The principal’s casualness reveals authorisation to harm

When staff smile while scapegoating your disabled child: how casualness reveals systematic authorisation of collective punishment and accommodation denial.

When the principal cancelled the volleyball game, it hurt. A visceral cut, fracturing my daughter’s sense of belonging. Collective punishment separates disabled children, scapegoating them to maintain compliance. But what wounded me most was the principal’s ease and annoyance at my objection. She delivered the harm with such comfort that the casualness became evidence: the institution authorised this.

“The casualness of her dismissal was part of the harm.”

Trigger warning: this essay mentions rape, torture, institutional violence, and the distress of children. Please proceed with care.

Casualness and authorisation

I did not know then that genocide scholars from Hannah Arendt to Christopher Browning have spent decades theorising precisely this phenomenon—that perpetrator casualness functions as evidence of cultural authorisation, that comfort level while implementing harm reveals systemic permission structures, that the ordinariness of violence demonstrates how thoroughly it has been normalised.

Hannah Arendt argued that genocide perpetrators aren’t monsters, in Banality of Evil (1963). They’re bureaucrats implementing policy casually. The ordinariness of their demeanour is itself evidence of how normalised the violence has become. “Terrifyingly normal” people commit atrocities when systems authorise them.

Or as I summarised for a friend: the best systems of oppression disperse responsibility sufficiently that people don’t feel like monsters.

I do not think the people in my child’s school were monsters, but they did monstrous harm to my children. Trying to understand why has taken me on a journey.

The pattern of systems that are casual

As I began examining how systems across domains justify ongoing harm—how institutions ranging from schools to states to emerging technologies develop remarkably similar linguistic strategies for maintaining legitimacy while implementing violence—I recognised the same patterns I learned fighting my daughter’s exclusion appearing everywhere I looked.

When leaked footage shows Israeli soldiers implementing sexual torture with apparent casualness and boredom—the same affective signature that courts use as evidence of systematic authorisation—public discourse deploys:

• Hedging language
• Demands for more investigation
• Introduction of complexity claims
• Refusal to recognise what the casualness reveals

Systems block the vocabulary that makes systematic violence legible, erase comfort level as evidence, and render ease of implementation insignificant rather than diagnostic.

The principal’s swift dismissal and the careful hedging that protects state violence are the same mechanism operating at different scales.

How swiftness becomes justification

The principal framed her cancellation of the volleyball game as a matter of swiftness, as if urgency justified the harm, as if institutional control required immediate visible action that could not accommodate the slower work of repair, relationship, or individualised response to a disabled child in crisis.

She invoked necessity—”it had to be swift”—to perform a specific institutional speech act that transforms:

• A choice into an inevitability
• A decision into a requirement
• An exercise of power into the mere execution of what circumstances demanded

Exposing a problem poses a problem

Sara Ahmed writes about how institutional speech makes complainants into the problem, how administrative efficiency creates a circuit where questioning decisions becomes transgressive, where institutions reframe moral objections as inappropriate disruptions rather than contests over harm.

The principal’s exasperation when I raised concerns communicated precisely this logic: my objection, not her punishment of innocents or implementation of punishment without consideration of individualised education plan, violated institutional order and required management and dismissal.

“When you expose a problem you pose a problem.” — Sara Ahmed, The Problem of Perception (2014)

The grammar of denial

This is the grammar of denial—not the refusal to acknowledge that harm occurred, but:

• The transformation of harm into necessity
• The conversion of choice into requirement
• The performance of constraint that makes institutional actors feel they had no other option

When the principal said the punishment had to be swift, she invoked institutional preservation logic that values the appearance of control over children’s actual wellbeing.

What swiftness actually does

The swiftness itself did specific work:

• Prevented deliberation – No time to consider alternatives
• Foreclosed individualised response – Disabled child treated as generic problem
• Created urgency where none existed – Manufactured crisis
• Performed decisiveness as leadership – Speed conflated with quality

The principal could have taken time, could have spoken with each child individually, could have recognised that my daughter’s refusal to apologise to a teacher who had escalated to physical contact represented not insolence but a trauma response. But those possibilities required recognising my daughter as a subject worthy of individualised care rather than an object requiring swift management.

