Heh, decent timing. My last CBT session ended with me realising one of my issues may be a lasting effect of bullying.
Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything that lifted you up (e.g. good grades) made you a target.
The realisation was that that will probably not to happen now. If I do something exceptional at 34 I probably wont be bullied by my peers (or heck, even if I actually was bullied for it.. who cares lol, my peers don't understand the market I work in)
I'd never reevaluated the internalised rule "If I excel, I will be bullied" until the other day.
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On a slightly more positive spin the whole thing made me quite sensitive to deception. If someone is trying to deceive or manipulate me my subconscious might as well be flashing up a Metal Gear Solid exclaim noise for how obvious it seems.
Would rich kids be facing much more competition for elite spots from poor but smart kids if bullying wasn't part of the curriculum in the public schools? Given that only 10% of kids get to go to a school where dignity is assured, it could be that 90% of the smart kids are being kneecapped and don't reach their full potential. One more thing that makes a mockery of "meritocracy".
I was glad to see though that New Hampshire (where I grew up) finally passed a law making it possible to sue schools for bullying like the other 49 states.
I wonder also how many Enrons and Challenger Disasters we've had because many of what could have been our best people had it beat into them that self-assertion is not allowed for them.
I have a friend who was bullied so abusively and thoroughly at a private school that his family pulled him out and moved him into public school (which turned out to be a very good school system with very little bullying, fortunately for him).
Obviously that's just one data point, but I don't think the incentive structure at a private school is what you think it is. There's a lot of incentive to keep issues quiet, and a lot of pressure to fit a certain mold.
Private schools are an instance of opportunity hoarding, and "opportunity" should be understood in a number of ways. The opportunity to buy a certain level of freedom from bullying in favour of a "selective" crowd, for instance. Though I doubt there is less bullying in private schools, more that it manifests in different ways; if I had to hypothesize, I might suppose the bullying is of a different intensity though.
I was bullied intensely in the public schools. My parents were able to get me into a private school for just one year and the difference was night and day. For the first time in my life I was able to go to school and get respect. They sent me back to the public schools for the fourth grade and it was war all the time all over again.
Someone I know used to brag about the stunt he pulled to embarrass the private high school he went to and I shut him up pretty harshly about it because I had suffered so much in the public schools and how I would have appreciated the privilege that he got more than he did.
Of course he had his own problems including a struggle with alcoholism, getting beaten up by the cops, etc. and today he is a tenant and I am his landlord so it's not like I didn't catch some breaks.
I had the an opposite experience. I had a rich kid pull a knife to my throat in a fancy private school, the fanciest of my city, which is why my parents got me in. And he went by with a slap in the hand.
I got kicked out of it because after several years I became confrontational to the teachers, which is what mattered to them, and went to a public school, where things went mostly fine. Kids could still be mean, but they were not untouchable because pedigree, so things were more reigned in, and kids were more inclusive and less worried about in/out group.
Then came back to a different private school, and even if it didn’t get to the same awfulness level because I was more on the defensive, it was once again the same casual ostracism.
My private school years made it very clear to me that I wasn't supposed to excel because of my background. I was there to conform to the rigid boarding master rules, write maths with a fountain pen (excruciating for a left-hander), and generally know that I did not belong.
I wasn't bullied by the other students, but I witnessed an incredible amount of racism to other students that was largely whistled under the carpet. The "vote Tory" banners under the school entrance every election day, the sheer theft of the school administration when it came to school uniforms, stationary, and simple things like paper.
And then the elitism. They tell you that you're special to be there, next world leaders in politics or industry or what have you. Of course, they don't mean you - they mean the hand-selected elites that served as prefects or head boys and other from purer backgrounds with the same grades as yours.
Uni was a breath of fresh air, like finally stepping out of the shadow of someone else's ego and never realising it until that moment.
Kids don't bully because they're poor. They bully because the other kid is different (e.g. jocks vs geeks), they bully to gain peer points, and for many other reasons, that are orthogonal to public vs privaye, or poor vs rich kid.
As for taking to others bad home experiences, like mimicking an abusive parent, that can happen to rich as well as to poor kids...
Yes, of course bullying will happen in better off schools as well. I just think there will be less of it, since some bullying probably happens because it's more "reasonable" to be a bully when your circumstances are worse.
Does anyone have experience with going to a "school within a school" for "gifted and talented" kids? I was trying to figure out why I don't remember any bullying from my middle school or high school, when it dawned on me that I might have been insulated from it by taking classes exclusively with gifted and talented kids —i.e., kids from stable/whole/educated households. I went to a high school where kids came from a mix of blue collar and lower-earning white collar families; does bullying still happen at public high schools in wealthy areas?
There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.
That's me. Grew up in a very middle to perhaps lower-middle-class area and went to more-or-less middling schools. It definitely wasn't 'the mean streets' or anything but very blue collar. I'm certain there were kids living through very real problems at home and in their personal lives all around me. But I was blissfully unaware and disconnected from all that as I was wrapped in the bubble of band and honors/gifted classes and the associated type of kid. A pretty good childhood overall. One time, one 5-minute instance, I was actively, actually bullied, in a very minor and entirely inconsequential way by the football captain jock kind of kid. Took me by surprise, but rattled my cage enough that I still remember it. He went on to play in the NFL, had a short and pretty much unremarkable career as an athlete best I can tell, and now is a construction worker nearby and I saw a headline once that he got arrested for a DUI. I now live in a much nicer neighborhood in a bigger house than he does, and based on the blurb about the DUI, I drive a better car than he does/did. Point is, I can't imagine what it's like to actually be bullied. One tiny thing happened to me in an entirely impersonal and inconsequential way and here I am decades later googling the guy and feeling smug that I came out on top. I would have been crushed by any amount of real bullying.
A lot of the biggest bullies at my schools growing up were the richest kids. They might bully about different things, but they were huge bullies.
It seems like a lot of the HN discussion is focused on kids being bullied for being smart, which makes sense given the audience on here. However, other kids get bullied for lots of different reasons.
Chiming in with my anecdote. Took all honors classes throughout high school, so I pretty much never mixed with kids outside of that bubble. Was one of the few Asians in my high school in the small midwestern town, so I'm sure there was potential for bullying. But I wasn't bullied, and I credit some of that to the tiered class system.
This is one reason I'm up in arms about public school districts near me shutting down their gifted programs because they made certain not academically-inclined demographics feel bad about not being represented. So now, kids in my demographic get to feel bad about being bullied.
If I understand you correctly, shutting down gifted programs because they aren’t equitable doesn’t make sense. But if you wanted my advice, you might get further if you made that point without the racism.
The assertion that there are “not academically-inclined demographics” comes from those working to shut down gifted programs. Need we pull out the Smithsonian’s “whiteness” chart again?
I looked up what you’re talking about and the good news is it looks like that chart was pulled with an apology, so you should be able to rest easy now.
This is essentially how "honors" classes worked at my large public high school. If I weren't in the Anime- sorry, I mean, Japanese Culture- Club, I would literally have only seen the same 50ish kids all day out of a class of ~1000.
In freshman and sophomore year I decided that English classes bored me to tears, so I took non-honors English both years. There was zero overlap between that class and the kids I saw the rest of my day in honors classes. Then in junior year when I decided to do IB and was forced to take IB/AP English, suddenly boom yep exact same set of kids.
I'll admit, I enjoyed the experience. Admittedly partly because even half-assed work got me easy A's and glowing appreciation from my teachers (for actually putting in some effort and not being disruptive etc), but also getting to meet lots of different people was fun.
Also good god did I hate English class. So many insufferable books of what I still consider to be terribly little literary merit. I wish we'd been allowed to just read classical literature all year. For one of the book slots we were allowed to choose our own book, and I chose Plato's Republic, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was the only book from prior to the 20th century that I got to read for class that year as well. At least it got better in senior year when we got to do Shakespeare again.
First I went to an average middle school an I remember many delinquents, but they had something like their own hierarchy independent from grades, so I guess nerds were no threat to their hierarchy, so they didn't care about nerds. Rather nobody cared about nerds to such extent that I didn't even know some animosity to nerds even exists. Standard grades were undefinable either, because ironically delinquents were below any standard, as a consequence nonstandard grades were undefinable either, so I guess separation based on grades was impossible as marginals were too numerous and visible. Then I went to an elite school for gifted kids (elite in terms of academic performance), but I didn't see anyone stereotypically rich there, and I'm not sure that a school for gifted kids is the same as a school for rich kids, I think they have very different goals. There was some kind of internment school for orphans nearby or something like that, so we got some flak from them, funnily I was once stopped by a girl and she tried to seduce me - a tomboy - I blushed, lol.
yeah, when I was trying to figure out 'What is the moment before the split second "my fingers just opened a new tab" effect, I realized so much of adhd is really consciously or subconsciously:
emotional flinching
distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah
----------
BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)
it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after
Thanks for sharing 'distraction is just running away from a feeling.' It puts my experience into words succinctly without giving a root cause to why I might feel that feeling.
Separately sometimes I can find a period of my life that seems to explain why I act the way I do but I'm also not confident in my memory to know if it was happening before hand or if I'm just associating two things that are only slightly related.
For example: I tend to be a very self deprecating individual because I like to laugh and hang out with people who say silly things but I also use it as a crutch to avoid accidentally offending people. I went to a very bad college and so was considered very good at academics while there and may have developed this then to fit in. I could also have developed it growing up because it was a way to laugh off mistakes. I could also just like the sense of humor. Heck even this statement I'm replying to that I like so much I'm certain I've heard it and resonated with it before but have just lost focus of it over time.
