Discussion of Criminalization of School Bullying

Summary

School bullying is almost common in all schools across the world. Criminalization of school violence is not an effective solution to the problem. It not only increases the harm to children but also led to other criminal activities in students. There are many social, political, and economic factors that led to school violence. Criminalization has failed to address the root cause of school bullying.

However, it negatively affects the victims and aggressors. Criminalization is not an effective solution; it increases depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, low academic performance and other problems in students. Bullying prevention and rehabilitation programs should be started to decrease the problem of bullying.

Criminalization of Bullying

Bullying is a structural problem based on prejudices and stigmatization, and whose solution cannot be the criminalization of those who commit it. Bullying is discrimination because it prevents having the conditions conducive to learning for everyone involved in it, not only who is the victim but also who commits the aggression and who participates as observers.

School based bullying is common across the world, but there are many countries that deal with is strict. Criminalization of school bullying has no ground in the literature. There are many factors that led to the criminalization of school violence. There are many sociological theories that explain factors that led to the criminalization of school bullying. The main factor that led to school criminalization is the fear of society. Social and political fear about school crime and social insecurity led to school criminalization (Rios, 2011). The second factor is to make efforts to accommodate the rising structural realities and realignment of power (Hirschfield, P. J., & Celinska, 2011).

Social life is an import aspect of school criminalization. School bullying often leads to school violence. Teachers and principle mostly saw eager to transfer all the disciplinary responsibilities to police officers. Fear is an even more important factor leading to school criminalization in a safe school. This is not only a response to school violence. Research has indicated that the irrational and beliefs of politicians, educators, and parents towards the school and racially-based thoughts also lead to violent behavior. Scholars have considered the youth as a scapegoat of politicians and educators. They declined the help from the government and other corporations to deal with school violence (Hirschfield & Celinska, 2011).

School criminalization has moved the attention from fear of youth to bigger concerns founded in socio-economic and socio-political change and political interference in schools disciplinarian (Rios, 2011). Research regarding political engagement in school criminalization has indicated emergent structural political involvement. Structural political involvement in the school criminalization process has weakened the ideological foundations of school disciplinary practices and practical consequences. School penal transformations have changed the justice policies regarding school bullying. White and middle-class response to urban problems and their increasing taxes has contributed to increased youth violence in the school. Policies concerning youth poverty have also pressured the youth mind to use violence in school.

Deindustrialization and the penal industry have direct implications on school violence discipline practices. For example, billions of taxes invested in mass incarceration effective costly schools to improve their behavior, such as hiring costly teachers and guidance counselors. The penal industry's irregular distribution of education and their disinvestment in urban schools has shifted the focus. Moreover, the growth of a strong criminal justice system formed by powerful criminal professionals may have expanded the school criminalization by increasing the juvenile system or police roles in schools or allocation of school consultants and vendors that establish technologies to improve school crime recognition capabilities (Hirschfield & Celinska, 2011).

In literature, the effectiveness of government is now considered not by equally distributing the money and resource, improving human capital, or protective civil rights but rather by defending the citizens from crimes and holding the criminals responsible. Because public crime is a highly prioritizing the issue and is a politically easier way to shift the attention from deep to complex problems. In the school context, this model is highly applicable and showed through school crime collection data. This has also seen in school accountable reforms. New reforms and laws shifted schools to centralized policymakers at state and local levels. Poorly performed schools adopt these reforms to attain state-imposed achievement and attendance threshold (Cornell & Limber, 2015).

Zero tolerance policies regarding school violence have helped the government to mask social injustice but also opposing the significance of mitigating factors. The transmission of school discipline activities from schools to police or professionals also supports these factors as police are ill-equipped to deal with the psychological and social roots of school bullying. School criminalization doesn’t help to stop school bullying; rather, it has increased the rate of school violence (Hirschfield, 2008).

Jeness discussed the model of criminalization presented by the McGarrell & Castellano 1993. This model explains how the process of large criminalization can be understood. The model is divided into three levels. The first-level “structural foundation” discusses the social and cultural factors that produce crimes in society and how society response back to such crimes. The second level, “social organization of crimes and criminal,” indicates the factors related to perceived experiences of crimes as well as how legislation deals with it to combat the fear of crimes. The third is “trigging events,” which discusses what events lead to crimes (Jenness, 2004).

This model is directly applicable according to the school criminalization. School bullying is not a direct response to personal problems (Jenness, 2004). There is a number of social, political, and economic factors that led to school violence. Racial biases, social and ethnic inequality, fears of crimes, the criminal justice system, punishments, media attention to crime as sensational events, and political interference are some factors that play an important role in school bullying (George, 2010). Parent’s lack of attention towards their children's grooming and welfare and crime policies and legislation is also seen as a leading factor in school bullying incidents (George, 2010).