When comfort reveals authorisation

When the principal said the punishment had to be ‘swift,’ the edge of one side of her mouth tightened. She paused for a second, took a breath, and then smiled wearily.

I recognised that sequence—I’d seen it before in people who know they’re doing something questionable but need you to let them enjoy it anyway. It’s the look of someone about to eat farmed salmon at a restaurant when they know you prefer they wouldn’t, but they’re going to do it anyway and they need you to not make them feel bad about their choice.

The mouth tightening was the moment she knew. As if she recognised, for a flash, that what she was about to frame as necessity was actually choice, that ‘swift’ was performance not constraint, that she was choosing institutional authority over a child’s dignity.

The pause was the decision. She gathered herself, took a breath, and chose to proceed.

The smile was the performance. It was designed to make me doubt what I’d just seen, to suggest that surely someone who smiled like this wasn’t knowingly harming my child, she was just tired and doing her very best.

The casualness she displayed—the ease, the bureaucratic comfort, the exasperation at my objection—wasn’t natural or automatic. It took effort to produce. The mouth tightening revealed that effort, the moment where she had to manufacture the ease that would make collective punishment feel like simple administration.

This is why casualness functions as evidence. When someone has to work to produce it, when you can see the seam between recognition and performance, when the smile is opulent enough to be armour—you’re witnessing authorisation in action. She became comfortable because the system had trained her to believe this was appropriate work, but the training required overriding something, some flash of knowledge that had to be suppressed.

What genocide scholars have documented

In genocide studies, this phenomenon has a name. When Christopher Browning analysed Reserve Police Battalion 101—ordinary German men given the option to refuse participation in massacres—he documented how perpetrators moved through stages:

Initial awkwardness → Routine efficiency → Casual implementation

The comfort level increased over time as the violence became normalised. The ease with which they killed revealed the cultural permission structure that authorised their actions. The progression from distress to banality demonstrated not individual moral failure but systemic authorisation: the soldiers became comfortable because the institution communicated that this was appropriate work.

Historical examples of casualness as evidence

When courts and tribunals examine mass atrocities, they recognise affective signatures as evidence:

• Omarska concentration camp
  Guards laughing while forcing prisoners to sexually abuse each other
• Abu Ghraib
  Soldiers posing smiling for photographs with tortured detainees
• Rwanda genocide
  Hutu militia describing machete killings as “work” with mundane attitude

The casualness proved these were not isolated acts by rogue individuals overcome by momentary rage; the comfort level demonstrated systematic practise, cultural authorisation, institutional permission.

If the violence violated social norms, perpetrators would show distress, concealment, moral struggle. The ease revealed that the norms had shifted.

The same pattern in schools

My daughter’s principal displayed ease and she:

• Did not agonise over the decision to cancel the game
• Did not express uncertainty about whether collective punishment was appropriate
• Did not acknowledge the specific vulnerability of making a disabled child the scapegoat
• Implemented the punishment as routine administrative action
• Became exasperated when I questioned it
• Treated my moral objection as an inconvenient disruption

Her comfort level told me everything about how the district had trained her, what behaviours the system rewarded, what decisions she expected to defend successfully if challenged.

Why casualness compounds the injury

The casualness was not peripheral to the harm—it was the harm, or at least it amplified the harm beyond what the punishment itself inflicted.

To watch an authority figure destroy your child’s sense of belonging with bureaucratic ease communicates:

• The child’s pain registers as negligible
• Her humiliation does not rise to the level of moral concern
• Her experience of being marked as the source of her peers’ loss matters less than institutional convenience
• She does not warrant care that would slow down institutional efficiency
• Her wellbeing can be sacrificed to the appearance of authority
• Her vulnerability makes her useful as an example rather than worthy of protection

The broader pattern

When I encountered that same casualness in leaked footage from Sde Teiman—soldiers implementing sexual torture with apparent boredom, treating it as just another shift, just another detainee, violence so normalised it generated no distress—I understood how denial systems operate.

