Penn State.

staplung• 3 months ago

  I and the public know
  What all schoolchildren learn
  Those to whom evil is done
  Do evil in return.

W.H. Auden

zarzavat2• 3 months ago

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.

bryanrasmussen• 3 months ago

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

avazhi• 3 months ago

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.

squibonpig4• 3 months ago

That's pretty dumb

dash212• 3 months ago

This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...

InsideOutSanta3• 3 months ago

That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the science is much more solid"?

That's not the conclusion I'd draw from that body of evidence.

rlonn• 3 months ago

Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to now. Singapore may be modern in many respects, but in this area, they're a bit of a backwater.

Gareth321• 3 months ago

I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.

For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.

dash212• 3 months ago

One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".

baobabKoodaa5• 3 months ago

Some things can be good/bad in and of themself, rather than just a means to an end. I would argue that "violence against children" is bad in and of itself, and outlawing it is good in and of itself. If you want to argue that you see violence against children as a useful means to an end, why stop there? Let's also put the children to work. The children yearn for the mine.

dash212• 2 months ago

Right, but if you smack your child on the wrist, is it violence? You can't really answer these things by throwing definitions around. (Imprisoning children is wrong, I'm sure we can agree. So, if you ground your child, is that imprisonment?)

verteu• 2 months ago

No, it's about as "controversial" as claiming lead exposure is bad for children's brains.

Do we have RCTs for that? Or might we reasonably shape our priors from the hundreds of studies using a dozen different causal methodologies, which all find the same result?

dash212• 2 months ago

The evidence for lead exposure harming children's brains is extremely solid, I believe. The evidence for spanking is not in the same league. It is not just about a lack of RCTs.

squibonpig4• 3 months ago

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.

Haven8802• 3 months ago

Caning proven to work.

squibonpig4• 3 months ago

For what, administered by who?

sebmellen• 3 months ago

On this same topic, Texas leads the US in paddling!

Spanking has greatly decreased in elementary schools but increased at high schools, especially in non-urban districts.
Between 2010 and 2025, over 180 high schools reintroduced paddling —- often justified as an alternative to out-of-school or in-school suspension.

https://www.corpun.com/rtsd.htm

tomashubelbauer• 3 months ago

I googled this and I didn't even have to scroll the search results before I found an article about a perverted teacher abusing a teenager this way.

reenorap2• 3 months ago

clort• 3 months ago

This is only half-true. Normally, the bully can escalate further than you are capable of, since they are experienced at it. Sometimes they can even get their henchmen to hold you at a distance so your resistance has no effect.

It worked for me once. I think, bullying the loser was kind of cool in front of his gang, but rolling around on the floor wrestling with a loser in front of them was not so cool. Sure, I got pulverized but he didn't try me again.

That is an anecdote though, not data. He was a small time bully, could have simply escalated to a stabbing after school and left me permanently disabled. I don't know the real answer, but telling people is a good start. Make sure people know about every incident. Don't silently suffer.

threethirtytwo7• 3 months ago

No getting stabbed is rare. You made the right move and you learned to stand up for yourself. The bully learned not to fuck with you.

If you told authorities and they coddled you that experience might get imprinted on your personality.

selcuka3• 3 months ago

I don't fully disagree, but the bullying will not stop if they see that they can beat you up easily. It might even get worse.

modo_mario3• 3 months ago

I can think of only 3 times where i or someone else confronted a bully and made it stop. In 2 of those cases the bully was stronger but such stuff can always carry risks that the bully might not like or scenarios they can't take.

In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimpering fool in front of a ton of people. As far as I know he didn't try to get back at the victim.

In the second it was I that flipped out and had some luck. I didn't seriously hurt him but he realized the blind intent in the moment was there. He just seemed shocked and no longer bothered

The 3rd guy had some Moroccan machismo thing going and kept picking on people he couldn't beat and it always happened fairly conventionally without suprise.

christkv• 3 months ago

I think it's important to understand why Singapore ended up where it ended after experiencing decades of multicultural violence. This guy gives a pretty good overview of why Singapore of today happened as a reaction to that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxc_KDPrxM I think the modern equivalent case is probably El Salvador (can it become a new Singapore? Probably not).

decimalenough3• 3 months ago

Well, no, Singapore's rules on caning were inherited wholesale from its British colonial days.

