Yes, they can, and they do. Almost without exception.DMt. wrote:The schools are in loco parentis [ahem] while the child is there, and thus do indeed have a duty of care; but the bullied child knows that after all the boxes have been ticked and the relevant wrists slapped, they can always get you later, and worse.
The only problem is that it can cascade horribly. When I was in the seventh grade, I almost killed an eighth-grader twice my size because he and his buddies decided it'd be fun to slap me around a bit. His buddies didn't do a d%#n thing, either, and I'm not sure how I feel about that (but I'll bet you they weren't so close after that incident); I didn't know I was killing him, sitting on his head with his face in a foot of snow until I let him up, apparently almost at the last second, and it took him a while to figure out where he was. I didn't "rat him out" on earlier occasions for precisely the same reasons Oskar didn't: it would not only do no good, it'd just make things worse.
