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revenge?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
i know it's a story from sky news but still http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Headmaster-Kieran-Heakin-Savaged-In-Pupil-Grudge-Attack-By-Jermaine-Bullen-Over-Caning-In-Rochdale/Article/201004415612837
i dont condone what this guy did to his former teacher, you only have to look at the photo to see how bad the beating was. on the other hand it does make me more adament that physical punishment in school as a form of discipline is not the way to go.
one quote did make me roll my eyes though. from the teacher:
does anyone not find the above quote ridiculously ironic?
edit: although this could just be very sketchy. bbc news says
i dont condone what this guy did to his former teacher, you only have to look at the photo to see how bad the beating was. on the other hand it does make me more adament that physical punishment in school as a form of discipline is not the way to go.
one quote did make me roll my eyes though. from the teacher:
The committed Christian said after the case: "In spite of my injuries I have forgiven Jermaine and I don't want any revenge.
"He lost his self control for a moment and will pay for that for many years to come.
does anyone not find the above quote ridiculously ironic?
edit: although this could just be very sketchy. bbc news says
Outside court, Mr Heakin denied Bullen's unsubstantiated claims about the corporal punishment.
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Comments
With that argument thoroughly crushed, I shall state my view. If the version of events we have is correct, Jermaine Bullen needs to grow up - he wouldn't have been caned for no reason whatsoever. So he was punished at school 20 years ago? Big deal. That was then, get over it. The fact he carried out a revenge attack doesn't prove that physical punishment of children is wrong.
It just proves that he's a complete and utter cunt.
okay let me quote myself
going by that quote it's pretty clear that im stating my own view rather than trying to class it as 'right' or 'wrong'. i like the way you state compassionately that he needs to 'get over it'. as i mentioned in my edit the reasoning behind his violent actions aren't clear. if i were to assume the story from sky news is correct then i think it's worth noting that holding a grudge from childhood isn't exactly abnormal. are you saying no one imagines taking revenge out on someone that has wronged them? i accept that what this man did was wrong but seeing as we dont know the extent of his claimed physical abuse it's a bit tricky to judge him right now.
i wanted to add a personal story but seeing as this is p&d i don't particularly want people like sg taking a narrow-headed shit on it but here goes:
it reminded me of a story from my mum's childhood. she was getting caned by this one teacher and my grandfather (just to give you an image- he's a bit like dumbledore from harry potter) went to the school and told the teacher 'i do not want you to harm my daughter ever again'. and the teacher never did. overly sentimental i know but it's a shame this guy's dad never marched upto the school and told him to not touch his son.
I appologise, I must've misread, or missassumed.
I do not agree with corpral punishment in schools, to me I cannot see how one isolated issue would change my mind making it worse (although I do despise it already)
With ref to your mums story, I'd do the same for my boy if that happened. However my son started nursary and they do have quiet time which I agree with, aka if my son is very naughty he gets put in quiet time/time out. it works amazingly well (we use it at home as well)
Physical punishment on child is not needed.
im gonna lose any ounce of credability but there was this story line in eastenders. this bloke billy had been abused at a care home i think and had a chance meeting with the man who had abused him. everything flooded back and billy kicked the crap out of him.
i know this is changing the topic a bit but i know that whilst watching that episode i sympathised with billy and even slightly understood his actions but in no way do i condone them.
Nobody would think this attack was justified. But we can make a distinction between justifying something, and explaining and understanding it.
What this guy did to his teacher is not excusable, but it's at least partly understandable. If you tell children it's ok to inflict pain on people as punishment, you can't be too surprised when they do things like this.
If you beat children they learn to do the right thing not because they've understood and internalised the reasons why it's wrong, but because they are afraid of another beating. So it's totally ineffectual as a method of discipline, if we think we should be trying to teach children right from wrong. When they are big enough that they can dish out the beating themselves, they have no reason not to do so, as they've never had to learn that it's wrong.
That's the consequentialist reason why we shouldn't beat children - it's counterproductive. That's before you even get on to the fact that it's just wrong, plain and simple.
I think that combining 'corporal punishment' and 'violence' as one idea is misleading and emotive. Is chastising a child verbal abuse?
If a child is told, "What you are doing is wrong. Next time, if you continue to do it, I will have to spank you", this is different to whacking a child indiscriminately who did not understand the implications of their actions.