Anyway thanks again for sharing, it has helped refined my thinking.
Yeah the whole "ok but why do I respond like that?" is a massive focus now that I've realised there are all these internal rules I've been following since early teens and possibly even younger.
I'll absolutely give that a look into, thank you!
Also for nerds who have yet to consider it: CBT is like debugging code, except the code is your brain. I'd highly recommend looking into it where possible, especially if you are opposed or wary of the "and how does that make you feel?" style of therapy. Fascinating field, and quite helpful for me so far.
> Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get worse after receiving the ADHD diagnosis and medication and then hyperfocusing on their distractions even harder. From my position I see a lot of people with anxiety issues, perfectionism problems, or even textbook depression becoming convinced that ADHD is the explanation for everything in their life. Not all ADHD patients, mind you, but largely the recent influx of people who start with self-diagnosis via internet memes and TikTok (mis)info about ADHD.
Yes, this is definitely a thing. I was one of those that self-diagnosed after seeing a long twitter thread about ADHD symptoms and every single tweet fitting to an absolute T.
It wasn't until I found a psychologist that had an opening 90 days(ish) later that I was able to get fully diagnosed that I was even mentally able to think about myself differently. That said, I had the resources to see a doctor, I'm in my 40s, so there was no family to tell me I was making things up, and the only pressure I felt was from myself to address the issue.
If I couldn't do that and was stuck in a world that acknowledged ADHD was a thing, felt I had it, and yet felt disempowered to do anything about it, I could see myself easily falling down the rabbit hole you describe.
Oh absolutely. I'm open to it being something else but as it currently stands two people trained in the field reckon it's ADHD so I'll go with it for now.
In any case being diagnosed with ADHD was just me finding a missing edge piece of my jigsaw, it helps to know what I'm working with but there's plenty still to do.
I actually started the CBT because of that, I realised ever since I got diagnosed I was leaning into ADHD as an excuse (welp that's just me, can't help it!) and doing less overall than when I didn't know, which I thought was lame. Like that's it, I get a diagnosis and then give up trying to live? Lol no.
Absolutely, and the problem is that amphetamines will make most people feel better regardless of their underlying issue, because that's what they do to the human brain. If you're depressed and you start taking Adderall you will feel happier and more energetic in a way that will convince you that you just had ADHD all along, when it's simply not true at all. You can insert so many other conditions in the place of "depression" in that sentence and it will be true. I know because I went through this whole cycle myself: adult ADHD diagnosis that seemingly explained so many things in my life -> prescription for low dose amphetamines that gave me that "wow is this how normal people feel" moment and validated that ADHD must have been my problem all along -> eventually hit a ceiling with medication effects and begin having terrible comedowns such that when I skipped them for a day I felt essentially lobotomized and incapable of getting out of bed.
Eventually I came to accept that my attention and motivation problems were a combination of screen/social media addiction, drinking too much, poor sleep caused by the two previous behaviors, poor diet, lack of exercise, and the stress of pandemic isolation and working from home. Addressing those issues was much more difficult than getting diagnosed with ADHD but in the long run it has completely changed my life for the better. I do think the ADHD thing was an important detour on my path to a healthier life, but I wonder how many people who are in the same boat will move beyond the "ADHD explains everything" stage and actually solve their real problems?
Another common thread among ADHD folk is perfectionism. I certainly suffer from it, and it’s extremely harmful to my career.
People end up confused why I’m not delivering when what I do deliver is excellent. They figure I don’t care or I’m checked out, something like that. I become less reliable because not delivering is imperfect, and I begin to give up not only on my objectives but myself as well.
I’ve had this lead to catastrophe twice, but I’m much better at identifying it and speaking about it now.
It’s debilitating at times. Knowing I can do better, but it’s not there yet. I could deliver something so much faster, but if it isn’t the best I can do, I’m ashamed of it. I feel like a complete hack.
Worse still is that when I nail it, do good work, get it out on time, etc… It’s still not good enough.
Fundamentally it’s because I’m not good enough. ADHD can lead to some extremely insidious and harmful self talk.
When it comes to worrying about being bullied, I have to ask: why do you think you’re able to be bullied? Are you worth making into a target? Why did you internalize that?
Personally I think being bullied is a significant part of why I feel I’m not good enough. That’s what I was told for years! Unfortunately, I was young and dumb, very impressionable, and it stuck. Oh well, keep at it and try to do better. You aren’t someone who deserves to be bullied and I’m just fine at what I do. We’ll get there eventually.
I strongly relate. I've noticed a lot of my bad habits or odd approaches to things are actually simple pain avoidance. Bad things happen to us and we unconsciously develop methods of avoiding or lessening those bad things. No different than a beaten dog flinching at a raised hand. For me, a lot of these behaviors have been easy to unlearn, but it took half a lifetime to notice them in the first place. And who knows what other subtle pain avoidance behaviors I engage in that I've yet to see or understand.
There is a difference between choosing to do something like that because it is polite (or whatever other reason you find compelling) and feeling like you have to do it to be acceptable.
Needing to bring something special to any sort of event, bringing too many things - just in case.
It's overcompensating for years of not feeling like you are welcome, and years of only being acknowledged when you had a desirable item or knowledge, otherwise you were a person non grata.
Hazarding a guess: A frequent theme in bullying (at least in my experience) is falsely building up an expectation of positive outcome, then pulling out the rug, while blaming the victim for having unrealistic expectations, usually with rhetoric that they are inherently unworthy of positive outcomes, so by deceiving themselves they have only revealed their compounded lack of worth.
Experience that enough and I would expect one could develop quite advanced heuristics to protect oneself from deception.
You hit the nail on the head. Building up false hopes of acceptance in order to tear them down is especially characteristic of how girls bully other girls, but boys can certainly do it too.
Same way an abused dog will flinch when you raise your hand. You recognise the signs of bad things to come. Most flinches are wrong, but if you're always quick on the defensive you don't get hurt as often.
Someone looks shifty, or pauses at just the right moment in their sentence. Or scratches their nose while trying to get you to do something, or can't keep eye contact when they usually would. If they excessively look away for a moment during a disagreement get yourself ready to block the sucker punch. Or they accuse you out of the blue of doing something that's a complete 180 of your character -- ask them straight back if they're doing it themselves.
I can't really explain it too well I realise, having edited this comment like 20 times, as I've only just started looking into it myself.
When I was coming up, especially in middle school, we were always told that you should just ignore bullies and they would go away. This, of course, never actually worked. And anyone who did fight back against their bullies were punished just as severely, if not moreso if they swung first, as the bully. This entire approach was complete BS and only served to enable bullies because they now know that their victims either won't fight back or, if they do, the victim will receive most of the consequence.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think its vitally important that all children learn some form of self-defense (boxing, karate, BJJ, it doesn't matter). I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation). You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
> You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
The kind of punishment doled out by law-abiding adults to children isn't even a blip on the radar vs. suffering a vicious bully. It isn't even worth mentioning, punishment for violence is a total farce until adulthood. That's basically the whole source of the problem; bullys have realized there are no consequences.
The best response to a bully is an immediate and vigorous aggression resembling that of a honey badger, full stop. I agree it's important to teach children self-defense and get them familiar enough with conflict to not piss themselves when faced with it. It's the children who can get away with fighting back without negative consequence, and substantial upside potential.
It's not that easy to hurt somebody enough to make a real difference without weapons. Getting angry and taking ineffective action is one more thing that people will mock you for and further contribute to your worthlessness just as much as the principal telling you that you have no recourse for what is happening to you.
My acting teacher told me about her fantasy of punching somebody in the face and I told her that when I tried that as a kid and really hurt my hand. In fact there was a time my son got mad and hit me in the arm and I didn't find it especially painful but his hand was still hurting 10 hours later. Usually your hand is less durable than whatever it hits, particularly the rather large bones in the face, it is a big subject of martial arts to mitigate that. Someone who smacks you has to balance the intimidation power of the smack vs the very real sting they'll experience. Packing a roll of dimes in your pocket is a deniable way (like the clipboard carried by a store manager confronting shoplifters) that can greatly improve the pain factor for both your target and yourself.
I'll tell you that 40 years later the people I have rage at are the principals who told me I had no recourse to stop the bullying than the bully himself. It's not just getting hit or the unkind words, it is that the entire community organizes to support the bully and his ability to operate. I'm not particularly mad at the actual bully, in fact in one case I made peace 20 years later with that individual and his family.
I was on both sides of bad behavior in school that involved insults, punching, etc. and this is not necessarily bullying. There was the time a friend and I did something cruel to an MR kid and his big brother (emphasis on "big") gave me the smackdown which I deserved. Not to condone my own behavior, but the fact that this kid got immediate protection from his big bro would have reduced the long term psychological effects of my transgression.
100%, the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.
I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.
When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.
He stopped fucking with me after that.
To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.
It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.
100% agree, I was a skinny kid who taught himself to fight to ward off bullies.
I bought a punching bag and started training when I was 12 - in 6 months I got so strong that I was bare-hand punching into cement walls.
There was this bully who would constantly berate me - he probably had 4 inches over me and a good 15-20 pounds heavier.
This one time am walking down the street and he comes out of nowhere and throws a punch, luckily I saw it coming, ducked and it grazed my cheek.
I flew into a rage - all I remember is he was down on the ground in a couple mins and I had beaten his face to pulp - I stopped when a friend and bystanders pulled me off.
So yes, learning to fight is a life skill - because there are times when there are no adults around and it's you or the bully.
> the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.
That may work for the individual, but there's always going to be an easiest target. We have studies of bullying interventions, including teaching kids self respect by way of martial arts, and changing the victim doesn't work.
