Discussion on:

Juvenile cyber-delinquency: Laws that are turning kids into criminals

In a society hell bent on making everything a crime/felony with zero tolerances (there are no more mistakes, it is a crime period), We have condoned our children to a future where everyone is going to be classified as a criminal. Today, things are considered a punishable crime, even as a minor, that stays on your record forever that when I was young would have just sent me home to my parents for a but whopping. No wonder we have so many people can not find work, outside of other reasons, there are many that with no malicious intent made a simple mistake but due to less giving laws now was made a serious crime and a felony which stays on their record and employers now search for and do not hire these folks even though the so call ed crime was 30 years ago when they were 16/17 of ages and has been a model citizen since with a loving family to support.
Sometimes I think we have fallen back to living like peasants under the emperors rule.
Next we will be told what not or can say (opps, happens now already)
Then, what we can or can not wear, What we can not read in a public library (too late again)
Sounds a lot like the Communism we were once against

We have got to get back to sperating out the simple mistakes people make from the malisious crimes and really bad people in our legal system, this is not the meaing and intent behind declaring independce for liberties, freedoms and justice.

Many of our laws actually conflict with this intent. As long as do not directly or some other means prevent someone else from their freedoms and liberties then no law should prevent me from mine, and then have justice when it does but only then and for that purpose only!!!

Time to Declare independence again from the same reasons now we did before!!!

well put. But I think you meant we have "condemned" our children to a bleak future.

maybe "consigned"

conned/owned would sort of fit too, and it's a homophone to "condoned"

Probably not what mwclarke1 meant, but it's clever.

might just work, as well.

hear hear, er, here also!

Laws should not be written to make people criminals. Your not a criminal because what you did harmed someone else, your a criminal because an arbitrary law says you are.

The focus on due process also plays into it. The judicial system has removed the power for a judge to decide a case and penalty based on it's own merits. Privatizing the prison system has ensured that business interests lobby for minimum sentances and mandatory jail time for everything. The judge has been reduced to hearing the case, accepting the verdict and reading a stock penalty off a menu.

Let's not leave the politions out of the discussion; they all claim to be "tough on crime" because when the next vote comes around, they don't want to be slandered by the oposition as "soft on criminals". "Tough on Crime" doesn't work. "War on Something" doesn't work. The War On Drugs has been an abismal failure that mis-directs immence finances and resources away from actually solving the problems with drug use; problems that could be solved at much lower financial and societle cost. The populartion of inmates encarserated for possessing a single stick of a crumbled dried weed that grows naturally pretty much everywhere in the world is absolutely insane. Get caught with a doobie, go to prison with rapists and murderers.. oh.. right.. for a minimum sentance of long enough to develop into a real criminal if you survive Con University without being stabbed to death over looking to long or looking to little at another inmate.

Rational thought has been completely tossed out with any form of justice system in exchange for a legal system that doesn't solve the actualy problems causing the increase in offenders. And this is supposed to inspire hope for the survival of future generations? Aperently the law makers get a free pass on the good drugs given this line of thinking they seem to present.

How can a nation that has the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world call itself "free"? The US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. This began to happen when the War on Drugs was escalated in the late 1980s, when petty victimless drug crimes could sometimes earn greater punishments than crimes of violence.

All of this has not made us a better nation, or a freer nation. And from what I sometimes read in the comments section of political websites, there are plenty of people who would gleefully incarcerate more of their fellow citizens for petty infractions if they had the power. How did we ever get so hateful of each other?

Cheap shot, I know.

I'd say it happened in baby steps; slowly and methodically taking each next step while lulling the public to sleep. Poor education and retoric ensures that the public does not think critically about it's government. Privatization of government systems and corporate interests insure that maximizing profits outweighs public interest (encarceration pays better than rehabilitation).

The government's petition website seems a complete farce. "legalize pot" was in the first three petitions and when it hit the minimum signatures the goverment coughed out a boiler plate response regurgitating policy based evidence rather than allowing any discussion of fact based evidence. And of course once a petition is responded to, it's frozen from collecting any more signatures so that pesky surfs can't continue to be represented. (I did not that the petition the day after was "actually take these petitions seriously and allow open discusson")

It's not all the US though, the UK gov is completely beyond any rational discussion of the drug issue to the point that there own lead scientific expert was pushed out for not following the political agenda (he's now presented research that an affective anti-depresent could be derived from magic mushrooms but the gov won't allow further reasearch because the medication is derived from a "bad" natural source instead of a pharmacutical company lab). And our gov here came very close to rational thought until your gov pushed them to drop all discussion of even decriminalizing pot. Highly adictive substances like alcahol and tobacco are "ok" but less harmful and less addictive substances remain under prohibition.. hm...

