This is the only word that matters for the purposes of the crime she’s accused of committing.
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I have a feeling that it won’t be long before the thread gets arrested.
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But she didn’t do either of those things. Seriously. You can’t use that logic. She mixed safe liquids together, and added salt - and so we’re clear, adding enough salt to cause an electrolyte imbalance would render it undrinkable. Same for lemon juice and vinegar. They might upset your stomach, but then again, probably not, especially when you are a kid. You dont have a citrus allergy if you drink gatorade, and acetic acid is a natural byproduct of a number of metabolic reactions, so no one in a position to be a bully is going to be allergic to that.
Lets apply your logic to another situation - Kid punches bully. “But what if he had used a baseball bat, or a gun!” - No. That’s stupid. He didn’t. There is no rational reason to think he would. That’s a terrifying escalation from “consequences for my bully” to “trying to kill him”.
I’m fine with not praising her for it, it certainly shouldnt be listed under “parenting best practices”, but kids feed themselves more dangerous, and worse tasting, drinks from the soda fountain every day. Arresting her for mixing stuff you cook with every day into gatorade is just stupid.
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This may not apply to the really stupid or self-destructively antisocial ones; but the bullies of my experience were generally pretty canny in their use of authority figures as implements: they know that an environment of spotty, but occasionally intense, enforcement rewards being able to goad a target into response and act as necessary to ensure that the response is treated as the problem.
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That’s the wrong analogy. The kid isn’t being accused of anything. His mother is. So let’s make the analogy accurate to what happened here. Parent punches 13 year old bully (I don’t know the ages involved here, but the school is K-8, so I’m just using the likely oldest age). Would that be ok?
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Mother was wrong and stupid.
However “he is a child” sounds like the sort of thing that would be said of a bully at several previous incidents along with “boys will be boys” and “there was no real harm done”. We do not know what measures were taken previously. We do know that school administrations tend to say they take bullying seriously and do nothing of the sort and tend not to protect the child being bullied,
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No. It is a statement of fact. He is a minor. Legally, this makes a big difference. And I find it ironic that you are pointing out that “there was no real harm done” as not being a valid excuse for bullying, and yet that is the exact excuse being used in this thread for the mother’s behavior.
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Mother’s behaviour is in the same veins as bullying.
It is a fact that he is a child. However it is often used to excuse unacceptable behaviour.
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And I am not doing that at all. I am only addressing the mother’s actions.
I want to make this 100% clear. I have very little, if any, sympathy for the bully in this story. The school is probably not doing enough to address bullying, because most schools across the country are not doing enough to address bullying. That needs to be addressed. None of that excuses what the mother did here, or makes her behavior not a crime. We, as a society, cannot function if we allow people to take every conflict into their own hands like this. This time, no serious harm was done. Next time…that might not be true. And again, I am not saying the mother should have the book thrown at her and locked up for years. Community service seems like an appropriate sentence to me. I don’t know if that’s what will happen here, but I hope so. Putting her in jail is not going to improve this situation.
Ok, I’ve said all I need to on this subject. I’m just going around in circles here and I’m getting tired of it. You all enjoy the rest of the discussion in this thread. I’m out!
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Turns out this continues to bug me, so I just need to process it.
Wow, that’s not true at all. The bullies I dealt with when I was a kid would have done exactly this. They loved the attention, the sympathy, the ability to play the victim when they were in fact the abuser.
And the more I think about it, I’m not surprised neither the kid or mom went to the school about the bullying. Bullies often get that way because they know they have cover from authority. Multiply that by 100 in Texas. In one of the schools I went to, I was directly blamed by figures of authority for being bullied. There was no help going to them, and most likely they would have told the bullies about it and that would have lead to retribution.
There is no crime. There was no intent to harm - the concoction was literally harmless, as designed, by a health professional. There was no harm in fact, either. The concoction was harmless. The bully made up all of the symptoms entirely for dramatic effect. It’s like saying harm was caused by giving someone water, but because they thought it was poison, let’s treat it like it was.
When authority protects the strong and harms the weak, yes, the ONLY way society can function is when we solve the problems ourselves. We cannot expect authority to save us when they’ve already proven they don’t care.
And part of the reason I’m reacting so strongly is that, while it’s unlikely my mom would have done this, this is exactly the kind of thing my grandma (a nurse, coincidentally) would have done to solve this problem. And there is no way she would have deserved to be arrested, charged with, tried, or convicted of a crime for it.
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And this kind of stunt wouldn’t?
What outcome did the mom expect for her poor kid? That the bully would take a swig, do a spit-take and say “By Jove, you sure made a monkey out of me! Points to you, good man! You’ve just won my respect!”
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I don’t think it would have. It’s subtle enough (not in terms of taste, but of action) that it would be likely to serve the intended purpose, getting a response of - “Ew, this is nasty! How long has this been in your locker!” And no more drink-stealing, without any retribution.
It’s not like it was Tabasco sauce. The additives were consistent with the existing taste of Gatorade - just amplified in an unpleasant way.
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So if the mother intentionally makes her child a liverwurst and onion sandwich in the hopes that the food thief would no longer want to steal her son’s food does that rise to the level of a crime?
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I feel like I should respond, but all I have is “Heh, whoops!” but saying that requires a lot of filler to get over the minimum character count. So there we are!
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but see
Regardless of whether or not this is a crime, how could she have possibly thought that a practical joke is a good way to respond to bullying? Her stunt, whether legal or not, could only exacerbate the bullying. There are good ways for parents and children to respond to bullying. Pranking sure as hell isn’t one of them.
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Vinegar
Salt
Lemon
Gatorade
We’ve all consumed these things. These aren’t harmful individually or in combination. Not a crime.
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It wasn’t a prank. It was a direct, minor negative effect of the bullies own behavior. It was a harmless bit of negative stimulus in response to an undesirable behavior. It’s behavioral psychology 101.
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It probably would have been had the bully not noticed, but if we’re talking Psychology 101, I also think that it would have required multiple such unpleasant experiences to be effective in changing behavior (one bad batch of Gatorade isn’t going to put you off taking people’s drinks for life), so either the bully was meant to notice and get the message (in which case I would call it a prank) or the mom’s understanding of psychology was lacking.
In either case, I think the mom should have accounted for the possibility that the bully would figure it out and the consequences of that.
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But that’s not how behavioral psychology works. Negative stimulus response isn’t concious. It’s subconscious. You’re right that it would take multiple stimuli to cause persistent behavioral change. But realizing it was intentionally nasty wouldn’t actually change the response to the negative stimulus. The bad behavior would still be associated with a negative stimulus.
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