I suggest people should look into the actual science on this. A good start is "Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do" by Dan Olweus from 1991.
So this book that’s been around for over 30 years has the answers, yet apparently few schools have implemented it enough where bullying is still a problem?
If that would surprise you, you don't know much about social science. Proving an intervention works is one thing, convincing the people who make the decisions to follow up on it is quite another.
Luckily Olweus was uncommonly good at that too. It has been implemented at thousands of schools all across the world, and kept being evaluated in differing cultural contexts, and in comparison to alternative interventions, in many systematic review studies.
Dan Olweus, the father of studying bullying and anti-bullying interventions, also studied this. He found that fighting sports did not help bullying at all, and there was even evidence it made it worse.
It's not so surprising when you think about it. Bullying is about power, but it isn't being good in a fight itself that makes some kids have power over others. It's social, not physical. The victim had the ability to strike back physically all along, they don't need special training. In theory the victim could stab the bully in the back in plenty of ways - even literally. The reason they don't do that, and the reason the bullies don't fear it, is because all the ways the victim could strike back would be scorched earth. It makes no difference if it's with freshly learned BJJ or a weapon.
> Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision
Adult supervision is no guarantee either. Kids are way smarter than adults give them credit for. I remember bullying occurring in the presence of teachers who were completely unaware of the meaning of subtle language or other cues meant to be harmful (with the same meaning known to others of the in-group).
> When I was coming up, especially in middle school, we were always told that you should just ignore bullies and they would go away. This, of course, never actually worked.
I don't think ignoring works well, if we consider "ignoring someone" as an emotional attack. The bullies may feel more hurt/rejected/ignored and therefore bully more or in different ways. The ignoring/conflict avoidance can be quite similar to a silent treatment, which can escalate conflict.
> I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation).
I agree with you that I'd love if more people took self-defense (full disclosure, I train people in what I call Emotional Self-Defense), as when I took Krav Maga I felt more confident to stand up for myself in situations where I had previously thought I would be physically attacked. I disagree, however that "fighting back is the only real solution" because I think what I learned in Krav Maga was the confidence to stand up for myself without having to fight back. I learned that I could fight back if I needed to but that in most situations, just standing up for myself and not attacking back would bring quicker and longer lasting resolution.
Part of the reason I created Emotional Self-Defense is because I thought most self-defense/martial arts don't go far enough upstream to resolve the conflict when it's at an emotional stage and before it becomes physical violence.
Anecdote to go with everyone else's: punching a bully in the nose in the 9th grade wound up bringing about an immediate, universal and permanent end to anyone bullying me in school.
Love it. My best friend was bullied by the class jerk for being Indian. Unfortunately for the bully, my friend and I had been practicing martial arts together for years, and my friend knocked the guy out in the middle of class. The story spread like wildfire and no one bothered him ever again. It still gets brought up many years later at class reunions!
A couple of years later, some other kid tried his luck against me with the same result. It's the grapevine that really does it for you. "Some kid fell down trying to tackle me" turned into "I knocked out this hapless boy with Bruce Lee's one inch punch" over the course of a week of storytelling.
Ideally the equilibrium would be that enough people in the group can't be bullied that it extinguishes the bullying behavior, or bullies get ganged up on.
It's unfortunate, but to the person being bullied, their immediate concern is not the next weakest person. Their immediate concern is avoiding or fending off the bully.
For the people who think bullying isn't a problem:
Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.
Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
> Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".
I've been focusing on a very bottoms-up approach: how to respond to micro-attacks. So practicing responding to getting rejected, ignored, blamed, even idolized, and complimented—anything that makes me want to disconnect more and more from the person and from myself. I've found that in getting better at these very simple, micro-interactions, I start to get better at the bigger things.
One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally.
Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you."
I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.
I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this:
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.
It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.
A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).
I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.
Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
> If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
> self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators
While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong. Rather than try to expound that in more detail, I'll just reference a post by The Last Psychiatrist that does the job better than I could anyway:
"[W]hat kind of school doesn't want a kid to stand up to a bully, especially when they're doing it to help someone else? What kind of crazy school wants you to back down-- and get someone else to protect you? What kind of school indoctrinates kids that power is only possessed by a) bad people; b) the state?
> While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong.
Just to be clear: I don't agree with it. All I'm saying is that child-me understood that it wouldn't be a valid defense after the fact, i.e., that there would be consequences. That, of course, affects one's decision making.
That article is very real, though. (But … and I get this gist from other comments on the thread: that article's example is a mild bully. But yeah, that's how public schools react, and how they inadvertently teach.)
I certainly hope nobody's talking about going full enders game. I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response. Not being afraid to take a punch or get a black eye.
If someone's talking about a real psychopath willing to break bones or with a weapon, the only real responses to run and any martial arts with class will teach you as much.
Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth. Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
> I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response.
The goal is change, i.e., to end the violence. That's the same motivation as Ender. (I shouldn't imply Enders-game levels of violence, sorry, I meant more the metaphor the book sets up: Ender ends the conflict, which is a mirror to his larger role in the plot.) My point is that, had I engaged in violence — I never did, but do I regret that decision? how should I advise a youth? IDK… — I'm not fighting to win that fight, I'm fighting to win all fights.
(And, as I said in the original comment, I think the question of what the child should do is itself wrong. By the time a child is thinking whether violence will or won't solve the problem, the alleged adults in the room have already failed the child. It should never have gotten that far to begin with.)
A number of commenters in this thread also seem to have the popular media trope of a bully as their impression, which is a fair bit watered down. As the paper states,
> poor outcomes throughout the life span, including mental, physical and socioeconomic difficulties.
"Throughout the life span". It has permanent, enduring effects, and I don't know that pixels on a screen capture the mental anguish bullies leave in their wake.
> Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth.
That's a good way of putting it. Unfortunately, I think the years it takes to acquire that mean you're not going to have it until after it's too late. (Or more realistically, I think bullying set back a child acquiring that sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)
> Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
Of course I would. I feel as though this is a false dichotomy. It isn't either/or. I wish I got the help that I needed and that adults took it more seriously - not going into detail, but I ended up almost dying because of it.
The study literally says that you should ALSO help the victim build resilience, it never says that we should stop preventing bullies from bullying. You are creating a strawman here.
I would take it 1 step farther, if you're not teaching your children how to deal with bullies themselves then you're harming them for life.
There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
You sound like you have never met a real bully. Just because a kid is mean and tough doesn't mean they're a bully.
Actual bullies have a very keen sense of how the victim might fight back and what it would cost them. And they go ahead with the bullying - breaking down a person, because they can - because they know the victim can't effectively fight back.
> There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
And the next step isn't to start arguing about what does, and doesn't, constitute a bully.
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The way my mother tells it, I started crying when I got into the car after school and wouldn't tell her what was going on. After the 3rd day in a row she got very insistent, I finally told her and she never left that parking lot before having it cleared up with the school. They removed me from her class and put me in another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker (whom I adored).
You're mistaken if you think my argument is that there aren't situations in which the parent MUST step in.
Yeah, that sounds like a situation where you needed someone else to stand up for you, and I think that's a lot more common.
If you can get out of it on your own toughness alone, it probably wasn't bullying. It's part of the definition of bullying that it's one-sided, that the victim has no good ways to fight back.
If they DO have a way to fight back, it's called conflict, not bullying. It's of course possible that one side in a conflict is a big jerk, a wannabe thug, etc.
One of the big conclusions from bullying research is that treating bullying as if it was conflict (e.g. teaching kids "negotiation strategies") makes things actively worse.
I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B.
Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.
I don't have a clear answer but definitely they should know you have their back, it certainly makes it easier if the child knows you'll support them in it (even when they perhaps did the wrong thing).
Outside of that, they need to be taught that buttholes exist and dealing with them is a fact of life. They shouldn't start things, but they definitely should end them. That was the metric for us while in school, especially if we got into "fisticuffs".
I think for you it's important to understand that school and teachers can't be trusted. I'm not saying teachers suck, but shitty teachers exist. My middle brother once had a teacher take a dislike to him because he corrected her in class. I once had a teacher that would make me stand out in the hall behind the coats on the coat rack. My mother showed up at the school for both, I was pulled from that class and put into another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker, whom I absolutely adored. I still remember the song we would sing at the beginning of class (about parking cars).
My point is that if your child is having an issue with a teacher, don't assume it's the child, my experience is that it very often wasn't. You build trust with your children by SHOWING them that you're there for them. Of course, that doesn't mean every poor interaction with a teacher is the teachers fault. We were dirt poor so I suspect that had something to do with it as well.
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Anyways, none of that is really concrete, I don't know that concrete advice really applies to a question like that. Imo, kids learn what you teach them even if you don't know you're teaching them, and there is no such thing as a single glorifying lesson, it's a slow march over time, exactly as you would do to build trust with someone.
I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level?
Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they absolutely knew who they had a physical edge on, and were absolutely willing to do nothing but escalate.
We don't need to "teach children to deal with bullying" we need god damn physical security around and within schools, and a panopticon of surveillance to make sure that justice happens swiftly and accurately.
I knew one kid who stood up to the bully and then was jumped by the whole gang after school. They used steel pipes to break a leg and knock out teeth. Of course there were no "witnesses" as "snitches get stitches" in that old neighborhood.
Now... i was also heavily bullied at school and at some point my solution was to show everyone of the "gang" (not in the US sense... more a clique of 13 - 15 year old wannabe-gansters) that i am total psycho. I waited for weeks until i got the chance to grab the main bully alone and unprepared, surprised him, beat him heavily while keeping total silent while doing so only to tell him afterwards in a somewhat calm way that it could be weeks, months or years, but i would GET him if he continues to harass me.
