Why are student-on-student crimes in high schools (like assault) often prosecuted under school rules only, and not law?
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TLDR: Bullying isn’t seen as serious enough to warrant involving the authorities. It would require a very serious event for the Police to even want to get involved with bullying. For example serious physical injury. Teachers as care givers are empowered to act on the behalf of parents to punish children and discipline to try to correct behaviors but today there are strict limits on what they can do.
I recall something I told the High School principal in my last year of High School when after being bullied relentlessly for years they still refused to act on it.
“When you bully a person in High School it’s just boys being boys, but when you’re an adult suddenly it’s called assault and harassment and it becomes a crime.”
In hindsight the amount of harassment I was receiving would have been adequate for a restraining order as an adult. But bullying is accepted by a lot of people as just a part of growing up, and that it toughens people up, or some other nonsense. That’s why it’s called bullying instead of harassment or assault.
Children are also psychologically very different from adults so depending on their age you have to use different techniques to try to correct behaviors.
Bullying is a serious problem but it’s rarely treated as a crime. Getting evidence and witnesses to prove assault to the Police with children is very difficult and showing that it’s bad enough warrant jail time is even harder. Bullying is so common place and seen as relatively minor (compared to things like gang violence, threatening people with firearms, or murders, for example) so the attitude is to treat it as a psychological problem and to use punishment to correct the problem. School Guidance counselors meanwhile have limited resources and are limited on what they can do without parental permission. Since bullying is often caused by problems at home the parents of bullies often a big part of the cause and refuse the treatment.
Another factor is that having a criminal record is life limiting and there’s an attitude that you should avoid calling the police at all costs because of the long term effect it could have on the bullies life. Police similarly won’t charge a juvenile with a crime like assault unless it’s extremely serious. But the long term psychological effects on those being bullied aren’t considered in the equation.
The attitude used to be that bullying is just something kids do. Corporal punishment used to be commonplace, suspensions were rare, and calling in the police was virtually unheard of unless someone was serious injured or killed. The classic problem being that reporting a bully to authorities often just makes the problem worse as they later take it out on those who reported them.
Schools today are a lot harder on bullying than even a decade ago, but it’s still a massive problem. Anti-bullying campaigns often have the opposite affect of making bullying more commonplace as the bullies by definition won’t follow the prescribed prevention techniques, or worse actually end up learning how to be better bullies from the training.
It often falls on the parents to pay for expensive psychological treatment for their children so it often doesn’t happen for financial reasons, or a straight refusal to admit the problem with their child. Without a legal intervention the schools and the bullies parents will try anything to prevent their child from being expelled but that may be the only recourse in the long run.
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