"Decades of multicultural violence" is also absurd. There were indeed race riots in the 1960s, but these were closely tied to the ongoing saga of the formation of Malaysia and subsequent expulsion of Singapore, and as much political as racial (to the degree that these can be separated, since many key players like Malaysia's UMNO openly advocated for a given race).

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.

decimalenough3• 3 months ago

Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.

You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.

selcuka3• 3 months ago

You can also to to jail for selling chewing gum. And you are legally required to flush a public toilet after using it.

refurb• 3 months ago

Neither one is really enforced

redleader55• 3 months ago

Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.

That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

Owning 500g is enough to get someone hanged. A proof of trafficking or selling is not necessary.

It is exactly as I said. Please don't spread misinformation.

Permit• 3 months ago

They also seem to be one of the few countries that won the war on drugs, no?

delta_p_delta_x• 3 months ago

Your point being?

qurren• 3 months ago

And that makes it a super pleasant place to live, I don't ever have to smell that junk on the street. I prefer the smell of good food and that's pretty much what all of Singapore smells like.

throwawayk7h• 3 months ago

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

HatchedLake721• 3 months ago

Which country is that?

coldtea4• 3 months ago

Maybe it's based on millions of years of biological differences in their capacities and functions (starting from body strength and role in reproduction), plus differences in social roles, of which some of the latter might be arbitrary, but some are necessary adjustments every historical society understood.

dude250711• 3 months ago

The big idea lately is to ignore all of that and just give everyone equal rights but unequal responsibilities.

cpursley2• 3 months ago

I always find it really amusing that the most pro trust the science people who are in total agreement with all the evolution theories are often also the ones who are the first to be in complete denial that us humans might actually share some characteristics with our closest genetic relatives (chimpanzees).

almostjazz4• 3 months ago

If strength is relevant, should particularly weak boys be "treated like girls"?

Should particularly strong girls be "treated like boys"?

Should girls and women without functioning reproductive systems be treated like boys?

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

Is the fact that chimpanzees do things a certain way remotely good evidence that we should do something that way too?

Answer key:

- no

- which gamete you supply?

- no

mock-possum2• 3 months ago

Or maybe it’s based on bigotry

teiferer4• 3 months ago

How on earth is that an acceptable argument for physical abuse that is directed purely at boys?

I'm not saying girls should be beaten too. But the ethical blindness here is striking.

Besides, girls are just as much capable of bullying as boys are. Society might have taught them to use different methods, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable or any less vicious.

Barrin92• 3 months ago

It's not even remotely clear to me what this has to do with the topic at hand because insofar as gender plays into bullying girls tend to be more impacted than boys, and secondly corporal punishment and 'disciplining' women by men was historically normalized.

The Singaporean habit of caning is a very modern practice of industrial and military society that has no biological analog, an offshoot of mass discipline society of the 20th century and gender roles of Victorian Britain where groups of men needed to be 'whipped into shape' and women were feminine and pure, but it sure is convenient to randomly invoke biology when one runs out of arguments

tzs• 3 months ago

Which of these biological differences in capacities and functions make it so that girls should not be punished by physical pain but it is OK to punish boys with a physical pain using a method that often leaves permanent scars and lasting psychological damage?

array_key_first10• 2 months ago

Historical societies are... historical. We shouldn't be looking to them. They didn't have the technology we have today.

Yes boys are strong. You know what's stronger than a boy? Gun. Girl with gun is stronger. It's not fucking 400 AD and this isn't Rome and we don't have slaves. Things are different today.