The principal’s ease and the soldiers’ boredom manifest the same architecture: institutions back systematic harm so thoroughly that perpetrators experience no moral friction, no uncertainty, no need to justify beyond institutional authorisation.

“The casualness is the point—it reveals that the system works, that the authorisation is complete, that the violence has been absorbed into routine.”

The dispersal of responsibility and the concentration of blame

Collective punishment operates through a specific mechanism that institutional actors either cannot see or refuse to name: it disperses responsibility across so many nodes that no single actor must bear the full moral weight of the harm, while simultaneously concentrating blame onto the most vulnerable individual.

How accountability got distributed in my daughter’s case

When the principal cancelled the volleyball game, she distributed accountability in a way that protected every institutional actor:

Protected from consequences:

• Teachers who rounded up children like cattle
• Teachers who escalated to physical confrontation
• Principal who chose collective punishment over individualised response
• District that trains principals to value swiftness over care

Placed at centre of loss:

• My disabled daughter, marked as the reason peers lost their joy

The responsibility that should have been distributed upward, toward those with institutional power, instead flowed downward and inward, landing on my daughter with concentrated force and on her peers.

How collective punishment conscripts children

My daughter’s friends kept asking why the game was cancelled. Their disappointment circled back onto her. Confusion became accusation. They marked her as the one who cost everyone their joy.

Collective punishment conscripts children into institutional logic. It weaponises their disappointment to press guilt into vulnerable children. It transforms moments that could repair relationships into performances where my daughter learned:

• Her presence in the group comes at a cost to others
• Her difference makes her dangerous
• She is the problem

The rhetoric districts use

This is precisely how school districts respond when pressed about exclusion. They claim:

• Disabled children’s needs threaten the education of others
• Accommodation would be unfair to the class
• Safety requires removal

The rhetoric disperses institutional responsibility—no one chose to exclude, everyone was just trying to protect the group—while concentrating blame on the disabled child whose needs supposedly created the impossible situation.

“The structure makes accountability impossible to locate while the disabled child bears the full consequence.”

How responsibility distribution protects institutions

Systems assign accountability asymmetrically. They demand individual responsibility from those without power. They invoke complexity and constraints to disperse responsibility from those with power. Systems protect institutional legitimacy, not actual accountability.

This distribution of responsibility is not accidental. It is the architecture through which institutions manage harm while maintaining legitimacy:

By ensuring no individual with institutional backing feels fully accountable:

• The system allows everyone to participate in systematic exclusion or violence
• While experiencing themselves as caring, constrained, doing the best they could
• Given impossible circumstances

By ensuring the vulnerable individual feels responsible:

• The system prevents collective recognition of the pattern
• Forecloses solidarity
• Maintains isolation that makes each instance feel individual rather than systematic

What my daughter was told

My daughter was told through the cancellation of that game that she, not the institution, bore responsibility for what happened:

• She should have complied
• She should have written the apology
• She should have recognised her refusal would cost others
• She should have subordinated her trauma to institutional authority

The principal’s swiftness communicated that my daughter’s trauma, her reasonable response to adult escalation, her autistic PDA profile that makes forced apology neurologically impossible—none of this registered as context that should shape institutional response.

The responsibility for repair, for preventing loss, for maintaining group cohesion was placed on a disabled child rather than on the adults with power, training, and authority to create different conditions.

When naming harm becomes the problem

When I refused to accept that distribution, when I named what the principal had done as collective punishment rather than necessary discipline, when I insisted that the institutional choice to scapegoat my daughter constituted harm rather than leadership, I was positioned as the problem—the difficult parent, the one who doesn’t understand how schools work, the one making things harder than they need to be.

The complaint became evidence of my unreasonableness rather than evidence of institutional failure, exactly as Sara Ahmed describes: the person raising concerns is transformed into the concern, the one pointing to harm becomes the source of difficulty.