Worked for me, never had any problems with his clique afterwards.
Teaching children to deal with physical bullying includes self defense lessons and also involves teaching them not to be passive if they witness physical bullying.
Maybe the bully is the biggest kid in class but it won't matter if every kid knows how to defend themselves and also every kid will team up to pull them off of someone.
And then the bully, because for some reason they're still in the school - because you seem to think its "going too far" to enforce the rules in anyway other then mob justice - cries about how it's unfair, and then jumps one of the kids at the bus stop after school.
This is a stupid idea that doesn't scale, and continues the cycle of victimization: the victim gets to take on all the risk of physical retaliation. Maybe the next punch kills someone? It's impossible to know. Now they get to be on trial for murder while everyone declares they "just don't see how little <bully> could have deserved this".
An 80 lb kid who "knows how to defend himself" against one weighting 150 still loses the fight. The benefit of defending oneself is mostly that the bully often moves on to easier pickings after pummeling the one who fought back.
Yet some school cultures are entrenched, and extend from the broader community. If people are taught from everywhere else that bearing witness is dangerous then groups of bullies will have free reign. Changing that culture can be like pushing a rock up hill.
Solutions may have to be drastic, like electronic surveillance or sending troublemakers to different schools.
A panopticon of surveillance? That’s absurd. Anyway, a lot of bullying actually happens online these days. It can be much more effective than physical bullying.
Why is surveilling schools with cameras absurd? A societal panopticon is, but visual surveillance of an entire school, surrounding streets and buses? That's already happening, it's just not coordinated. We've pushed the responsibility onto kids with cellphones, so school authorities can pretend they "don't know" what's going on.
It’s traditional for a father to teach his son that he should defend himself. He may lose the fight, but respect is gained. And, you’d be surprised, many bullies are actually cowards and will fold early.
There are many novels directed at young people that show how to behave in these situations. It’s not clear that anyone reads them anymore.
It’s important to work these things out early in life, before the “events” get too serious. Refer to the Wikipedia article on “The Dozens”.
(I have no idea how mothers traditionally taught their daughters to stand up to bullies, but I’m sure they did.)
You should learn about bullying from science, not from out of fashion novels. Try out your intervention in a dozen randomly selected schools, try a different one (or do nothing) in the others.
This has in fact been done, and nothing resembling your approach, what one might call the "Manhood YouTube channel" approach, has done well at all.
You propose people, other people, should do a specific thing. That's an intervention you're proposing.
Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread the book that is school bullying 101, "Bullying in school: what we know and what we can do", Dan Olweus, 1991. It contains the results of the first large scale intervention studies on preventing bullying in schools.
> A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were
I say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot.
Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.
I'd go so far as to suspect that anyone calling this victim blaming is a bully themselves and is attempting to make people at large less resilient to bullying by advocating positions that don't promote resiliency and self control in these kinds of situations.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.
My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.
One of my favorite lines:
> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
Do you think that if bullies were stopped when young, they might be able to turn into adults that don't bully?
Regardless, as others have said here, I have way more avenues for dealing with bullies as an adult, including but not limited to getting my own lawyers.
This is a good point. Policing bullying in school (when young) may work if one can catch it in the act but this bully behavior never stops in adulthood, it starts taking different forms. Being aware of bullies and not being affected by their actions helps but they will only find a different target.
I think the point the OP is trying to make isn't to police bullies, but to figure out the influences on the child to be a bully, and to correct for that, so that the kid doesn't bully in the first place.
Actually, sex education is an excellent metaphor here. Teenage pregnancy happens when you assume by not addressing how teen pregnancy happens, teenagers won't fuck. However, teenage pregnancy goes down when you give access to safe sex, robust sex education, and effectively take away the forbidden fruit of fucking.
Similarly, teaching kids how bullying functions and a robust environment that prevents the causal factors of bullying can cut down on the actual bullying behavior.
- property manager put a lock on the door 3 days before I had to be out, went in and removed a few of my animals. Took the bitch to court, to this day I'm not sure if she was unaware that there are laws on the books in my state SPECIFICALLY to deal with that exact situation.
- VP got pissed off at me and told my manager to write me up. I refused to sign the document, immediately quit, and she was fired roughly 8 months later. 10 months later that same manager contacted me wanting to hire me (I refused).
I could go on, but I won't. If you've never dealt with a malevolent person who actively wanted to take advantage of you in over 30 years, congratulations. But that sure as shit isn't normal.
This presupposes that bullying is always explained by something environmental or that it's learned behavior. But what if bullying is just fun for some people? What if human beings have differing innate levels of aggression, empathy, and tolerance? What if some people see bullying and feel a little pit in their stomach -- fear, disgust, anger -- and what if others simply don't?
"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make here. If some people find bullying fun, they should be taught why it isn't fun for others and dealt with if they continue. I mean I'm sure rapist think that their rape is fun or empowering or something, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed.
I agree with you. The point is just that it suggests a different set of interventions. If you keep digging for the "root cause" when the root cause is, "he likes it," then you're going to waste a lot of time getting nothing done.
If you're going to make a claim like "'the blank slate' conception of the world continues to mislead us", it wouldn't hurt to have more than a series of what-ifs.
"Nature vs. nurture" is in the public conception a live debate, but it really isn't. The data are in. If you're genuinely interested, Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a great overview of the argument for the layman.
Nah, that's too glib. The people at one extreme end of the spectrum might accurately be called sociopaths, but lots of more ordinary people fall to the right of center on the "enjoys bullying" bell curve.
No, this is true. Statistically, we know many serial killers are actually victims of brain trauma as children (usually through being violently beaten) and we know traumatic brain injury can cause aggression. In fact there's a predictive relationship between childhood trauma and juvenile psychopathy. [0]
0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29598432/ " Results indicate that psychopathy is significantly correlated with childhood trauma. For the Missouri data, trauma significantly predicted psychopathy scores for both boys and girls."
Enjoying and causing the suffering of others, especially as a power thing (and what is bullying about if not power) is sociopathy, plain and simple no matter how you adjust your spectrum.
If "ordinary people" are on the right of centre of the bell curce, all you are arguing is that the culture you are in encourages sociopathic behavior.
After watching how my kids schools deal with this, I think the a big part of the solution is not just thinking about bullies or the bullied, but the rest of the kids in the middle that aren't bullies or the bullied.
The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.
One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
I would say in an ideal world yes, but the fact is that in the real world a lot of generalizable anti-bullying messaging/curriculum can start from a good place but can easily be mis-construed or willfully and purposefully construed or in fact morph into such things like critical race theory, etc.
Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".
In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully?
Why not both?
This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.
The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.
Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
I read somewhere that to be successful you need to focus on the environment people are in, as in instead of trying to figure out who the bullies are, you need to figure out why a certain environment leads to bullying behaviour.
I teach people how to protect themselves from emotional attacks. What I've seen is that most of us who attack others often believe we were attacked first.
So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).
So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
>Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
Absolutely people try to make bullies not want to bully, from psychological counseling to suspending them from school. It sort of works, but any success is limited. Also bullies can attack outside the school premises.
This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression.
Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration.
If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time.
We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense.
This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this.
The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim.
The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight.
I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
> It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.
The year was 1990. The school was the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The leader of the group was Chris Cater. The resident assistant who was battered was Steve Dyker and this happened in front of South Hall, the dorm I lived in, although I wasn't there when that incident happened.
When Chris did this in front of witnesses he was expelled immediately although I did see him come back to sell drugs on campus a year later.
Before that incident the dean of students, Frank Etscorn, told me that it was just "my word against his" and that he could not press charges.
Chris was criminally minded and he certainly inspired a group of students into more criminal behavior than they would have done on their own. I don't believe that New Mexico Tech was much worse than other schools at this time, in fact around this time there were high profile incidents involving bullying and suicides of gay students at other schools.
I'm reticent to ask more questions given that you said receiving the newsletter was retraumatizing. But one of the people who witnessed the behavior you described should consider documenting it.
I'm not sure how getting to the root of the problem instead of treating the symptoms is "trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics." If the topics are more complex, let's address those complexities. I feel like when they say, "We should teach kids how to survive bullying better," they're the ones trying to apply feels-right reasoning to a complex situation. That's a short-term solution. If the real, long-term solution is medical intervention of some sort, then do that! But don't let the bullying continue and put all of the work on the victim of the bullying. Sure, we can help them be more resilient, as I said above. But the actual problem needs to be addressed no matter how hard or complex it is.
Bullying is enabled by a power imbalance. For those without the ability to rectify the power imbalance, teaching resilience both helps in the short-term and is a useful skill for the large fraction of the population who will one day end up in a job where there is a n abuse of a power imbalance, but they can't quit if they also want to eat.
As the parent of both a bully and a victim (two different kids), I can say that correcting the bullying behavior is not as easy as it might seem. Many (most?) bullies are charming and manipulative and most victims are not, so convincing those who have the ability to correct the power imbalance is quite challenging.
I could make a laundry list of examples just from my own direct experience, but I'll limit it to one:
(Pre COVID, as it does involve tech in the class room, which changed a lot in 2020).
We refused the school-issued Chromebook for my daughter and the administration agreed that she could do all of her work on paper. One of her teachers "didn't feel right singling her out" and "she is such a good kid" so without telling us gave our daughter the classroom Chromebook to do in-class assignments, which she used to cyber-bully a classmate to the point that the child left the school and the child's parents, who were previously friends with my wife, will no longer talk to us.
