Cause and Effect of Anti-Bullying Laws

One of the current crusades of the social justice movement is to bully bullies. By passing anti-bullying policies, which tend to work by prohibiting free speech and expression, school administrators believe they can bully kids into not bullying kids. It’s a rather strange theory; one that doesn’t seem to be panning out:

It started as a simple look at bullying. University of Texas at Arlington criminologist Seokjin Jeong analyzed data collected from 7,000 students from all 50 states.

He thought the results would be predictable and would show that anti-bullying programs curb bullying. Instead — he found the opposite.

Jeong said it was, “A very disappointing and a very surprising thing. Our anti-bullying programs, either intervention or prevention does not work.”

The study concluded that students at schools with anti-bullying programs might actually be more likely to become a victim of bullying. It also found that students at schools with no bullying programs were less likely to become victims.

Once again we see the Law of Erisian Escalation coming into play. By imposing order in the form of anti-bullying policies school administrators have cause chaotic bullying to escalate. This stems from the fact that bullying is a societal matter, no a legal matter. Trying to solve societal matters through legal means is a recipe for failure. By definition the lawless don’t comply with the law. Passing laws to curtail the lawless is like dumping kerosene on a fire to put it out; you only make the lawless person more lawless and the problem persists (or gets worse).

2 thoughts on “Cause and Effect of Anti-Bullying Laws”

  1. The only way I found to stop bullying when I was in school was to fight back and win a few fights. This lead me to get in trouble because schools are a place you cannot legally defend yourself. So my solution to stop bullying is to let kids fight back without consequence.

    1. Fighting back does wonders to stop bullying. It also helps the kid that was being bullied by raising his confidence.

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