John Williamson wrote:
soup wrote:
On 03/06/2012 13:24, ARWadsworth wrote:

Poking someone who is messing on their phone instead of learning is not
assault.

Is smashing them over the head with a baseball bat assault?
Is throwing a duster (board wiper)at them assualt?
Is smacking their knuckles with a ruler assualt?
It seems, to me, to be a question of line drawing and in this case
that line appears to have been drawn at physical contact. In this
particular case there seems to be a "grow up" element to it but the
student WAS assaulted, if indedd the line had been drawn at physical
contact.

The normal test applied by the court is "Would this contact be expected
to cause physical harm?". That's for what is correctly termed battery.
Assault does not necessarily imply physical contact. Unfortunately,
there is a modern tendency to call both things assault.

One relevant case involves the statement "If this were not assize time,
I would punch you". The prosecution for assault failed, because it was,
in fact, assize time. Had those words been said the previous or
following weeks, then the prosecution would have succeeded, as they were
not "assize time".

So, for the baseball bat case, yes that is battery, as the intention
would be to cause physical harm, for the blackboard duster, possibly, if
it was aimed directly at the victim and hit them, and not just nearby in
order to scare them while hitting them accidentally, the ruler case
would depend on whether there was a bruise or other physical damage by
the contact.

The place where this happened may have other rules, which could override
the legal definition, for instance, punching someone in the face at a
nightclub would be battery, but exactly the same punch thrown in a
boxing ring would not.

The college where the incident mentioned in the original post is said to
have taken place may have a policy on place forbidding all physical
contact between staff and students, in which case the college rules
apply, even though, legally, there was no assault or battery.

Wonderful quote in the DT blogs today, 'when teaching children to tell
the time the correct answer to 'what time is it, when the big hand is
over the little hand?' is 'time to call in the police to arrest the
maths teacher'


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.