Studies show that roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths, and these people are over-represented among CEOs of corporations. From that we can assume there are rewards for psychopathic behavior, and this includes bullying. Starting in school, the bullies are often rewarded by established authority figures. Some of this is generational perpetuation: a generation ago some bullies became leaders and now they want the new generation of bullies to also become leaders, as they associate their own behavior with ideal leadership. Therefore, to end bullying would require a full-going social, cultural, and economic revolution. The entire generation-to-generation cycle would have be broken.
I have ADHD and Aspergers. Which results in extremely high anxiety. I did not get along with other children or people. In fact; I found them completely boring and had no desire to interact with anyone. My instinct at school was just to avoid them all. Eat alone, hang out in the school library.
I have run into parents who homeschooled their children and let them follow their curiosity. Some of the results I saw them get were completely out of this world. The kids taught themselves multiple languages and instruments.
I’m going to be faced with a similar choice with my kids. I will likely put them through public elementary school. Junior high I feel is abusive to children.
They are going through very complex hormonal and emotional changes and on top of this you dunk them in a tank surrounded by parasites who are garaunteed to act like savages.
With mobile phones and cameras.
I think I could see a strong argument to skip junior high and high school altogether and explore home school.
If anything like what happened to me happens to them (and I honestly didn’t have it that bad), I will seriously consider pulling them out.
The damage that was done to me lasted 15 years. That is unacceptable.
I personally had severe acne. Putting me in junior high to get taunted - irreparable self esteem damage.
Parents need to understand.
Let’s be honest. The elephant in the room is human beings get ahead by bullying Eachother and forming mobs and cliques.
This behavior has shown up at every job I have ever had. The dumber the people are the more likely they will use this “strategy” to get ahead. It is the go to dumb person strategy.
You can only avoid it often by working at smaller companies or developing much better social skills.
One of the things that happens is similar to the group psychology of hazing.
A person perceives abuse as much worse than the person that deals it out. Hazing is the person being abused then delivering worse punishment than they received to the next round of people, again because their perception of the original hazing abuse was worse than what their abusers perceived.
School tolerance of abuse/bullying is essentially this hazing cycle occurring over generations, more slowly.
That's not the only fucked up human psychology loop in play. Denial, stockholm syndrome, and of course, laziness all come into play.
We're strongly considering homeschooling our kid. We have reservations (read are scared of how hard it sounds compared to sending them off to school) but hearing about experiences like this move us in that direction.
It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.
...and also to keep the kid in an associal bubble. Socialisation and experiencing/handling all kinds of people in life is the most important skill to be learned in school. I woulnt want to give this up for comfort.
The idea that socialisation with unsocialised cretins is important, is one of the biggest pieces of marketing spin that I feel keeps schools operating, children and teenagers when allowed to form groups and cliques are fucking animals, they will engage in the worst kind of behaviour. There is a big difference between socialising your child, which can be done through a whole host of methods, and throwing them into a shark tank filled with animals.
As someone who was bullied at school, let me assure you, the only socialisation I received from the experience, was an appreciation for how fucking horrible humans can be.
There are other ways to socialize kids besides school. As I understand it, things like field trips and social gatherings are an important part of a well balanced homeschool experience.
Instead of just studying about government from books, take a field trip to City Hall, observe a public meeting and talk to people there.
Spend time with other home school families (via homeschool associations) and other families in general. Take trips with them. Let the kids hangout among themselves.
Homeschooling gives you that freedom.
Anecdotally, I personally know homeschooled young adults that are confident, have great social and communication skills and are doing very well in life thus far.
The emphasis here is more on the bubble. Who will decide on this trip? The single homeschool teacher. Who would the kids meet regularly? Kids of parents who can afford homeschooling. Field trips are one-off short contained episodes and can't replace having to live daily life with dozens, hundreds of other kids, and dozens of teachers/input voices. Of course, a lot of them will be adverse, inefficient, aggressive, in different developmental stages. How to deal with them is the learning. The family home with understanding parents is still central to this. There is that, and the "out there".
I feel that motivation of most homeschoolers - a lot of time fuelled by their own bad memories - is to provide an "adequate", contained, controlled chicken coop. Life is anything but that. I can't believe one can go in with a pharmacy scale and make a just fine sampling of daily societal life.
Source, somehwat: I was also bullied in school a lot, but in the end I think I could learn and grew from the experience.
I attended high school in a not-well-known country (Nigeria) and the amount of bullying I witnessed was unfathomable. I’m talking outright beatings from seniors, and it was legalized (reporting to the school authorities will get you more beatings).
I transferred from a chill private school to a public school because, well, my Dad wanted me to have some “experience”…needless to say, the experience I got was that even teens can be extremely cruel to each other…the funny part is that most people here see it as normal and laugh about it, like they don’t realize they’re living the equivalent of a wild animal farm…but for some reason, I got over the horrific bullying real quick…or maybe I’m scarred and don’t know it.
Haha, yes, unfortunately that’s how it is at virtually all government-run schools in my country…pure cruelty is the order of the day, and I’m not exaggerating.
This reminds me that I should write down the experiences I remember as a child, including being chased over three miles by half a dozen kids. I finally crossed into an older woman’s yard, she recognized what was happening and asked me inside. I’ll never forget the beautiful polar bear rug in her living room. She got her keys and drove me home.
Lucky for me I sprouted between elementary and junior high, I also got meaner, and the problems stopped.
I turned out okay but I’m sure it shaped me in various ways.
If I were to guess the cause of the downvotes it might have been a reflexive action from seeing the numerous times the paradox of tolerance is brought up but then misapplied in a way that suits whatever poster's rhetorical purpose yet deviates significantly from Popper's definition. To be clear, I'm not saying you did that, just offering a possible explanation.
I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s important to take a more nuanced viewpoint rather than reducing such parents to “bad people”.
I think it’s fair to criticize such people, or point out why it’s a problematic approach, but many parents are just trying to do what they believe is the right thing, misguided though it may be.
Education and correcting misconceptions is important, and applying a binary mindset to anyone who shields their kids in this way is not going to move the needle, nor is it likely a fair representation of these individuals.
This is a deeply fallacious argument, and these are not equivalent things.
You seem to be concluding that the only thing that matters is outcome, not intent.
Comparing a parent who makes a well intentioned mistake with a parent who intentionally puts their child in the care of a predator is ridiculous.
One of these parents may even be criminally liable for their actions.
> If you're uncomfortable with calling them bad people, then call them bad parents.
It’s not a matter of comfort, but of effective communication and acknowledgment of nuance. Words have meaning, and boiling complex things down to hardline binary positions is rarely helpful.
Yes, calling someone like this a bad parent is somewhat better than calling them a bad person, because the implications of the two accusations are drastically different.
One implies a moral failing, while the other implies a lack of knowledge/understanding, which are two entirely different categories.
I say somewhat, because these “bad parents” may still be doing almost everything right, and may not have been exposed to situations that would give them the wisdom to impart proper guidance to their kids on this particular topic.
I know some truly lovely and sincere people who just aren’t very good at parenting yet. Every parent starts there. They know it, and they’re doing their best to learn and improve as they go. They grew up in sheltered environments and didn’t exactly have model parents to emulate.
These are not bad people.
A hacker who intentionally breaks a critical system in a hospital is a bad person.
A freshly graduated sysadmin who causes an outage to the same system due to incompetence is not automatically a bad person.
Both events may have similar outcomes, but to claim that the people involved belong in the same category is nonsensical.
> I'm a bad basketball player and my intent has fuckall to do with that judgement.
Being a bad basketball player doesn't automatically mean you're bad at all sports. And it certainly doesn't mean you're a bad person.
> If a parent isn't preparing children for life as an adult they're bad parents.
I mostly agree with this statement, but this isn't where we started.
And just like failing at basketball doesn't mean you're failing at all athletic or sporting endeavors, failing at one aspect of parenting doesn't mean you're failing all aspects of parenting (an enormously complicated and diverse set of responsibilities).
If a parent is failing the most critical aspects, or most aspects, yeah, they're bad parents.
Bad parents still aren't automatically bad people.
At this point, I think the horse has been beaten sufficiently.
Everyone is trying to do what they think is right — you can read the pro-social statements of many dictators.
I think teaching your kids not to defend themselves is obviously bad parenting — and the people who do that, to the result of their own children getting hurt, are bad people.
Is there a scenario where you would be willing to interpret such a parent’s pacifism as naivety?
There are many extremely complex issues that do not have obviously right or wrong answers.
Being bad at something is not the same as being a bad person.
How would you describe the difference between a parent who actively abuses their kids and a parent who loves and provides for their kids, but fails in some area along the way?
Unfortunately what I mostly learned is that money allows you to shield yourself to some extent. The true appeal of a "nice" neighbourhood isn't the fancy houses, it's that the police might care about you. The appeal of a private school (aside from hobnobbing with kids of rich parents) is that bullies can get kicked out of a private school much more easily than a public one.
My parents basically said “If you keep getting bullied, assault the bully, try to draw blood, and we’ll take you out for ice cream if you get suspended.”
Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
Yep. I got my ass kicked in the playground by a much larger kid. Completely unprovoked. I came home crying, my dad told me to return to the playground and hit him back. I insisted that I couldn't, he's much larger and stronger.
"Get a piece of wood then"
I did. As I approached the playground, I felt ridiculous. This wood still wouldn't do anything. To my surprise, the bully fled the scene, clearly afraid.
This incident has taught me a lot. It wasn't the wood that did it. It was the fact that I came back. He could now easily kick my ass again, wood or not. But I might come back yet again, and what (or who) will I bring next time?