The guy that attacked the headmaster has a long history of violence and crime. I would guess that his issues relate to humiliations in his home life when he was growing up and not to the discipline meted out by the teacher. He probably saw the headmaster as a generalised 'focal point' for revenge in his mind because he could hardly (presumably) beat his parents up 20 years later for what they might have done to him as a child.
Having said that, I am not a supporter of corporal punishment. If a child consistently misbehaves, exclude them and pass them back to the care of their parents.
Unfortunately, it seems in many of these cases, that the parents believe that its the schools responsibility to raise, educate and discipline their children and are completely unsupportive of trying to keep their children on the straight and narrow.
Agree: part of the explanation being that Bullen is clearly a criminally-inclined psychopath.
LOL!
I agree with that. But I think that psychopaths are made, not born.
One way of making a psychopath would undoubtedly be to beat the shit out of them as a child.
I'm not saying that's what happened in this case. But it's certainly one good reason not to beat children.
I don't think that matches up with medical research. Early indicators have been found in young children.
Well, a quick search on Google would contradict this. Agreed, I didn't clarify that not all psychopaths are 'born' - but they certainly aren't all 'nurtured'.
I agree with others who have said there are more effective ways of disciplining children than corporal punishment. However, I do have an issue with the wording of your post. This was not 'abuse' of a child by a teacher. Whether you agree with it or not, corporal punishment was, until relatively recently, considered a perfectly acceptable way of maintaining discipline. And, while there were undoubtedly some sadistic teachers who left children emotionally damaged, most were not. Almost everyone over 40 remembers getting the strap, the cane or the slipper, or whatever, at least once during their schooling, and we haven't all turned into violent misfits.
All things considered, it is probably good thing that corporal punishment is no longer used in schools, but I don't think anyone should try and excuse what this man did to his former headmaster as if he had it coming.
Apart from the fact that violence as a form of punishment is wrong, I think maybe the reason it's not effective is that it is about fear rather than consequences. Any child who is only punished through violence isn't learning why they shouldn't do certain things, or what kind of thing they need to do if they do something wrong. They're not taught how to resolve issues, so they don't know how to do it.
I haven't said that the headmaster 'had it coming', but I think if children are sent mixed messages we can't be surprised when some of them do things like this. It doesn't excuse what he's done.
The fact is that, however unacceptable it may be in today's society, corporal punishment ("violence") WAS considered acceptable to my parents' generation. To many of them, it still is. How often have you heard elderly people say things like, "back in my day, we would have been given a clip round the ear", "my dad would have tanned my hide for a remark like that" or "things have never been the same since they got rid of the cane". And this from people who were actually on the receiving end as children. I'm not condoning it, but you cannot say that corporal punishment was never acceptable. Misbehaviour was simply dealt with differently back then.
Actually, you did. But I agree with the definition you have given above, so perhaps it was just a slip - wrong choice of word may be?
For example, if you hit a young child for pushing another child, they might learn that they shouldn't push people, but they don't know why they shouldn't. So in their mind things like hitting, taking their toys or pinching are ok because they're not pushing. It sounds to me like many adults who were punished through violence as children feel that it's a good system for those reasons, they never learned how to deal with the complexities of certan situations and just want what they see as something quick and easy to deal with the problem.
I've just checked my first post again and the word 'abused' refered to actual abuse, which I've already given my definaition for.
I was on the recieving end of it when I was at primary school. It was a sharp smack to the arse for messing around and drawing on other peoples' work. I was 4 at the time and I remember quite vividly never wanting to do something that got me a smack in school again.
And when i got home and cried that I'd had a smack I got another one off my dad lol.
Seriously though, it never did me any harm. I can't see it coming back, but sometimes corporal punishment when used appropriately and at the right time is very effective, imo.
The more you write, the less I think you know what you are talking about. You seem to think that corporal punishment was randomly dished out for minor things like pushing. Yes, as Whowhere says, you might have received a smack from your class teacher for serious misbehaviour in kindergarten, but corporal punishment (properly administered) for older children was never random or unexpected. And, don't for one moment think that children didn't understand why they were being punished. That's just plain naive.