Yes, there are biological differences, but they definitely matter the least now as opposed to ever. Think about jobs. Women can do basically every modern job a man can do, and definitely the high paying ones. Now think about ancient societies and why that wasn't the case.

xienze2• 3 months ago

This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.

imtringued2• 3 months ago

This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

blks10• 3 months ago

When you impose gender ideology, gender roles on them from age 0, yeah you will get vastly different outcomes for boys and girls.

joefourier2• 3 months ago

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

If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.

roysting3• 3 months ago

It doesn’t really matter. Most likely your indigenous population that was targeted to believe such terminal things like males and females being the same, will not be in power for long, let alone possibly even be around at all in the future. This modest puppy have is just a tiny little blip on the timeline where your society and culture was poisoned with a mental viruses to self-exterminate.

Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.

Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.

cultofmetatron3• 3 months ago

one of the many reasons america is so screwed up right now is because of our insistence on ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders.

that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.

The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.

techblueberry3• 2 months ago

one of the many reasons America is so screwed up right now

Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?

lII1lIlI11ll3• 3 months ago

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.

qweiopqweiop• 3 months ago

I've always found that quite interesting. I agree women should have equal rights and never be discriminated against, but when push comes to shove I imagine men would be the ones called up to fight in wars for most countries around the world.

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

Aerroon2• 2 months ago

Unless you are from a select few Norther European

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

Maybe one day it will get there but it's been a decade and has not got there yet.

trick-or-treat• 3 months ago

Sexism is illegal in your country? Whoa, your prisons must be crowded!

theoeifjf2• 3 months ago

Does not US have like 70% infant circumference rate and conscription for single gender?

xdennis2• 3 months ago

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.

electriclove• 3 months ago

Simple, boys and girls ARE different.

Yes, girls can be bullies too, etc..

odiroot• 2 months ago

Well, how many reportedly liberal and democratic countries have obligatory draft for just one gender?

lazylizard• 3 months ago

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

yowo2• 3 months ago

I was hit with wooden 100cm ruler in middle school multiple times, it is painful for an hour or so but not emotionally damaging or anything, I'd be happy to meet that teacher today, I dropped out from high school eventually after I've been reducled and mocked at by a principal repeatedly as I didn't like to shave my facial hair, which I assume happen all the time and isn't as controversial. I kept dreaming of vandalizing his car for a decade but didn't want to get in trouble.

stubish2• 3 months ago

An actual cane works more like a whip and can break skin and leave permanent scars.

bamboozled2• 3 months ago

They are not going to perform a prison style caning ffs...it's going to be a light but firm tap on the knuckles.

blks10• 3 months ago

You’ll be happy to meet him to do what? Hit him with a ruler multiple times?

yowo2• 2 months ago

No, give him a handshake and thank him for being a good teacher who didn't let me and my colleagues turn the class to a zoo and teached us discipline.

Corporal punishment is not bad when its fair, not arbitrary, unjust, nor physically damaging.

arjie• 3 months ago

Surely there is some irony to claiming no emotional impact while you ruminate in dreams about revenge.

I got in terrible trouble in school and did act out but never in reaction to corporal punishment. As it so happens, if you’re a boy the challenge is to take it without showing any sign of its effect.

wvbdmp2• 3 months ago

The revenge fantasies were for being bullied, not justly punished, and by different people. Not that I condone corporeal punishment.

sayamqazi2• 3 months ago

These things only hurt emotionally when done wrongfully.

ecshafer2• 3 months ago

This matches with my experience. Men really don't hold grudges against authority that give them stern, but fair punishments. Think of any sports coaches that make their athletes do extra running or push ups or whatever for punishment. They garner respect from their players, and there isn't real negativity towards them. Its cruel, arbitrary punishments, or mocking that causes resentment. If you take a test and get a 70 but its a fair grade, thats how it goes. If you deserved a 95 though, or the professor calls you an idiot, that is the antagonism generating event.