From fearful to being feared. A pure mind play.
I do not believe in the perfect world-to-be where one day we've eradicated all bullies and other bad actors by educating them. Life will test you and learning to stand your ground and retaliate is a skill I wish we didn't need, but most definitely need. Address the problem from both angles at once.
I never really got physically bullied because this was just understood in our house, so I was confident enough with the option to throw down that it didn’t happen.
There was also the fact that my parents spent beyond their means for “good” schools - but I was a tiny kid and otherwise would have made an ideal target.
I think two scuffles overall, both were the first and last time, and one of the bullies became my friend afterwards. No blood was drawn at any point.
Having the confidence to start a fight with a bunch of classmates/teachers watching makes a big difference, they will usually break up the fight.
Man - you grew up in such a sheltered world. The real world is much more cruel for most of us. You might have said you were a "tiny kid" but you were truly never at odds.
I was constantly beat up, physically, until I was 16. It wasn't just by one kid, it was often by multiple. This was even in front of teachers, principles, etc. They watched and did nothing. Other kids watched and did nothing. We don't all get to live in nice communities.
Other kids could pick me up by the neck and choke slam me down into the ground and did so. I wasn't able to do anything about it because I just wasn't that big. If I had done anything to fight against it - I would've been expelled.
It's different when you're a small brown kid in a super racist small town America where your average parent is absentee and on meth half the time.
Don't give advice when you never got into a physical confrontation to begin with. How fucking privileged.
Dude, you had a problem way above and beyond what is being discussed here, and way above and beyond what most boys face. Sorry.
I hope you’ve been able to deal with the trauma, and if not, I sincerely hope you find some peace with the world soon. If you can get into a martial art, that’s the best suggestion I can offer. It will help you heal.
Also, you have to realize that insulting me and dismissing my experience just because you were so badly abused is another kind of bullying. Don’t fall into that trap.
I mean - great advice if you’re as big as the bully. As a kid who was often smaller than kids 2-3 younger than him all the way to his senior year in high school… Can’t say that advice would go over well.
The ideal situation is with as many bystanders watching as possible. That sucks if you have a gang after you, but perhaps it can be avoided in the first place by not being an easy target.
I do agree that this won’t work in all situations.
In High School, lined up waiting for an elective class, dozens of witnesses... I took this advice... I stood up to a bully, and since they were already "up in my grill" they were able to sucker punch me, right in the diaphragm, without having to raise their arm and make a big show, fist quick raise to ~90 degree bent elbow and jabbed strait forward.. leaving me struggling to stand and winded for several minutes... and because they were so close, no one clearly saw what they did... leading to dozens of people being, no witnesses at all... I changed classes.
For everyone that thinks this advice always works... some bullies aren't cowards they're worse... they are arrogant assholes that think they can get away with what they are doing, or are entitled to do it... they may not back down, and may just get worse when confronted.
It can also backfire, depending on the kid's psyche. A troubled child could imaginably interpret that as carte blanche and overreact to a perceived threat or retaliate and get into serious trouble.
We lived in a normal city where this wasn’t much of a risk, not San Francisco.
Also, most bullies wouldn’t tell anyone, since they are usually bullying people in the first place because their parents abuse or ignore them. Needless to say, if you are a shitty parent, this is a very bad idea.
In the Netherlands there used to be a TV show where victims would explain how being bullied dramatically affected them far into adulthood. At the end of the episode, they'd meet their bully.
The consistent pattern across episodes is interesting. Pretty much every time the bully barely (or not at all) remembered the bullying. Not as a type of denial, they were genuinely shocked to learn that they were a bully, or that the bullying they did remember had such massive impact.
And when you looked at these grown up bullies, they seemed perfectly normal and reasonable adults. Not at all mean, manipulative, aggressive, or cut-throat.
Whilst none of this helps those victims, it does tell us that bullying is not some permanent character trait. It seems more a fleeting behavior of an undeveloped human being. Probably often performed under group pressure, being an "also-bully". I think that's a much different take from the notion that it's some highly planned, rational behavior driven by evil.
I know my son has bullying tendencies, and he actually struggles to maintain close friendships because of it. Like you say though, it isn’t intentional at all. He would much rather keep his friends and have an easier time socializing.
The trouble is that he, for some reason, sees elevating himself and pushing others down as an appropriate thing to do at times. He is fairly insecure and reflexively does this. His mom is quite similar, and like him, also unaware of how it affects people.
When either of them do this, they are entirely oblivious to how uncomfortable or upset they’ve made someone feel. His mom is much better at apologizing even if incredulously, but he still lacks the social tact to recognize the importance of acknowledging and apologizing if it was insensitive. If anything, over time he may actually be less receptive to the idea that he’s doing anything at all.
I have no doubt that many kids will think he was a bit of a jock and a bully later in life. He will remember school as a somewhat lonely and confusing point in time.
Even discussing this with him openly has yielded no results. It makes no sense to him. Likewise, his mom is also still positive that anyone she offends simply misunderstood her, or that people are too sensitive or lack a sense of humour.
I wish I understood it better. At any rate, I’m fairly certain that a lot of bullies are very misunderstood and often potentially quite miserable and lonely. The more they push people away, the fewer opportunities they get to grow and improve themselves with deeper relationships. It’s not a good situation for anyone.
There are many adult bullies, and while I'm not sure if they were also bullies when they were kids it's certainly not the case that it's necessarily a temporary stage of someone's development. Adult bullies tend to operate quite differently, though, and can be much smarter about plausible deniability.
I completely agree about the problem, and some of this thread has the answer: fight back. Being adults, we naturally focus on what the adults can do. Of course if someone in authority sees bad behavior, they should stop it.
The problem is all the bad behavior they don't see. The bullies just learn to do it when no adults are watching. Teaching the kid how to fight back is a great solution and several answers have said that.
But suppose he or she just can't (sick, handicapped, uncoordinated, tiny, etc.)?
This is where the kids who are not being bullied can step in. Teach your big strong kid it's not cool to just watch it happen; confront the bully yourself. Protect the kids who can't protect themselves.
Not that it holds much scientific value, but my impression from reading news stories about school shootings is that the perpetrators usually were already known in their social circles as bullies, not bullying victims.
So bullies are people that stress the societal boundaries of acceptable behavior.
The advocacy of violence in response is a further stepping over of a societal boundary, essentially the same one used by bullies.
So the boundaries are crossed, both legal, institutional, and societal.
But you want to be pedantic about "problem statements"? That firearms and school shootings are some boundary that is fantastical and doesn't get crossed in the real world (that is, the USA conception of the real world)?
You want boundaries on the problem statement, which is about using violent extralegal means to address violent extralegal threats?
What a bizarre comment. Like, you don't think gangs exist? You don't think bullies who crave power and strength don't crave strength in numbers? You don't think gun violence exists, exists at schools?
Are you in some fantasy land where BJJ is the solution for world peace? Are you some gun nut scared that this will cross into gun control? Are you just some spectrum resident pendant/troll?
Lots of people on this thread advocate for fighting back. I don't know why you have a problem with it.
"Bullying" on the original article had nothing to do with firearms & school shootings, as you would know if you read it. It has to do with one nasty kid picking on another one. It very rarely makes the news.
If you need to have the last word, go ahead. I'm not replying any further.
Those boundaries exist because they're mutually beneficial. If the state is derelict in its duty to enforce them, it's not obvious to me why the individual has a moral duty to either the state or the bully to simply endure injustice.
One aspect of today's society that would have seemed strange to anyone 100 years ago is that any verbal/psychological abuse of any kind is bundled as more ok than minor violence.
Violence is almost never the answer, but modern bullies seem to be artificially building situations where it's the only answer, since they know they'd get their way otherwise.
It's true that many abusers become this way due to violence at home, but abandoning any option in responding to force with force seems absurd.
“So the solution is to siphon even more money into charter schools, so that the public schools are left to rot even more due to lack of resources, and ensure the only children left in public schools will be the most desperate and poor among us. Their bullying problems will be 100 times worse, but it won’t be your problem. Let them rot.”
May as well be the rest of the quote.
At this point you may as well just advocate for executing the poor.
why is that exactly, there is some weird purification/concentration of social things that only happen at school. Is it the spike of age cohorts (+/-6mo) all thrown together without any regulating factors that would occur with older wiser children (say +6 years) being able to correct the misbehaving individuals? Is it a factor of the sheer outnumbering encountered from high student to adult ratios? Is bullying less likely to occur when the adult count increases?
Teachers/admin can't long-term isolate the shitheads unless they go really far—notably, it's very hard to be kicked out for bullying that's short of repeated cases of extreme outright violence. A teacher and even school admin can't "fire" a chronically disruptive and/or bullying student. Other students can't vote with their feet and flee the classes with the worst bullies. They're stuck and no-one has the power to fix the situation.
That's why it's so bad. One employee starts pulling dumb shit and several employees report it to the manager, good chance that employee's not going to be able to keep it up much longer or they'll be gone. Yes, abuse happens at workplaces, but school-type bullying doesn't have the same kind of cover it does in a school. Several students report a bully, that bully will still be there next week. And next quarter. And maybe in their class next year. Still being a bully.
Selection bias during admissions gets talked about a lot when it comes to private schools, but they also have the superpower of being able to tell a kid who won't shape up to GTFO permanently. One family's tuition isn't worth risking several other students leaving. This can and does happen, and it doesn't solve all the problems, but it means the worst of the worst don't stick around like they do at public schools, poisoning the whole school atmosphere.
