Editorial: Brats on buses

OPINION: It would not have been the hardest call Judge Kevin Phillips has made, to chuck out a charge laid against a 70-year-old schoolbus driver of assaulting one of his more unruly passengers, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

The 12-year-old boy, in a bus parked outside a Gore high school, had been pulling a girl's hair and was disinclined to let go just because driver Jim McCorkindale twice told him to, preferring instead to hold fast and swear at him.

The driver then applied what Judge Phillips decided was a small amount of force to the child. By Mr McCorkindale's own account, he had touched the boy on the arm, to attract his attention, and threatened to hit him in the ribs, which had made him flinch and release the girl's hair.

It is a curiosity, and not a pleasing one, that this matter made it as far as the courts. Gore police referred the matter for diversion, but the decision came from higher up the line that the prosecution go ahead.

Bad call, that. Authorities do need to be diligent in investigating cases of potential assault on children, and should not be swayed by sympathetic but extraneous matters like the fact that, sadly, Mr McCorkindale was facing the charge while his wife was dying.

What should have stayed the police's prosecutorialhand was the realisation that it is just too, too precious,in these circumstances, to take the line that the drivershould not have laid hands on the boy. If anything, he could be said to have interrupted an assault, rather than committed one.

If he did so imperfectly – matter of opinion, that – we await with interest advice on what he should have done while the girl's hair was being yanked.

Judge Phillips turned his attention, instead, to the boy, whom he directed to have an escorted trip to the court cells. Afterwards he said the boy should be thoroughly ashamed of himself, and that he should respect his parents and do as he was told.

To be fair, the boy did publicly apologise and his family defended Mr McCorkindale in court.

Pulling a girl's hair isn't the most savage of assaults, but it would be a censorious soul indeed who found the driver's reactions, in the circumstances, intolerable.

And honestly, what should he have done?

Due largely to the 2007 stink-bomb case in which an irate driver deposited five Southland Boys' High School students on the roadside at Greenhills in minus 4 degC temperatures, we know that in extreme cases, when drivers determine that it is no longer safe to continue a route with a student on board, they should not sling them off but, ahem, bring the bus to a stop and contact either the school or, in extreme cases the police, to remove that student.

Not, you will note, a particularly expeditious way to bring help to a girl who is being assaulted.

The snotty behaviour of some young people on schoolbuses has become a matter of widespread lament, not simply because of the grizzles of seriously put-upon drivers, but because the rest of the world has seen evidence of it through those big bus windows.

It does no harm for everyone on those buses to be reminded that they may be held accountable for their actions in courts, not merely at school assemblies, not merely in news columns, but in the courts.

In this case it placed more of a burden on the driver than he deserved, and that is regrettable.

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