Intent as shield, impact as insufficient

When pressed about the volleyball cancellation, district personnel and defending staff would likely invoke intent as exculpatory shield:

The principal didn’t intend to:

• Humiliate my daughter
• Teach her that her disabled existence costs others their joy
• Scapegoat her
• Mark her as dangerous

The intended outcome was swift discipline, visible authority, a lesson about following rules. The harm my daughter experienced was unfortunate, perhaps, but not the intent, and therefore not something for which the institution bears full responsibility.

The performance of trying

What makes this defence particularly insidious is how it gets delivered—not as cold bureaucratic dismissal, but wrapped in visible exhaustion, in performances of how hard everyone is trying, in sighs that communicate the immense difficulty of working with families like mine.

The principal’s weary smile. The district official’s patient tone explaining policy for what they frame as the third time. The teacher who says with evident frustration that she’s “doing her best” while my daughter sits excluded in the hallway.

Broadcasting exhaustion as defence

This exhaustion gets broadcast constantly, turned into a form of evidence that absolves institutional actors from accountability:

• “We’re trying so hard”
• “This is really difficult for us too”
• “You don’t see everything we’re doing behind the scenes”
• “We’re working within constraints”
• “We care deeply about your daughter”

The message underneath: if we’re trying this hard, if we’re this tired, if we’re broadcasting this much effort and care, then surely you cannot hold us responsible for the harm. Intent becomes visible through performed exhaustion. Impact gets dismissed as unfortunate side effect of well-meaning people doing their best in impossible circumstances.

How weariness works

The weariness serves a specific function. It positions the parent—me—as the source of institutional fatigue, as the one making simple administrative tasks impossibly complex through my unreasonable insistence on accountability. It suggests that the institution’s exhaustion is itself evidence of their care, their commitment, their good faith effort.

When the principal smiled wearily after saying the punishment had to be swift, that weariness communicated: I am tired from dealing with situations like this, from parents like you, from the impossible complexity of trying to do right by difficult children. See how hard this is for me. See how much I’m trying. Surely that matters more than the harm your daughter experienced.

The empathy trap

I am supposed to feel empathy for the exhausted teacher and the principal dealing with impossible constraints. I am supposed to recognise their good intentions, their evident effort, their visible weariness, and accept that these things mean they cannot be held fully accountable for the harm they caused. That scarcity is inevitable.

But my daughter’s principal would never say she intended to humiliate a disabled child, teach her that her existence costs others their belonging, mark her as dangerous and scapegoat her to preserve authority. She would say she intended something else entirely—swift discipline, clear boundaries, a lesson about following rules—and that the harm was an unfortunate, unforeseeable consequence of those good intentions performed under constraint.

Why this fails as defence

The choice to implement collective punishment, to make my daughter the reason for others’ loss, to refuse individualised response that would account for her disability and trauma—these constitute conduct from which intent can be inferred regardless of what the principal claims she meant:

The principal intended to:

• Make an example
• Demonstrate swift visible authority
• Prioritise institutional control over child wellbeing
• Use my daughter’s vulnerability to perform power

The humiliation and scapegoating were not accidents. They were foreseeable, inevitable consequences of that intended action. To say “I didn’t intend to harm your child” while choosing conduct that predictably, systematically, and foreseeably produces that harm is to claim a form of plausible deniability that basic moral reasoning should reject.

What matters for accountability

The intent that matters is the intent to implement the action, not the claimed intent regarding every consequence:

• The principal intended to cancel the game as collective punishment
• The humiliation of my disabled daughter was not an unforeseeable side effect
• It was the direct, immediate, predictable result of that choice
• She intended what she did, and what she did caused harm—that is sufficient for accountability

The exhaustion, the visible effort, the broadcast weariness, the performance of trying so hard under impossible constraints—none of this changes what happened to my daughter. None of it transforms foreseeable harm into accident. None of it means the institution tried hard enough, when what they tried to do was manage my child rather than support her, control the situation rather than repair the harm, preserve their authority rather than protect her dignity.