JuniperMesos3• 3 months ago

My biggest concern with this policy is students somehow manipulating the school authorities to get them to consider things that other students they dislike do to constitute bullying, and therefore cane them for it. Accusations of bullying - particularly cyberbullying, which is extremely subjective and also relatively easy to fake - can themselves be a form of bullying, particularly if they result in an authority figure taking a cane to your victim.

blks10• 3 months ago

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

HlessClaudesman• 3 months ago

If that were true Singapore would be a particularly violent place, it's not. Source: I lived there.

zdc1• 3 months ago

Singapore isn't particularly violent, it's just efficient. It's the threat of deportation (huge swathes of the population are on work visas) or punishment that keeps people in line. Even their prisons aren't very violent, it's just that if you commit a crime, the police will find you (it's a small place with lots of cameras) and the courts will apply the standard sentencing.

0x073• 3 months ago

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.

mvc• 3 months ago

That'll sure teach them not to abuse their power over their fellow humans with less physical strength.

testemailfordg2• 3 months ago

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.

michaelteter• 3 months ago

This is absolutely not going to teach a bully to be different; if anything, it may make them more cruel - and careful to avoid getting caught.

KSteffensen• 3 months ago

If they believe it's OK to cane the kids, why limit it to boys? Girls can also be extremely nasty to each other

bko4• 3 months ago

Because it may be effective for boys but not girls.

Men have to deal with some form of violence in their lives, or at least the threat of it. Most male encounters has an undercurrent of violence. Offend another male and you might get assaulted.

So when you expose men to violence it's a matter of the world. Like Tyson said, social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.

If you expose women to violence they will acclimate to it and begin to see it as the norm. That means they'll accept it, from their teachers and eventually their partners.

Its entirely rational to only apply this to boys only.

verve_rat4• 3 months ago

What? Your argument is men should be used to violence, so it is ok to hit boys, but women should not be used to violence, so we shouldn't hit girls?

We hit boys, so it is ok to hit boys, but we don't hit girls, so it isn't ok to hit girls?

That's so very, very wrong.

plewd• 3 months ago

The mental gymnastics at play here are astounding.

Why would women acclimate to it and see it as the norm while men don't? If anything, exposing men to violence will also make them more violent in their future relationships.

DonHopkins2• 3 months ago

Cane the parents first.

itake2• 3 months ago

I (think) many bullies have bad home lives. I wish parents would be held accountable instead of taking it out on the kids that are struggling to process their emotions / hormones in a healthy manner.

mantas7• 3 months ago

And parents are acting out for myriad of reasons. There's a never-ending chain if you go that way. At the end of the day, bully victims end up holding the short end of the stick. And they frequently become bullies themselves. Maybe stopping bullying at the visible link is not the most right solution... But is there anything better that does not lead to eternal finger pointing?

itake2• 2 months ago

I think the puck should stop with the first adult.

The front line adults at school have this policy now, which covers 30 hours of the student's week.

Parents need to be responsible for the remaining 183 hours they have with their kid.

---

In Seattle, I hate seeing news articles about kids doing stupid stuff (murdering classmates [0], stealing cars, etc) and not an ounce of accountability for being a bad parent.

[0] https://www.fox8live.com/2024/07/05/13-year-old-bystander-ki... [1] -

Tade02• 3 months ago

Valiant effort, but it won't change anything.

What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.

Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.

Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.

sfmike• 3 months ago

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

Perenti• 3 months ago

I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.

I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.

glimshe• 3 months ago

I don't agree with the notion of caning children, but... Why only males are eligible to be caned? That doesn't sound fair within the framework, girls can be bullies too.

tacostakohashi• 3 months ago

This line of reasoning, always strikes me as rather idiotic.

It's often heard from the progressive side of politics, in this general form, as if having everyone equally affected by bad things is a useful policy aspiration:

"<thing>, which is bad, disproportionally affects <girls, poor people, non-white people, etc.>, which is an outrage!"

Apparently, it's easier and more popular to make sure bad things are fairly distributed, rather than reduced or eliminated.

Jensson2• 3 months ago

Why only males are eligible to be caned?

Because Singapore outlaw caning women, the schools cannot cane girls without changing other laws but they can cane boys.