That's nothing to do with school though, just youth. Kids who get into fights in the summer months away from school aren't sent to jail for it like adults. Being at or away from a school isn't a factor in that difference.
In the US, probably a combination of reduced birthrates means there is less density of children, in conjunction with real estate development that requires cars to travel point to point, effectively filtering out situations where children get together without adults.
Nah, that doesn't ring true to me. I got into plenty of scraps during the summer when I was a kid. Nothing that rose to the asymmetry I would describe as bullying, but certainly it was violence. And besides the overt fights, many of the games we played were essentially organized fights.
Maybe things are different now, with kids spending too much time indoors playing video games instead of running around in the woods. But I think violence is generally an outcome from boys being together and relatively unsupervised. The insidious part about violence in schools is the double-jeopardy you face from administration; first you get your ass kicked by the bully, then you get your ass kicked again by the bureaucracy putting you through the wringer.
Is that some manipulative jingoistic pro-military shaming?
A boxer obviously will see violence, so will a pigskin football player. Those are things they signed up for and the violence is part of the voluntary activity.
A soldier (or policeman) signs up to be in war, either an active one or one that might happen.
A high school student, a cube worker, a barista, a fireman, they do not sign up for violence.
The difference is that children have no choice but to go to school. They are sent to the slaughter.
Certainly not only the military. I was countering an absolute statement, I don't need to list all exceptions to prove the statement wrong. I only need to list one.
This problem comes from schools being completely artificial environments. In human societies before the Prussian model, children were around adults most of the time and they learned to emulate adult behavior. Schools, with high child to adult ratios, are Lord of the Flies barely concealed with a thin layer of gilding to fool the on-lookers.
It's actually a different problem than most people realize. What happens is that you have criminal assault and abuse being tolerated by adults and then blaming the victims. To try to understand, take the behavior of the "bullies" and imagine it is being done by adults.
It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children who are totally out of control, they blame the victims and compartmentalize the assaults as being somehow different since they involve children.
These assaults are actually even more critical to address in childhood because as they are allowed to form patterns that persist in criminal assaults and fraud in adulthood.
This type of failure is one reason that we don't truly have a civil society. There is this facade of order, but really at the heart it's just the animal kingdom. There is some aspiration by those with the responsibility, but on average the teachers etc. have little real resolve, courage, or capability to actually deal with the broken and dangerous children that are common in schools. So they blame the victims.
I'd offer that the problem is compounded (and actually really the root) by anti-social parents who are unable or unwilling to parent appropriately, then raising hell when teachers attempt to cajole the student into being pro-social
As well as that the parents of the victim are easier to deal with even when the child is damaged than the parents of the bullies. And the parents of the victim may also be complicit in the victim blaming. It’s absurd to think it’s something that could be fixed in a generation also.
It seems to be very hard to distinguish between bullying and rough play. Rough play is a developmental requirement (particularly for young boys) across the hominoid clade (and likely wider). Being denied it also has real and lifelong consequences. For further reading, Frans de Waal has done a lot of work in this area.
Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.
Rough play is voluntary, being a victim of bullying isn't. I say this as someone who engaged in rough play, got bullied, and was a bully, at different times.
Learning how to respond to antisocial behaviour by a peer, and being able to resolve conflict independently, are two very important skills that it's critical to learn. Being seen as someone who needs adult help to resolve peer conflict is socially disastrous for young people. We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.
"Solve the problem yourself". Yeah, you've never had to deal with being chased by bullies and having the shit kicked out of you for no reason. Bullying is not a conflict between peers anymore than a woman getting raped is a conflict between peers.
As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I was bullied as a child, and honestly, the problem is hard to deal with. I was not good at socialising, I found it difficult to read social cues, and I was kind of irritating a lot of the time. None of that excuses bullying, of course, but ultimately a large part of what caused that bullying was my own behaviour. If I'd have been more socially adept, if I'd realised that the social group I'd found wasn't supporting me and if I'd put more effort into making worthwhile friends, I wouldn't have been in that situation.
In the end, I needed to change for the issue to be resolved - which I did, and, along with moving to a new environment which helped reset a lot of my social interactions, that helped a lot. Obviously that's not some instant magic wand solution - I went through five long years of this experience, with various teachers and other adults trying to help me before things started clicking and I started being able to move on - but in my experience there aren't really many better solutions.
So, while I can't reiterate enough how unacceptable bullying is, and what a negative impact it had on those years of my life, I do agree with the previous poster: the ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of victim (n.b. not literally: I never found violence helped me), and trying to resolve the situation via visible external intervention may well have little impact. For me at least, a better social education would have made me much more prepared to deal with the issues that I faced.
But isn't one really useful way to learn by having people older and wiser than you step in and explain the situation to everyone involved? You don't just throw a bunch of math symbols at a child and say, "learn how to do arithmetic." You teach them what numbers and numerals are and how to manipulate them. You teach them easier concepts first, and then build on them. That needs to be done for both bullies and their victims, too. Most people will not "just figure it out." That's abusive in itself.
That's definitely true, but I think you've got to know what you're teaching. You can't just teach that bullying is bad, because - while it definitely is - that's not solving the underlying problem. Instead, I think you've got to take an active role in teaching healthy social interactions, especially to those kids who are struggling to figure things out. We need to embrace emotional intelligence as a taught intelligence, where I think all too often we just ignore it with excuses like "that's just who they are".
And that's not going to work for everyone, so obviously there still needs to be repercussions for people who do bully others, and we should make it clear that bullying is never acceptable, but I think we need to concentrate more on helping the people being bullied to grow, rather than stopping the bullies themselves. To come back to your maths analogy, if someone's struggling with arithmetic, you can't just make the subject easier and tell them they don't need to worry about it, they still need to actually learn the subject, even if it's hard for them.
"The ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of the victim" is the reality that people who are pushing for anti-bullying measures are trying to change.
Well, bullying is many things, and I think the exact issue is that the conversation lacks nuance. As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not. If you are attacked by a group of people, or someone substantially larger than you, then intervention is warranted. Ideally this intervention is carried out by older peers. If you're being bullied by one of your peers, you need to learn the skills to resolve that conflict. Sometimes escalation is the best tool, sometimes avoidance is. There's no panacea, but it's something we all need to learn.
If one of your classmates takes to pushing you around, taking your stuff, embarrassing you, calling you names, etc. This is normal behaviour in apes who are trying to establish a dominance hierarchy. The bully likely sees you as a soft target who is easy to dominate. The best course is to correct that assumption - escalate conflict - fight back, fight dirty. It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. The best way to avoid that is to make friends and be more trouble than you are worth.
In adulthood I’ve never had to resolve a problematic interaction through physical violence, and I hope to never have to. The methods I have used—distancing myself from the bully, reporting to management/HR/oversight agencies—are quite like the methods I used to avoid bullying in childhood. I never used violence back then either.
The only meaningful difference between now and then is that in adulthood I have more such avenues and they are much more effective. The fact that they were less effective in childhood is an indictment of the administrative and social structure we have constructed schools to have, not of nonviolent methods themselves. I reject your assertion that it’s helpful for a bullied child to model behavior on chimpanzees in the jungle or criminals in prison. Becoming violent in childhood would have had negative long‐term effects on me, and I’m glad nobody back then gave me the “advice” you’re sharing now.
Good response. Toxic organisations (at whatever scale) fail to maintain an atmosphere where bullying is rejected and people are helped to be their best. Children should be taught to recognise toxic organisations and be given courage to exit them. And internalize that you do this as an adult too. There are situations where assault or battery could arise, and it is good to have some training in how to deal with those situations. Bullying, assault, battery are all abusive: it’s just bullying is legal and the others are not.
Given that my interactions with adults outside of school (and later, when I was pulled out of public school to be homeschooled) were almost always positive, I’m willing to specifically blame school administration and/or their techniques.
I think you problably have some sampling bias in your adult interactions.
Im guessing most of them don't involve the lowest functioning portion of the population, eg, people who regularly comment violence, rape, and beat their wives, or are currently incarcerated. Public schools cut across the entire population spectrum and include children with legitimate social and cognitive deficiencies.
Adults also have more developed brains and better incentives to obey. a hostile worker might still care about losing their income, car, or house. It is hard to find comparable incentives for children and young adults.
"the well adjusted adults I know easily resolve issues without violence" does not mean that you should expect the same results for all adults, or for all children.
The original assertion I disputed was that we should accept that the social dynamics in a school match those of a prison.
Certainly I don’t pretend there aren’t environments where adults are violent and unreasonable. Such as prisons, or other places with “people who regularly commit violence, rape, and beat their wives.”
If your argument is that school environments must be similarly unpleasant because they take students from all strata of society, I counter: we do not take teachers and administrators from all strata of society, and society should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly, because we can take lessons from environments where such things are not normal.
> should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly
This seems harmfully naïve to me. In pursuing this aspiration we ignore the realities that exacerbate conflict. Children and teenagers are literally not cognitively developed enough (on average) to function to this standard. This remains true no matter how much we wish it weren't.
More effective policy comes from embracing this reality. "Violence and mental abuse" are inevitable consequences of the construction of hominid dominance hierarchies. Instead of fighting their construction, we should create environments where they can occur most naturally.
Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved?
Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish the perpetrators.
Right, I'm suggesting that adults are sufficiently cognitively developed to take personal responsibility for their actions. Children clearly are not. I'm not suggesting we stop punishing bullies, I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment. Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies. Lord of the flies is deemed chillingly instructive for a reason. Children typically age out of this behaviour by their late teens and go on to become functional, peaceful adults. The ones that do not are indeed destined for prison.
Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality.
