Overkill in the principal's office

Mark Steyn looks at the case of two Oregon seventh graders arrested and led out of school in handcuffs and then charged with felony sexual assault after having engaged in an apparently common event at their middle school, "Slap Butt Fridays," during which boys and girls would roam the halls slapping each other's rear ends. I taught for 12 years in middle school and this Oregon school's custom doesn't surprise me. But teachers and administrators should be capable of dealing with such hanky panky without calling in the police and the district attorney. I recommend a little talk with the kids involved, their parents, and then some detention for the kids doing the slapping, both boys and girls. If an administrator can't take care of such shenanigans on their own then they have deeper problems than a few kids getting slaphappy on each other's derrières. As Mark Steyn concludes,

A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that's losing any sense of proportion. Without which, civilized life becomes impossible. So we legalize more and more aspects of life and demand that district attorneys prosecute ever more aggressively what were once routine areas of social interaction.

A society that looses the state to criminalize schoolroom horseplay is guilty not only of punishing children as grown-ups but of the infantilization of the entire citizenry.