Editorial #117: Paying the Price for Bullying

What a joy it is to see that one school district is now charging a fine when bullies bully.

The Milton City Council recently approved a city ordinance that city officials hope will prevent bullying by toughening the community’s stance on harassment and charging offenders with fines. Fines for a first time offense could cost up to $100. Second time offenders could pay up to $500.

The upside of this is that parents will try much harder to stop their kids from bullying.

The downside is that whomever gets caught will more likely than not be seen as the bully, even if they are acting in self-defense.

A further downside is that sometimes autistics lash out when they are overloaded, or when their personal spaces are invaded, or when they are touched unexpectedly, or what have you. If they wind up getting slapped with a fine for that, the autistics in that district are going to have a fight on their hands trying to explain themselves and it is hard to know what would be the outcome of such an event.

Each situation has to be weighed in turn. In places around the world, there have been instances where, in response to situations where autistic children have gone ballistic in hit teachers, fellow students, etc., parents or caregivers have whined that the school districts have not been very accommodating to their children with autism. And yet, even when the districts gave the children everything the parents asked for, their kids STILL wound up hitting people and wrecking the classroom.

So this thing about the fine has got to be looked at more closely.

But here is the main point: If parents made more of an effort to stop their children from bullying in the first place, such radical measures like the one we see in Beloit would not be needed in the first place.

Replies to this editorial are welcome.

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