The grammar of intent-claiming

This move—making intent determinative and impact insufficient, performing exhaustion as evidence of good faith, positioning perpetrator weariness as more important than victim harm—is how institutions manage accountability:

• “We didn’t mean to”
• “We were trying so hard”
• “You’re exhausting us”
• “We care deeply”
• “Circumstances constrained us”
• “You don’t understand how difficult this is”
• “We’re doing our best”

My daughter knows what the principal intended because she experienced what the principal did. The performance of effort, the broadcast of weariness, the visible exhaustion of institutional actors—these do not erase the harm, do not transform chosen actions into accidents, do not mean that trying hard excuses causing predictable, systematic, and foreseeable destruction of a vulnerable child’s sense of belonging and safety.

The grammatical architecture of denial

What I learned from fighting my daughter’s exclusion, what I recognised when examining how harm gets justified across domains, what connects the principal’s swift cancellation to careful hedging that protects state violence, is that institutional denial follows a predictable grammar, a linguistic architecture that remains consistent across domains even as the specific content varies.

The six core moves

The moves are:

1. Individualisation that blocks pattern recognition

• “Every child is different”
• “Not all teachers”
• “Not all soldiers”

2. Complexity-claiming that forecloses accountability

• “It’s complicated”
• “Multiple perspectives”
• “You don’t understand how schools work”

3. Intent-centring that dismisses impact

• “We didn’t mean to harm”
• “We intended safety”
• “Intent is crucial”

4. Urgency-invoking that prevents deliberation

• “Had to act swiftly”
• “Immediate threat”
• “No other choice”

5. Responsibility-dispersing that protects power

• “Everyone was doing their job”
• “Following policy”
• “Systemic constraints”

6. Blame-concentrating that marks the vulnerable

• “She refused to apologise”
• “Her needs are extreme”
• “Isolated incidents not pattern”

Why this grammar works

These are not separate strategies emerging independently in different domains. These are the grammatical moves through which institutions manage the contradiction of implementing harm while maintaining legitimacy, of causing suffering while claiming care, of exercising power while performing constraint.

The grammar works because it distributes across the discourse—no single move is definitive, no individual statement fully reveals the mechanism, but the cumulative effect across interactions:

• Makes accountability structurally difficult to pursue
• Makes naming what happened feel perpetually tentative
• Makes the victim’s certainty about their experience seem less reliable than the institution’s claimed uncertainty

“I spent years learning this grammar through my advocacy work, documenting how districts deploy these moves with such consistency that they become predictable, recognisable, citable.”

When the district writes denial

Months after the volleyball game was cancelled, I wrote to the Vancouver School Board seeking written confirmation: did they support collective punishment as a disciplinary practice, particularly when it involved neurodivergent students whose behaviours arose not from wilful misconduct but from unmet needs and institutional failures to provide appropriate support?

The response demonstrated every grammatical move I had spent years documenting. The district official reframed my question—I had asked whether they supported collective punishment, but the response restated this to mean punishment imposed “without any consideration of individual circumstance,” a definition I had never offered, a strawman carefully constructed to be easily denied. The letter then explained that the Board has no such policy, that under the School Act discipline must be “similar to that which would be imposed by a kind, firm, and judicious parent,” that consequences must be “fair and consistent” with “consideration of all circumstances of each case, including the actions and individual circumstances of each student involved.”

I would never do what they did to my child.

By claiming to consider individual circumstances while maintaining that “consistency” requires students with “same or similar” circumstances to receive similar consequences, the district created a logical architecture where my daughter’s disability disappeared. Her trauma history, her autistic profile that makes forced apology neurologically complex, her sensory needs, her documented requirement for the very activity being withheld, her pattern of behaviours reflecting unmet needs rather than defiance—all of this got compressed into “circumstances” deemed similar enough to neurotypical children’s wilful rule-breaking to warrant identical punishment. The district claimed they considered her individual circumstances while the evidence proved they treated her exactly as every other child, which is precisely what makes collective punishment collective: the refusal to differentiate based on need, the insistence that fairness means uniform consequences regardless of disability, the transformation of neurodivergent responses to institutional failure into evidence of misconduct equivalent to any other.