It's a mess all around really. Everywhere got an elite minority spending most of it's time worrying that someone is enjoying there life differently than the puritans and governments would like.

At least not the kind of education that would make it into government schools. The failure is a moral one, which topic is hotter than a third rail in public debate.

There won't be any targeted discussion of moral right and wrong in public school as long as there's a federal funding component, due the strings attached.

And forget the remainder of our (so-called) "culture" encouraging moral behavior... popular culture is actually the cause of the juvenile black hat phenomenon.

You can also leave out the parental component, they're asleep at the switch for the most part.

may be part of the solution. Is that what you think?

`

Yes, parents are, in general, both oblivious and apathetic to what their children are doing. Now, nobody get uptight and cry out, "not me!" If you truly do care and are involved with properly bringing up your children, then you are a rarity, to be commended, and you're not part of the problem.

But we can't simply "leave out" the parental component. It is the foundation for how a child learns what is right and wrong. A child develops much of his or her personality core by the age of six. That in itself rules out the education system as the only solution. Parents' first responsibility is to provide for their children - and not just food on the table and a roof over their heads. Parents are the ones who must instill in their children a proper work ethic, a proper respect for their fellow man, a proper respect for authority, and a proper sense of right and wrong. I know some parents who think it's hilarious that their two-year-old has somehow learned to give people the finger and to swear, even though neither parent does those things. They tell me, "They don't even know what it means, and they'll grow out of it." No, they won't! Before long, they'll figure out what it means, and if their parents simply laugh at it now, they are teaching their child not that it's disrespectful and unacceptable, but that it's funny. If parents see their child doing something wrong, no matter how the child learned it or whether the child even knows it's wrong, the parents have a responsibility, if they care at all how their child will grow up, to teach them that it's wrong, why it's wrong, and that there are consequences for doing it. Obviously, if the child didn't realize they were doing something wrong, you can't very well discipline them for it, but once you do tell them there are consequences, then if they continue to do it, you do have to discipline them, otherwise you will be, in effect, teaching them that "I didn't mean any of that, it's really OK, nothing will happen to you."

Sure, the school system can - and should - teach students about the laws of the land, about what is legal and illegal, and how those laws are evolving because of technology opening up new ways of breaking them. But it's that core sense of right and wrong that is paramount. If a child doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong, then they're not going to care whether something is legal or illegal. And parents simply have to start teaching their children about right and wrong right from the start. If they wait till their children are school-aged, they'll be fighting an uphill battle. If they leave it up to the school system entirely, then they'll lose the war. Those few hours in class cannot compete with the constant pressure from popular media, friends, and even video games - pressure to push the boundaries and break the laws, and to not care that it's wrong.

Children are only inquisitive if the object of focus , is unavailable...
It is hardly acceptable for the ones that continue to police the web to even be found caring...about their own situation or a child's...when the judicious thing is to incarcerate children in prisons for life...That's the policies of politicians that do not care for children men or women...they care about financial things, economics and the the legality to accomplish the acts necessitated...to allow them to be quickly to become millionaires...
Children need a separate web not attached to commercial accounts or government web servers. Then there is no excuse for the justice department or the IRS DEA, etc to lead them into another path called hacking or cyber war...while they read the pages of the Hollywood styled pages.

"Then there is no excuse for the justice department or the IRS DEA, etc to lead them into another path called hacking or cyber war"

Hacking itself is simply self directed learning by doing by a personality that is inquisive of a topic down to details other's do not bother with. It's DIY learning and creation. I would love for my children to be self directed learners who would rather discover there topics of interest rather than zombie out in front of TV show reruns.

Now, to be clear, I don't mean the mass media mis-representation of "hacker". When what one means is criminal acts the correct term is Criminal and that behavior should not at all be encouraged.

It is the kids that have the Hacker mindset towards learning that will move society forward; the inventors who will create the next big thing, the researchers who will improve the current thing's design flaws.

To Hack; to understand a given topic through a compulsion to learn through hands on experience and need to share what one has learned with other's to build on the existing knowledge base.

And, sadly, this kind of self directed curiosity is usually beaten out of kids by the end of early schooling in the persute to manufacturer office drones. One does not graduate the current education system; one survivies it.