School criminalization has not decreased the school violence; rather, it does more harm to everyone involved- both who were bullied and those who bullied. Societies need to pay more attention to reduce crimes; criminalization will not solve the problem or mitigate the bullying issue in schools. According to the comprehensive 2016 study conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that criminalization alone would not solve the issue of school bullying. School suspension, criminalization, or expulsions has not only to fail to stop the bullying but also harm children. Criminalization is increasing the children's contact with the juvenile system and also increased risk of trauma, academic failure, and suicides in children (Rivara & Le Menestrel, 2016).

Students who witness acts of violence at school suffer later the same psychological, social, and school effects as the victims of these aggressions. These effects translate into drugs, crime, depression, social anxiety, and lower school performance (Feld, 2015). Although not a direct cause to bully suffering, as with the victims, some studies indicate that stalkers can be found in the antechamber of the criminal conduct. Although it is paradoxical, with their execrable attitude, stalkers often get the approval and even the admiration of some of their partners, which makes them strengthen their intimidating attitudes by achieving, at least momentarily, success with them (Feld, 2015).

There is a problem of enormous social inequality, and that has had a social impact. They are people who have already seen that their parents and grandparents continue to earn low salaries, they live in colonies with circles of violence, they are very specific colonies, where there is substance abuse, teenage pregnancies.

It does not mean justifying the commission of crimes, but of understanding under what conditions thousands of young people are developing in the country with high rates of violence, with an unequal economy, and few opportunities for development and social ascent through education or employment.

The vast majority come from communities where crime and violence are completely normalized, where many times, there is a family member in prison and has committed crimes. More cameras, more police, alternative measures are the only palliative to the phenomenon that will not be fixed in the background until we enter the macros. Criminalizing young people does not solve the problem but complicates it (Feld, 2015).

For many years, it was thought that young people are a problem, without realizing that they are a solution, a solution that has not only been abandoned and turned our backs on. If parents and reformers did their part, there would be no need to criminalize the school violence (Rios, 2011).

When talking about bullying in the school context, two positions are usually identified: the bully or stalker and the one who is bullied, harassed, or victimized. The young man who harasses, in general, when discovered, the school sanctions him and often expels him. It is not intended to justify actions such as harassment; it is simply to understand that in that situation, there are more than two people, more than the one who harasses and the harassed (Rivara & Le Menestrel, 2016).

It is to include in the analysis that both are minors, therefore they do not necessarily have the emotional maturity to understand the scope and effects of their actions, that more than indicating them with the finger, it indicates us as fathers, mothers, and community, who can reflect and prevent violence in the school context (Feld, 2015). For this, first of all, it could be important to understand violence as a relational phenomenon, which implies many dimensions, so it is quite reductionist to limit ourselves to a binary logic of the “good” and the “bad.”

If we consider school violence as a “relational” phenomenon, typical of any society, what we should focus on is the links, and existing networks in a school community and in a society where it is not possible to channel the aggression inherent to every human being, but through government initiatives, is repressed and punished with disproportionate violence, invisibilizing the needs of children. When mentioned, government measures mean the “safe classroom” Law, curfew initiative, review of backpacks for admission to schools, among others.

References

1. Cornell, D., & Limber, S. P. (2015). Law and policy on the concept of bullying at school. American Psychologist, 70(4), 333.
2. Feld, A. L. (2015). Jeffery W. Cohen and Robert A. Brooks: Confronting School Bullying: Kids, Culture, and the Making of a Social Problem.
3. George, C. (2010). Parents Super-Sizing Their Children: Criminalizing and Prosecuting the Rising Incidence of Childhood Obesity as Child Abuse. DePaul J. Health Care L., 13, 273.
4. Hirschfield, P. J. (2008). Preparing for prison? The criminalization of school discipline in the USA. Theoretical Criminology, 12(1), 79-101.
5. Hirschfield, P. J., & Celinska, K. (2011). Beyond fear: Sociological perspectives on the criminalization of school discipline. Sociology Compass, 5(1), 1-12.
6. Jenness, V. (2004). Explaining criminalization: From demography and status politics to globalization and modernization. Annu. Rev. Sociol., 30, 147-171.
7. Rios, V. M. (2011). Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys. NYU Press.
8. Rivara, F., & Le Menestrel, S. (2016). Preventing bullying through science, policy, and practice. The National Academies Press.