Meadmaker said:
Any time restraints are applied, of whatever sort, whether it is by hand or by handcuffs, there is a small risk of injury. It happens, especially when people, including children, resist the application of restraints. Should children never, therefore, be restrained? I think all of us would agree that such a policy would be foolish. Children must, in some cases, be restrained. If anyone disagrees, let him speak up. We need some more non-parents to ridicule.
Which suggests a strawman. The point is not whether children should be restrained, but rather by who and how they are restrained. Situations where handcuffs are necessary would be rare, or so I would imagine...
OK. So if they have to be restrained, how should they be restrained? Clearly, the prevailing opinion is that the form of restraint should minimize the risk of injury. Correct? That is the prevailing opinion, is it not?
Well, it isn't my opinion.
The chance of injuring the child by "just grabbing her" is very, very, small. It is larger than the chance of injury posed by applying handcuffs, but it is still very small.
In my opinion, the type of restraint used should be the most effective form that poses an acceptable risk of injury. In the case of dealing with small children "acceptable" is very low indeed. However, "just grabbing her" would be well within my threshold of acceptable risk. If there were a significant risk of danger from grabbing children, most of our own children would never have made it to school age.
Ahh... but there are differences here. First, this is not a parent and a child. There is general agreement that a parent can and should take such action. However, the parent generally (with some awful exceptions) will care deeply about the welfare of the child and will be very familiar with the child. The child, likewise, will be familiar with the parent...
While there are some wonderful teachers out there, there are also some stinkers who may not care much about a kid. Very few will have the familiarity with a child's physical state as a parent will.
However, none of this explains why, if a school decides to allow a teacher to grab a child, that the school should be able to dodge financial responsibility for an injury caused by a zealous teacher grabbing a kid with perhaps a physical condition. That is what removing the risk of lawsuit does.
In theory, the risks have been weighed, and the risk of injury determined significant enough to leave these situations to others. That is what tort liability does.
My outrage at this incident is not aimed at the application of handcuffs. My outrage at this situation is at the failure to apply more effective means earlier. I am outraged that an entire classroom full of kids was emptied because no one could "just grab her" and force her to stop. If she failed to stop when reasonable force was applied, then she could have been removed.
Would this have resulted in greater risk of injury? Yes it would have, but the risk would still have been very, very, small. In my youth, I saw this happen on a number of occaisions, and I can't recall any resulting injuries. I'm not saying they never happened, but they were very, very, rare.
This kid was allowed to shut down an entire classroom because there was a 0.01% chance that an injury would result from "just grabbing her". Of course, most of those injuries would be bruises. In all but bizarre cases, a dislocated shoulder would be the worst that could come about. (I obviously made up the number, but I think I could grab 10,000 kids and only hurt one of them. Maybe not. Maybe only 1,000, so 0.1%, but see below.)
Do people really care about probabilities that small? I don't think so.
Going to point out that there is a problem here. If a parent has a child with a bunch of brusies or a dislocation, the unlikelyness of the injury isn't going to carry much soap. In fact, if we apply your numbers and a bit of bayesian style analysis we may reach an ugly conclusion:
If an injury is indeed by chance when a tracher simply removes with as little force as necessary is 1 in 10000....
What do we say about the number of occasions where a teacher out of frustration simply hurts a kid? 1 in 1000?
Then an injury is 10 times more likely to be the result of a hot-head teacher being too rough than chance.
All of these numbers are just made up, but the point is that yes, chance injuries may occur, but I'll bet that more occur because some teacher is a hot-head. In fact, I'd place the level of "innocent" injuries as a lot more remote than 10000-1 against, which makes it even more likely that some level of negligence or malice is involved when it does happen.
So what are they afraid of? They are afraid of that "expert witness" testifying in court that the rash actions of a teacher created the possibility that the child could have been harmed. And schools are so afraid of this possibility that they put policies in place that prevent effective measures to stop this behavior.