In my experience, having been caught doing something that was considered bullying, dishonest or damaging to property, violent or otherwise dangerous, a child would receive an appropriate reprimand from the teacher, matron, prefect or other person in authority, and sent to see the head teacher. The head teacher would then decide whether the crime merited corporal punishment. By the time I went to school, the days of being given a random beating by an older child or class teacher (in front of the whole class), were long gone.
I was about 14, at boarding school, and my dorm mates and I had got way over-excited and went on the rampage with some tubes of paint from the art room, with which we proceeded to 'decorate' the dormitory ceiling. All good fun, until the matron came in and found daubs of paint all over the ceiling, floor, furniture and bedclothes. All six of us were summoned to see the head mistress at break time later on that day. We were terrified. Of course we knew what we had done wrong, and why it was wrong, and we knew what was coming. We got a severe telling off, our parents were informed and we each got a belt with a slipper. Then we had to try and clean up the mess.
In fact, in view of the damage we had done, I reckon we got off pretty lightly, but the shame of the whole thing guaranteed that we would never do anything like that again. Now, you may argue that the belt with the slipper was unnecessary, and I wouldn't disagree. In our case, it probably would have been enough that we were hauled up in front of the head and our parents were told. But the slipper didn't so much hurt as shame - especially as there was a delay between the incident and the punishment. You had to make an appointment!
The way you talk of "violence" and "hitting" children, brings to mind some nightmarish vision of "Tom Brown's School Days". In most schools, it really wasn't like that at all. Unfortunately, there were, undoubtedly, sadistic teachers who enjoyed inflicting pain for the most dubious reasons and, as I have said before, it is probably a good thing it no longer happens. However, to compare corporal punishment to racism or rape within marriage is to show a complete lack of understanding.
Reread what she said. She's not comparing corporal punishment to racism or rape within marriage, if by that you mean, saying they are comparable wrongs.
She's saying that just because we used to believe that something was morally acceptable, doesn't mean that it was acceptable. We used to believe that there was no such thing as marital rape, because we falsely believed that men were entitled to have sex with their wives whenever they liked. That doesn't mean that when men raped their wives back then it wasn't rape, or that those rapes weren't wrong. They were, because it's always wrong to rape someone. Just because we used to hold some false views about what things were acceptable doesn't mean those things were actually morally right then.
If beating children is wrong, then it's always wrong. It wasn't somehow ok 40 years ago but is now wrong. We might not think we can hold the teacher blameworthy, if the false belief that it's ok to beat children was widespread enough. But nonetheless, beating children is wrong.
Well, that is the trouble with the written word. It is open to interpretation. From my point of view, Naturegodess was trying to draw an inappropriate comparison.
Again, we, i.e. you and I, believe that corporal punishment of children IS unacceptable. But we are talking in the past tense. Unfortunately, 40 years ago, it was WAS the accepted practice. Not only was it not considered wrong, it was considered good discipline. You cannot therefore hold a teacher blameworthy for administering discipline in line with the culture of the time - whatever your own opinion of the practice might be.
And, although I thought I had made myself clear, we are not talking about the sustained and indiscriminate "beating" of children here, which would always have been regarded as cruel and unjustified, even by my parents' generation. The incident that sparked this act of revenge was a caning of a 6-year old tearaway, administered in line with school discipline.
But it is an emotive subject and I recognise that I am arguing devil's advocate.
It is also true that it is wrong.
These two things aren't necessarily connected. They can come apart. I can believe something to be true that isn't true. So someone can believe that corporal punishment is morally acceptable, when in fact this is false.
I did say, if you read my post properly, that we don't necessarily have to hold the schoolteacher blameworthy. If you live in a time or a culture where there is a widely held false belief, like racist and sexist views used to be, or the view that it's ok to beat children, then we can say that you cannot be blamed for holding that belief too.
Nonetheless, that belief is false, and when you beat the child, you are doing something that is wrong. You might not be expected to know that it is wrong; we might say that you can't be held morally responsible for doing something wrong; but what you are doing is wrong.
Nothing drives me crazier than the moral relativism that many people jump to when they blur these distinctions. Just because it was once widely held that it was acceptable to own slaves doesn't mean that it actually was acceptable to own slaves. Even if we think the slaveowner couldn't have been expected to know what he was doing was wrong, it was still always wrong to own slaves, in all times, all places, all cultures.