The idea of a children's internet has been discussed over the years. Should kids have a children's only internet where all records are expunged at age of maturity when they graduate to the grown ups area.. it's an interesting idea though implementing it does have several challenges not the least of which is how do you limit kids access to it? If I think of a solution along these lines before other's do, I'll certainly share it for public consideration. Until then, responsability will have to remain with parents knowing how to use the tools the kids use and what the kids are doing when using those tools.

An MMORPG, actually.
To be featured: Games that introduce CLI, games that introduce scripting in various formats (from the very gamy to the very realistic), games that let them use a virtual machine and virtual compiler to write programs... that their mobiles can run!
Then the kids can have quests to check code submitted by their peers (actual and/or simulated) for bugs, weaknesses and malicious functionality... getting credibility awards for doing a good job.
When a user shares a malicious app (as will likely happen sooner or later, it can be used as a learning material; showing players how the bad app was propagated, what social engineering is like, how to resist it, how to build a network of trusted peers, how to decide which privileges to allow an app.

And if the kids won't go there, I sure as hell will!

Age of consent vs. age of culpability

I find it outrageous that the American judicial system can rule that in most states you???re not responsible enough to consume alcohol until you???re 21, yet can be sent off to war at 17 or are responsible enough to be tried as an adult in a court of law before you even hit puberty.

I find that the ludicrous amounts of so called ???damages??? suffered by corporations in a lot of hacking cases are complete ???B.S.???, hyper inflated projections, usually without a single shred of evidence to support they???re supposed loss of earnings or productivity.

It???s these crazy damages which justify the harsh penalties handed out to minors on IT crimes??? case in point with the fines and potential jail time for passing on copyrighted music and movies.

It???s seen again and again across the board???.juveniles running unguided through life, getting into small scrapes, being massively over punished, and thus alienated from society and pushed further into a less desirable lifestyle including crime.

Where are the parents? Why aren???t they being questioned on their parenting methods? Since when has it become not only OK, but the de facto standard for parents to out-source their roles and responsibilities to technology?
???Oh, my child watched a violent move and then attacked another kid, TV is too violent!???
- Ok, where the hell were you when they were on their own watching violent movies without getting parental advice on perspective?

???Oh, my child spends 10 hours a day on World of Warcraft and then hacked the Pentagon???
- Ok, why the hell didn???t you create a healthier balance with school/life/computers for your child? Why didn???t you promote the kids obvious intelligence and skills in IT in a constructive manner, rather than consigning them to search online for the friendship, guidance, communication and praising that they so obviously needed?

Kids are like puppies, if they turn out bad, its not their fault ??? they???re an empty vessel waiting to be filled, trained and developed??? it???s the parents failing, and they should be held responsible.

some people can have all the attention and guidance and still turn out "bad". Others that are neglected/abused can still turn out just fine.

.. all that mental health budget has been redirected toward the prison system so we can lock those people up rather than provide any real form of treatment or rehabilitation.

There are truly bad people.. but there are not nearly as many of them as the encarcerated population count would suggest. Consider other places that show a lower encarceration rate, lower and more humanely treated prison population and higher rehabilitation. There be something rotten here.

A criminal by any other name...

"Hacking itself is simply self-directed learning by doing by a personality that is inquisive of a topic down to details others do not bother with. It's DIY learning..." ???
So is dissecting frogs, kittens and puppies. And I'm telling you now, those kids rarely turn out right.

Are you seriously trying to tell us that being curious is a sign of sociopathy? I don't want you anywhere near the legislature, pushing them to pass laws that would (for instance) criminalize the act by children of reading source code. Screw that. What are you -- a malignant narcissist?

My children have been on the web since they were very young and I've never censored their activity, nor have I had to. If they've asked me about anything questionable neither I nor my partner have put off answering, even if there was something interesting on the TV. Parental interest can be as powerful as peer pressure, particularly in the early years.
Don't blame the Internet, you teach your kids to cross the road (I hope). The problem is many parents don't take the time to learn enough to provide the same sort of education for the Internet and many teachers also lack the knowledge.
Education can't work if the teachers are ignorant or uninterested.

Your poster gets pulled off a wall or marked up, you replace it with a fresh poster. Your website gets defaced, you re-upload your good copy. "not a big deal" - S. Jobs.

