So, what you’re saying is, HR department behaviours start long before HR department employment.

> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.

René Girard

This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.

And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.

Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.

So we are complaining:

1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)

2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.

3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"

These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.

The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).

Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.

My (private) school had the luxury of sorting this through a multi tier system. a) detention was 3 hours minimum on a saturday. It involved manual labor like mulching flower beds, picking up litter while rolling around 50 gallon drums, etc. b) if you liked manual labor you were made to do homework with someone paying direct attention or lecturing subjects you were bad at. c) if you attempted to opt out of that they would have you dig holes 3 feet deep with a post hole digger and fill them back in. d) if you attempted to opt out of that you got 2 options 1) the teachers thought you were redeemable. you pushed the dumpster around campus picking up the 50 gallon drums. 3 times during the circuit you'd come back and raise a 50 lb plate overhead and drop it to smash the garbage. Aroudn 30 times each round. One of the philosophy teachers would expound on your life decisions for the full 3 hours. 2) you were enrolled at your public school immediately, and truant the next day. your parents were called and told to pick you up and returned the balance of the tuition.

it was a large luxury of privilege.

Bullying via playing the victim can work after school too. Eg. some legal cases are like this.