The response closed with appreciation for my seeking clarification and assurance that they looked forward to collaborating on supporting my daughter—the written equivalent of the principal’s weary smile, designed to suggest the matter was resolved, that we could move into productive partnership, that my continued concern would mark me as unable to be future-focused. The performance asked me to accept that explaining policy constituted an answer to my question, even though the district never stated whether they supported what had been done or committed to ensuring it would not happen again.

I would never do what they did to my child.

What I learned: institutions develop extraordinary facility at comprehensive engagement that forecloses accountability. They redefine your terms so they can deny the redefinition rather than answer your question. And when you point to the gap between what they wrote and what you asked, when you refuse to accept the reframing, when you note that claiming to consider circumstances while implementing uniform consequences is definitionally what makes punishment collective—you become the difficult parent, the one who doesn’t understand how schools work, the one whose persistence makes collaboration impossible, the person whose refusal to accept careful institutional responses is itself evidence of unreasonableness rather than evidence that the harm remains unaddressed and the accountability question deliberately evaded.

When systems teach us what not to see

The grammar I documented through fighting my daughter’s exclusion—the reframing, the legal language as shield, the performance of comprehensive engagement that forecloses accountability—operates everywhere power needs protecting from the consequences of its exercise. I have watched identical moves deploy when systematic violence at any scale seeks legitimacy: the same individualisation that blocks pattern recognition, the same complexity claims that suggest victims don’t understand, the same dispersal of responsibility upward while blame concentrates downward. The linguistic architecture remains consistent whether the harm being defended is educational exclusion or state violence, because the function is identical: to manage the contradiction of implementing harm while maintaining institutional legitimacy, to make certain forms of accountability structurally impossible to articulate, to teach us that power’s violence is always more complex than victims’ suffering.

The principal’s cancellation of that volleyball game taught my daughter that:

• Her disabled existence costs others their belonging
• Her difference makes her dangerous
• The institution will sacrifice her dignity to preserve its authority
• The adults who should protect her will instead use her to perform power

But it taught me something else: it revealed the mechanism through which institutional harm becomes routine, how casualness functions as evidence of authorisation, how the ease with which power can be exercised against the vulnerable demonstrates not individual cruelty but systematic permission.

When I examined how harm gets justified across domains—from schools to states to emerging systems of governance—I recognised that same casualness, that same ease, that same comfort with denial appearing everywhere power operates.

Not crude refusal to engage, not explicit defence of violence, but:

• Careful performance that maintains thoughtfulness while foreclosing accountability
• Framework provision without application permission
• Strategic demands for more proof when evidence threatens legitimacy
• Evidentiary asymmetry that makes accountability grammatically difficult to pursue

These patterns are not neutral. They reproduce the discourse strategies that institutions use to:

• Manage harm while maintaining legitimacy
• Protect power by making certain forms of accountability structurally impossible to articulate
• Teach people that some violence is inherently more complex than other violence
• Require impossible standards of proof for some suffering
• Suggest casualness doesn’t mean what courts say it means
• Claim pattern and scale alone are insufficient without direct evidence of intent

What we deserve

My daughter deserved better than a principal who could cancel a game with bureaucratic swiftness and feel no disturbance about the child being destroyed.

The world deserves better than systems of power that can refuse to recognise systematic violence through careful performance of balance while maintaining the appearance of thoughtful analysis.

Both require us to recognise that:

• Casualness reveals authorisation
• Comfort level while causing harm demonstrates systematic permission
• The ease with which institutions implement and defend systematic violence is itself evidence of how thoroughly that violence has been normalised

The work ahead

The work now is to refuse that normalisation, to name the mechanism, to document the grammar, to teach others to recognise the moves so that:

• Casualness no longer passes as neutral efficiency
• Swiftness no longer justifies bypassing care
• Complexity no longer forecloses accountability
• The ease with which power operates against the vulnerable becomes itself the grounds for holding power responsible

“We refuse the grammar of denial. We name what casualness reveals. We document how power protects itself. We teach others to recognise the architecture.”