The question will and should remain, how did the person get into your website in the first place and why did the vulnerability remain available. Sure, the cracker that broke in did something wrong and if you can identify them, treat them as a vandal but that shouldn't be a way to mis-direct attention away from the neglegent company (unless proof of due dilligence can be provided).

"cyberbullying" is one of those BS terms invented to envoke emotional response without rational thought. It's a "cyber" something so it must be mystical magic; somehow totally different from bullying through any other medium including air. This is one place the law should never, ever have gotten involved; it's a perental responsability at minimum and community responsability at most not a legal issue. Leave police to deal with real crimes truly beyond the reach of civilians not sanctioned to use force. If your kid is being bullied, you talk to the school or the other parent or you help your kid develop a thicker skin. It's a problem as old as time and long since solved; the internet doesn't magically make it different.

For me, the biggest fear is the perminant nature of the internet. Kids are naturally stupid; we all did stupid stuff we where thankfull to leave behind us as we grew up. That is indeed being lost for the newer generations who have there entire lives digitized and archived(.org) for eternity. Once information is posted, it's free to the world. Information posted will inevitably eventually be used in ways not intended by the original poster. These are hard lessons to learn and not learning them before hand can result in serious consiquences. This is the one I can't suggest a solution for yet other than parents being responsible for there own children instead of expecting the internet to raise there kids for them. Your kid is alone with the computer in there room and you don't know what they are doing, saying, visiting;; why the F not? Your the parent; it is your responsabiility to know what they are doing, to be computer literate yourself.

And that's the main problem. There's no single solution to this. It's the parents' job to teach right and wrong, its the schools job educate, and its the governments' job to regulate. The parents these days either don't care, or are just as bad as the kids. Schools have to tip-toe around anything that could possibly be viewed as controversial to avoid ridiculous lawsuits, and the government has a hard enough time regulating adults (much less the children they can no longer even relate to.)

Saying that creating more laws creates more criminals is obvious, but doesn't really solve anything. Putting a law in place saying you can't wear purple would make me a criminal almost every day of the week. Making more laws, or even separate laws for children, wouldn't change anything. Until the other parts of the system are fixed, the whole will remain broken and our society will continue to decline. And it starts at home.

"...And it starts at home. "
If you want to change something or create new laws to fix this problem then make it about the parents first.

I've often wondered what might happen if we start punishing the parents for their children's infringements...if the child shoplifts, make the parent stand up in court to answer for the crime. I don't have children myself so I can't speak with any voice of experience. What do you guys think?

In writing for a sociology class I was taking, I came across the very same issues that you discuses in your article.
The first and I think the biggest impact that social networking will have on our society as a whole is that the Internet never forgets. One of the biggest things about being a kid is that you ???will??? make mistakes and do a lot of very dumb things as part of growing up. Just 20 years ago (when I was young), I had a group of friends and we had a place to hang out, whether it was at a one friend???s house or a special hangout that the group found. That special hangout was the place where the idiocy of adolescence took place. Today, kids no longer have that special hangout, instead, it is the Internet and versus social networks. This is an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome as they will no longer be able to outlive their adolescent mistakes. One would have to live and extremely restrictive and paranoid life just to come out of youth unscathed.
This leads to the next point about kids/teens and ???lapses of judgment???. As a whole, I believe it is societies responsibility (parents mostly) to teach kids what is right and wrong, the rewards and punishments and how best to live one???s life within said society. The problem that we face today is more on the lines of tolerance. As a society, it seems, we are no longer able to tolerate juvenile behavior and strictly punish all that disobey. I remember getting into fights as a kid, it was something that happens. I got in trouble and had to spend the day in the principal???s office and was told that if I did it again, I would be suspended from school. Today, if my son was to get into a fight, regardless of who started it or if he was only protecting himself, he would be expelled from the school district period. Children are not fully capable of controlling every aspect of their behavior. In some cases, they themselves do not know what they will do in certain situations. We need to roll the clock back to a time when kids were given ample time to play off all of their extra energy and when they were allowed to make simple and common mistakes (45 minutes of play time and zero tolerance in an 8 hour school day for a 6 year old is not ok). After that, we can look at how we deal with those that repeatedly break the rules. We need to let kids be kids again and provide them with safe, fun and stimulating places to hangout and just be a kid; something a growing majority of kids don???t have.

You are turned into a criminal by your own actions. Break the law, particularly on a regular basis and you are, by definition, a criminal.