The article says this, if it was legal to cane the girls they would also do that but they can't.

wvbdmp2• 3 months ago

That just raises the exact same question.

But also “we would cane more kids if only it weren’t for those pesky laws” is crazy. The world seems to be on a speedrun to rid itself of all civility. I guess that’s its default state, but where did the civilizing forces go?!

orangebread• 3 months ago

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.

q3k• 3 months ago

Haven't you heard? Not beating children is woke. Also violence is the only way to a high trust society.

CJefferson• 3 months ago

I'm not saying beating children is good but.. if you think the 'state of the world' is bad, well, most countries have massively reduced how much beating children get over the last 40 years or so.

JackOneSG• 3 months ago

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.

mock-possum2• 3 months ago

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

rayiner5• 3 months ago

It’s a tragedy that scholars don’t study Singapore more to understand what it did right. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, Singapore (then part of Malaysia) was a poor country. Today it’s rich but the subcontinent is still poor. The best thing all these so-called “humanitarians” could do to improve the human condition would be to study Singapore to understand how that model can be translated to all the poor countries in Asia and Africa.

mark_l_watson• 3 months ago

I agree. I worked in Singapore for a short while and I was so very impressed by the people and the government.

Singapore is a great place. It is breathtaking to see a government govern in the interests of its people. I live in the USA and we have two institutions, the democratic party and the republican party, that do little except cater to special interests.

kbbgl872• 3 months ago

I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country. The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares. Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vacation. I got into 2 taxis there. One of them explained how corrupt the country was by the banking industry and the other, more memorable one, was a guy in his 70s that still had to work long houes while his wife was on her death bed at home. He called her while I was in the taxi, I saw the conversation and burst out crying myself. I ended up tipping him 100 USD.

giraffe_lady4• 3 months ago

The secret is maintaining a permanently impoverished underclass without labor rights or a path to citizenship! Much to learn here, indeed.

TimorousBestie2• 3 months ago

No, the real secret is an expansive list of capital crimes! Or maybe it’s the public flogging. It’s hard to tell.

rayiner5• 3 months ago

Cheap foreign labor flocks to Singapore because it's much richer than the countries around it. But that's not how it got rich in the first place. Singapore had a restrictive policy on foreign workers until the 1980s. But by that point its GDP per capita was already almost as high as the UK's: https://emergenteconomics.com/2012/03/12/718/

And insofar as Singapore has such a policy now, the rest of the world should take notes. Creating wealth from poverty within a few generations is miraculous, and the system that achieved that should be emulated.

mg794613• 3 months ago

It doesn't matter which rules and policies you have in place, if teachers are afraid of some parents, or simply tired of some, they will neglect or look away from your child being abused.

Which is a direct result of parents influence on the schools.

eth0up• 3 months ago

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.

brnaftr3612• 3 months ago

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.

ryzvonusef• 3 months ago

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?

vondur• 3 months ago

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.

VimEscapeArtist• 3 months ago

The comments here are fascinating. A generation of men who've never been in a physical confrontation in their lives are absolutely certain that physical consequences don't work. How would you know?

A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back. You can teach that with a cane at 13 or let him find out at 25 when he mouths off to the wrong person. One of these comes with a controlled environment and a school nurse on standby.

nekusar3• 3 months ago

A pencil makes one hell of an improvised weapon.

aliasxneo• 3 months ago

"I once saw him kill 3 men in a bar.. with a pencil. With a fuckin' pencil."

mrguyorama• 3 months ago

Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out

Beating a child who acts out because they get abuse from other people in their life is a reliable way to not at all improve things and merely reinforce their broken worldviews.

If getting the shit beaten out of you by authorities was a reliable way to raise people, my parent's generation would have had zero crime and zero bullying, and the local "White trash" trailer parks would be pinnacles of human behavior.

You know that's not how it works out, right?