Perhaps that is how most injuries occur, as per the completely fabricated analysis above, so the fear is well founded.
Furthermore, it should be emphasized that those policies don't even minimize the risk of injury. While that child is running about, breaking things, and climbing on furniture, her risk of injury is higher than if she were restrained by somebody "just grabbing her". However, what those policies minimize is the risk of injury caused by school officials. If they do nothing, they are less likely to be accused of causing her injury, or of taking an action that might have caused an injury.
The policy appeared to have allowed the teachers to remove the child from furniture, and that was reflected on the tape. I'd imagine it allowed them to also physically restrain the child in other severe circumstances on the general principle that the child's safety outweighed the interest in the protection of property, but that is speculation.
If what you say is true, then there should be lawsuits where the child is hurt via negligence as the school pretty clearly has a duty to act to protect the child. These would include the the same experts and so forth as a trial for negligent action. For some reason the school has chosen to err on the side on inaction. I'd speculate that this is because experience has shown that the policy in place carries the least risk of negligent injury once all the variables (including the chance that the teacher is a hot-head) are considered...
As for "beating the crap out of her", that has never been allowed in my lifetime, unless you count paddling in that category. If a teacher "beats the crap out of"a student, in my opinion the appropriate response is to fire the teacher, and press charges if appropriate. Instead, what would probably happen, in addition to those things, would be that the school district would be sued.
Whoa!!! Hold on a sec....
How are they going to be sued if the "problem" of all these lawsuits is "fixed" by the Republicans? Is this going to be some magic bill that will allow lawsuits only in cases of actual abuse and not where some well meaning teacher grabbing a child slipped or something?
If the problem is too many lawsuits making people too careful I don't think the possibility of a lawsuit can be used to solve that problem.
Sometimes (or usually in my experience) civil liablility provides the opportunity for a party to expose wrongdoing. The criminal and school administration would rather that everything be fine and would be more likely to just push things under the rug (like with the Catholic Church), whereas a civil plaintiff has a bit more interest in discovering evidence of wrongdoing. It isn't like when a kid is abused in a school the school sends home a note saying that the kid was harmed for no reason.... There tends to be a coverup of some sort, and offically allowing physical contact by teachers can serve as a useful story...
So, an unruly child causes an unstable teacher to finally lose it, and do something he shouldn't and the consequence in America is that the classmates of the unruly child would lose some of their educational opportunities, because the money that could have been used to hire a replacement teacher went to the family of the unruly student.
Yeah. Maybe a child that gets beat up by a teacher should just take one for the team....
However, as this thread reflects, the threat will hopefully cause a school to take measures to avoid the problem, like screening teachers and removing opportuinities for abuse.
Plus, if we consider the "motivation to investigate," I can logically make the claim that absent the lawsuit the unstable teacher will simply continue to collect victims as there will be a lesser likelyhood of a real outside investigation into claims of abuse.
It makes them take these situations seriously and develop sane policies, like not having teachers physically accost small children without proper training, or not building a compact car where the gas tank is placed so it will explode if you are rear-ended...
When I was growing up, teachers were trained in such areas as math and history. They had a fairly intutive grasp of how to accost small children, without the need for specialized training. I can't see the modern situation as an improvement.
The teachers I had had a intuitive grasp of how to cause pain to small children that irritated them on the pretext of discipline. Since actual beatings were banned by school policy, the more pissed off teachers were forced into creative solutions, most of which involved grip pressure and "accidental" detours into walls and doors when taking a child to the office... or maybe I just imagine what I saw and experienced... Teachers mainly concentrated this sort of thing on "bad" kids, the ones whose parents even if they cared at all wouldn't be able to tell the difference in the injuries they caused as opposed to the ones caused by the teacher...
Maybe there is a question of priority, but I'll take all the policies in the world that
look silly from the outside if it helps prevent that kind of abuse by removing obvious cover stories with the additional benefit of removing a small chance of accidental injury.
Have you been channelling Kumar again?