As it stands, some things are only considered "bad" because there is a law against it rather than because it is actually bad. It was once illegal to consumer alcahol (and how well that worked out huh...).. so is having a drink "bad" or is a bad law imposing the idea that a drink is bad? What actually happened was bad laws and an influentual minority created a situation where violent crime proliferated with real harm towards society.

Consider the laws now popping up around copyright which turn a civil suit over contract disputes into a federal criminal case. A fifteen year old should face millions of dollars in claimed, yet unsubstatiated, damages because she copied the modern equivalent of a mix tape from a friend? What if bad laws had existed to make your recording a song off the radio a criminal act? If a law existed that said one could not listen to a CD with friends because that was "sharing music" would that make a CD in your car when not alone a bad thing or would that be a bad law?

A child pecks another child on the cheak in the school yard.. this is a normal "stupid kid" thing yet now schools respond with hurrasment charges against the child. Heck no, don't involve the parents first or rely on in-school punishments.. envoke the courts and lawyers and judges.. over a freaking peck on the cheak or mean word uttered?

I get the black and white angle; "criminal" is defined as one found guilty of breaking a criminal law. The question is deeper than that though; why does that law exist in the first place and was there a better way to respond to the prohibited act rather making it a responsability for federal legal resources? Some acts which truly harm others do justify the government responding through it's monopoly on cohersive force.. but do they all? Do all the new laws being signed in justify that force?

What I'm saying is we need to get rid of the negative connotations of the word, and realize it simply describes certain actions. Actions that, as a society, we have determined are not acceptable.

If you don't like all the new laws then you need to get involved in changing the representation that we elect to create those laws. The biggest hurdle to this though is that big business spends so much to get legislators to pass laws that only benefit them, personal privacy or rights be damned.

I heard the other day that Congress's approval rating was at a new all time low of 10%. But, I bet over 90% of the incumbents running this year will be re-elected because we listen to the canned sound bites that pander to the baser instincts of people. Pay real attention to what the candidates really believe, and not just the bad stuff they say about their opponents. We get the laws we deserve by being the sheep we are.

While the persistence, range, and audience for on-line indiscretions clearly eclipses anything in the pre-tech world, the behaviors are the same. Remember "Slam Books," the tart volumes circulated by the cool kids (not me) to "assess" the non-cool (me) kids? In my day, we were taught to consider the source. Bullying existed, but it was especially brutal behaviors that earned that epithet. Every hurt feeling, exclusion from a play group or birthday party, every slight, was not escalated (by adults) into a freaking Federal case. Indeed, today's misguided culture of full-inclusion-be-equally-nice-to-everybody is destructive, creating a generation of weak, whiny children who blame everything on someone else's behavior.

I know it is heresy to voice this, but nasty FB posts do not lead to suicide. Relatively innocent videos--however stupid--do not lead to suicide. Depression, isolation, lack of familial support, and other mental illnesses (and sometimes physical ones or fear of same, esp. HIV) may lead to someone suiciding, but it has become too easy--in this culture that loves quick fixes and hates ambiguity--to pin blame along with legal burden on stupid, insensitive children and youth rather than seeking root cause or living with the unknown.

This unfortunate trend cheapen bullying and does a true disservice to those who are truly victimized by more than bits and bytes. We need to take a GIANT step back, assess, and breathe.

And for once, I agree with Deb!

I prefer civil disobedience and dare governments to lock us all up. Share away folks.

...since finding proof is so much easier.
Bullying sucks, I think we can all agree on that, but in most cases nobody does anything about it, because they just hear claims and counterclaims. Teachers tend to act on allegations of bullying only when the alleged perpetrator is someone they've already decided is a bad egg in need to breaking (which is a flucked up attitude for a teacher to have). We've gotta remember that children are forced to go to school (barring alternative solutions, I know). They're forced to be there, and often being there isn't very nice. That causes stress, and some kids will act on the stress by picking on easy targets. That's not an excuse, but it is a fact. The thing is, if the community requires them to be there, the community also has a responsibility to make the experience bearable - and certainly to ensure that they're not victimized while thus incarcerated.

After all, going to school is also about learning how to deal with one's peers; do we really want to teach our coming co-workers that they've got a choice between being a bully or being a victim? Or to accept that someone else is victimized because it means they're themselves safe? A nation of thugs, victims and passive bystanders, not cool.

So... "Cyberbullying"... yeah, it's gotta be "not OK" to harass people, on the net/mobile or otherwise. But with children as the perps the point is NOT to throw the law at them. Bullying has to be addressed, but the justice system is not the right tool. It's a socialization problem.