Being hit works on people who would respond to nonviolent punishment.

danhau• 2 months ago

Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out

Not in my experience. There definitely will be some problematic kids, but to the majority of school bullies, I don't think this applies. To recall two of my own experiences:

As a boy I was being bullied by a group of kids. Some day I snapped at them and decided to resolve the matter there and then. I didn't care they outnumbered me. I didn't care if I'd win or lose. I genuinely was ready to fight to the death (lol). But it never came to that. Showing some teeth spooked them and they left me alone after that. I remember the dumbfounded look on their faces. So while it didn't come to violence, the threat of violence scared them off.

On the other hand, when I was bullying a boy (I honestly don't know why), he eventually fought back. That really surprised me and I vividly remember how much respect he gained in my eyes for it. It was humbling. We became friends.

The best thing that can happen to a bully is their victim standing up for themself. Like the person you responded to said: "A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back." The exception to this is kids with sociopathic tendencies (for lack of a better term) - kids that double down on their behaviour despite being confronted with the consequences. How a kid will respond is, I think, more of a function of their personality than the punishment received. But what do I know?

array_key_first10• 2 months ago

I just don't understand why people would think it works.

We used to do it. Shocker, it didn't work. Bullies were much, MUCH meaner in the past. Mostly it's just mean words now, which is still bad but better.

So, we had corporal punishment, it was bad. Then we got rid of corporal punishment, and it got better. Hmm, thinking caps!

Of course that's just correlative evidence. But we have literally no evidence anywhere from anyone that corporal punishment is good.

everdrive• 3 months ago

I've never seen a bullying program which acknowledged that there were multiple types of bullying with different causes:

- Some Stephen King-styled cretin who is just big and dumb and wants to hurt people.

- Kids vying for status in an unhealthy way and trying to cut people down.

- That weird "smelling blood in the water" problem that happens when a group of people come across someone who is just _too_ weak and their biology just seems to rev them up.

- A weird kid who is socially maladjusted and thinks they're being bullied, but actually it's just that no one likes them.

goofy_lemur• 2 months ago

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

This should be solved by nonviolence.

chrsw• 2 months ago

Hurt kids hurt kids.

profsummergig• 2 months ago

Maybe, give them estrogen injections too.

keernan• 2 months ago

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.

awesomeusername• 2 months ago

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.

Joyfield• 2 months ago

What a "lovely" country.

holografix• 2 months ago

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

SoylentGreenGPT• 2 months ago

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

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

president_zippy2• 2 months ago

This doesn't solve the harder problem: properly identifying bullying.

Bullies don't usually bully other people in front of their authority figures. Most "anti-bullying" policies in the past 25 years have the unintended consequence of fostering a more clever species of bully called the "crybully". People who are skilled at being assholes and manipulating authority figures into treating them as the victims.

In criminal law, increasing the odds of getting caught is statistically far more effective in decreasing the incidence of violent crime than increasing the punishment.

Other than that, I'm not particularly interested in the moralizing from either side about corporal punishment. Some problem children need mentorship, some just need consequences; most of it depends on their home life. Kids from abusive homes need to be moved to a safer environment and treated with therapy. Kids who are neglected or enabled by their parents need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them and other people don't have to put up with their crap.

jpfromlondon• 2 months ago

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.

VerifiedReports• 2 months ago

Why only for boys?

cheese_van• 2 months ago

I certainly don't condone the experience I had in junior high school, although it seemed to work for our specific environment.

As a child I went to a well funded Catholic school in Chicago. Fighting was discouraged by priests who would put the two kids in a boxing ring - we were made to use gloves (but I don't remember helmets). Both kids would have a priest in their corner, but really for their own amusement. Then they would ring the bell and the two combatants would have at it.

What those who don't box don't know is that unless you are trained, boxing exhausts you almost immediately and the gloves very quickly become so heavy you can hardly lift them to punch. At the end of the first round, the priests would ask us if we wanted to continue, we would exhaustedly decline.

My only introduction to the ring ended with my opponent becoming a best friend, and most bouts ended the same.

Again, I'm not condoning this practice, and I'm not nostalgic about the period, but it seemed to have positive effects in a milieu that seems no longer to exist (I'm 73).

Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

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