On the other hand, if there's no law, it can be hard for the victim of bullying to get the proof. Dilemma?

While bullying is a social problem, we need someway to protect the rest from them while the bully is learning a different way of doing things. It's not OK to put programs in place that have no teeth, as there are those who will not accept that they are in the wrong no matter how much education they get. There has to be, at least as a last resort, serious, legal consequences. For the parents as well as the child!

It's also not OK to require the victim to acknowledge fault or force them to have to change their behavior. I speak from the experience of a close friends daughter. She won the school district citizenship award and topped her class in several subjects as a 12 year old. After 2 years of high-school, she was forced to spend all her time, both class time and recess, in an empty class room as the teachers would not protect her from attack Even in class!

She now suffers from depression and has attempted suicide! This is a person who had an enormous amount to contribute to society who will probably never reach her potential. A loss for all of us, not just those that know her.

This ensures that judges are not allowed to decide justice based on the indavidual merits of the case. A mandatory due process must be adhered to and madatory sentancing guidlines followed on outcome wich usually involves set minimum time served.

The trouble is having a legal system instead of a justice system and having that be the first response instead of the final stage with teeth reserved only for those who refuse every other attempt at change. The problem is everbody get's to claim victim status now not just those who are truly victimized beyond any possability of escape. We don't teach kids to consider the source and turn the other cheak. At the slightest indication, we claim that the victim can do no wrong and the big meany who uttered an unfavorable word must be handled by the courts.

I was the kid being teased and I was the agressor at different times throughout childhood. Everybody was. Kids are mean and inconsiderate.. that's part of not having matured to the point of learning better behavior. Most kids will outgrow that (different rates depending on parental influence and such of course). Why is it acceptable to criminalize the kids that will develop beyond the behavior through more socially responsible methods?

Parents are indeed to blame too of course with schools that are afraid of constant legal actions? Teach kids about evolution in some places; you'll be in court over that. Teach kids about creationism in others; that's a court visit again. Fail a child who did not demonstrate the minimum requirnments to move ahead to the next stage; court again.. and now we have "no child gets ahead" programs to insure mediocraty rather than accepting that some kids are smart and other's are not and that life is hard.

"I was the kid being teased and I was the agressor at different times throughout childhood. Everybody was."

There are many of us who were never aggressors. It's not a given that kids have to behave this way. It's got a great deal to do with the parents behavior. Parents should be legally responsible for the actions of their kids. The kid beats someone up, the parent is charged with assault on a minor and prosecuted.

after that it's social services care, soon after that it's "tried as an adult" - and presto, life of crime.

The thing is, we need to protect people from being bullied, not increase the stress of schooling. Put offenders in special ed classes, so the kids who know how to behave can be in peace.
Bully someone in third grade? You flunk third grade and gotta make up over the summer or be held back
Put empathy and consideration (and stress-reduction) on the curriculum.

A five year old pushes another at the water table so we charge the five year old's parents with assault? The five year old instead hits the other with a toy over the water table conflict and now a parent is charged with agrivated assault?

Kids have a natural inability to control there actions. Even at sixteen when we're handing them half a ton of metal to drive into stuff with, there is a level of compulsion control that is lacking. It's simple due to how us clever monkeys mature as we age not any thing wrong with a given child. We're going to hold adults criminally responsible for the actions of a child not capable of fully controling there behavior?

Life is complicated and hard. Throwing a new law at a problem doesn't fix it. Repeate offenders and children who are demonstrobly intentionally malicious.. yeah, there needs to be some intervention there. But if we toss up a law that says parents are held criminally responsible for the actions of the child given the mandatory sentancing and due process now enshrined in the legal system your going to see parents charged over every little incident. And your still not adressing the root cause of the issue; the lacking social development of the child. Your just finding a new way to apply vengance and make yourself feel better.

I only regret that I have but one vote to give.

I agree with everything you said, there.

But you know, the rules for how teachers are meant to deal with things are codified. They are law.

They're not criminal law, nor are they civil law. But if we want teachers to have a common guideline to go to in case of bullying, and if we want them to have the resources at their disposal to do something about it, that's law.

A law can say, for instance, that the both victim and perpetrator are entitled to counseling (the victim, to cope - the perp, to grow some sense). Without this entitlement, they're not going to get it, because the political/municipal/foundation oversight won't allow the schools to set aside the funds for frivolous expenses.

A law can be just a protocol for letting things be done well.