>Lord of the flies is deemed chillingly instructive for a reason
It tells you what children might do if left to their own devices without adult supervision – i.e. in an environment completely unlike a school. The Lord of the Flies is also a work of fiction that's not based on any real life events, as far as I'm aware. In any actual instances of kids being stranded on an island that I've been able to find, the results were rather different: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
>Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies
In my school there was an effective intervention: you got punished if you beat someone up, and excluded from the school if you kept doing it. I guess no-one had told us that we were required to form 'hominid dominance hierarchies' and that we were cognitively incapable of responding to simple incentives.
>I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment
And what would this mean, exactly, beyond just accepting the inevitability of violence?
You can hold schools to any standard you want, but that does not mean it is actually achievable. My point was that being able to meet high standards with functioning adults is not evidence that it can be met with non-functioning children
> It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.
The simple fact that you think it's not a problem to somewhat approvingly compare schools to prisons is already a bad sign. Schools shouldn't be like prisons. Prisons shouldn't be like prisons either, but that's another story...
That's just not true. There are many kinds of social relations, dominance being just one particularity nasty one. Other apes also exhibit a whole range of social relations. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog world out there, and most of the time it actually isn't.
Absolutely, and there are many kinds of social interactions at school besides bullying. My point was only that "bullying" is an expression of normal hierarchy negotiation/construction in children and should be treated as such.
> As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not.
This was covered by the paper. You are talking about Peer Victimization without bullying. Bullying is a form of peer victimization in which there is a power imbalance (size, numbers, status, etc).
A shame sometimes the best way to resolve a conflict is eye gouging the aggressor before they permanently break a part of your body
The thing that stuck with me the most by getting the "resolve your conflicts by yourself" treatment was that no matter how much someone is being a piece of shit, the only one you can count on is yourself
Everyone else will watch as you break, and only intervene if you fight back. And punishment is only ever dished out in equal measures between aggressor and victim
Noticing that was probably the start of considering people to be rotten by default, reasons are needed to assume someone isn't
There seems to be a disconnect between what you think bullying is and how it actually manifests. Between adults, the behavior would be classified as unprovoked assault & battery. Someone punching you in the back of your head while you weren't looking, without a word being said between either of you, because the other person's peer group dared them to is not a failure of the victim's conflict resolution skills.
To be clear, as a victim, I was subject to unprovoled physical battery like this more time than I can count between the start of middle school and my second year of high school. As a bully, in my senior year, I never engaged in any kind of physical violence, just name calling and verbally provoking someone prone to emotional outbursts.
As we all read stories about bullied kids, or even this study above, not having help to resolve peer conflict isn't especially useful to kids' development either. So, how exactly should they handle it by themselves? Gang up? Outgun the bullies? I'm sorry but I can't even imagine a good way, any good way, how a bullied nerd kid can get out of bullying by themselves.
So basically you advocate not only educating the own kid, but also educating their peers to intervene, and also educating the older ones to police the area, and educating the adults in the end. Do you really think this is a realistic policy, over the lifetime of your school kid? In an ideal world, no idea, but in this real world Id say zero chance. However I can tell you how it works around here (Switzerland, by no means perfect either) where school personal will usually intervene - and somehow the bullied kids manage to learn their social skills as well. Yes we might be apes but even among apes the social structures are so different that the comparison is mostly meaningless.
This was basically how things have worked and continue to work in (particularly rural) areas where policymaking is lacking and people are left to their own devices. "Bullied" kids seek help from their immediate peers, from their/their peers older siblings, and from adults, roughly in that order. Parents typically do not hesitate to suggest aggressive escalation as a conflict resolution strategy. This strategy is often applied successfully.
I'm suggesting that the current "zero tolerance" approach practiced in North America does more harm than good by halting this process before it can resolve conflict - thus harming both the bullied and the bully.
My own experience growing up in rural America is not so romantic. Bullies were sometimes those who had a numeric advantage when it came to having relatives who were peers and adults at the school. Their victims, often, outsiders who were not physically strong, had no big siblings to protect them, and were not “favorites” of the teachers. Such children would not benefit from your strategy.
"This was basically how things have worked and continue to work in (particularly rural) areas where policymaking is lacking and people are left to their own devices."
So in rural areas if a child in school grabs another child, throws them on the ground, and starts beating them in the middle of math class, the teacher will not attempt to intervene?
The problem with American zero tolerance policies is not that they attempt to stop violence, but that they find the bullied to be as culpable as the bully, because “participating” in violence is what’s considered wrong, not instigating it.
There isn’t one of these steps that bullied children are not doing that they could do to resolve their issue. If your point is that their issue could be solved with education; well maybe, maybe they need parenting also…
> We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.
Will you do the same when your child is being bullied? How do you think that may affect them and their relationship with you? How do you think a child feels when they realize that the adults around them do not have their back? What does it do to their sense of safety and their self-esteem?
I have lived through this and have my personal take on these questions, but I'd love to learn about yours.
Like with most things, I think the right move for an adult is to help the child solve the problem themselves, rather than do it for them. As other posts have mentioned, learning when and how to apply violence is a critical skill. We (particularly children) do not live in a post-violence society. Children should of course not feel abandoned by those closest to them, but being overprotective can have its own negative consequences for development.
It's clearly a fine line to walk, but if you're being bullied then what you need is to learn how to address/discourage that behaviour - not an intervention. Otherwise all you're doing is deferring the learning experience until next time. Past a certain window it's very hard to learn this skill, and you can be stuck with a helpless mentality for your whole life.
I got pretty good at avoiding fights with bullies and dumbasses. And I never started a fight. I always made an effort to avoid fighting.
But I did become a "fan" of boxing at a very early age and studied how boxers fought. How they setup opponents, threw punches, and especially how they avoided getting hit. Most kids don't do that so it's pretty easy to gain an advantage. And bullies tend to leave kids alone who they know will fight back.
I grew up in some pretty rough neighborhoods so I was motivated to learn.
Homicide and suicide are the second and third leading causes of death for teens and young adults following accidents (primarily motor vehicle). (If it matters to you, males are much more likely to die and females are more likely to report bullying.)
Putting aside outliers like kids wity cancer, there is what is diplomatically called "death by misadventure". Or less diplomatically winning a Darwin award.
I grew up with 2 brothers and lots of cousins and learned how to fight by watching boxing on TV.
I fought my 2 year older brother to a draw when I was 6 years old. I dropped a 15 year old kid who was way bigger than me and bullying me by kicking him in the balls that same year and then stood over him while he was on the ground writhing and crying in pain and told him he was lucky I wasn't kicking his face in. He never came near me again.
By the time I started school kids in my neighborhood knew I would fight and when I started Jr. High kids in school already knew I would fight, and I was not a big kid, I was pretty small compared to most kids my age.
When I was 14 a kid I didn't know and was way bigger than me hit me in the head with a hockey stick at a city park and knocked me out cold. When I came to he was skating away from me. I skated as fast as I could, caught up to him and jumped on his back and knocked him down and I started wailing on him. I really don't remember how but I ended up sitting on his chest slugging him in the face as hard and fast as I could when I started hearing people yelling "Stop! Stop!" and realized there was a crowd of people watching me.
When I was in my late teens I started taking MMA classes. That taught me how to use an opponent's force against them and when I was 21 I literally bounced a guy who'd been pestering me for years to "wrestle" off his bedroom ceiling. He was in my face pestering me again so I gave him and little shove and he came back trying to shove me as hard as he could, so it was mostly his energy, I just redirected it. He was in shock because it happened so fast. I was stunned at how well it worked.
When people know you will fight back they tend to not mess with you and getting hit is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You'll heal up. Not fighting back sticks with you and hurts forever.
Bullies will only keep bullying kids who don't fight back. I taught my 5 kids this and none of them were bullied in school.
> When people know you will fight back they tend to not mess with you and getting hit is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You'll heal up. Not fighting back sticks with you and hurts forever.
100%
I once had a kid walk up to me and tell me he had to show me something out in the recess yard. We get out to a certain spot, he bends down and picks up a screwdriver and throws it at me, slammed into the side of my head. To this day I have no idea why, didn't know the kid.
I chased him back into the school building, he turned a corner and the principal was standing there talking to a teacher. I remember very clearly he drew up next to the principal and had a shit eating grin on his face.
I removed that grin from his face very quickly, he thought I was afraid of the consequences of beating him in front of the principal. He learned otherwise.
To the principals credit, once I told him the story, saw the knot on my head, AND the screwdriver I got away with absolutely no punishment.
I've never been one to start things, and in fact often times I let them go too far, but I've never actually been afraid of a fight. I used to move a lot as a kid and at some point I just got used to having to fight atleast 1 person at a new school, once people realized you wouldn't take their shit, they didn't give it.
Yeah, if that was everyone's experience being bullied no one would care.
My bullies would tackle me, surround me, and kick me while I was down for minutes. Never less then 6 of them at a time. I had 3 concussions from being tackled and having my head smashed against the floor.
They would throw sand into my eyes. I remember not being able to see while being beat. I remember having to wear an eye patch for a week from the abrasions.
They would throw large sticks at me, I have numerous scars from being hit in the face.
They would break my things, I had multiple bikes smashed on the bike rack.
They would steal my things, if I had anything nice in my desk they would steal it when the teacher was out of the room.
They would shove dog shit in my face when they tackled me to the ground in their groups.
They would ostracize me from every other person at school, anyone I tried to talk to would have to ignore me for fear of being beaten up and treated the same. Even those that I was good friends with outside of school felt they couldn't let it be known in school.
I'd have my pants pulled down almost every single day while I was walking in crowds.
I stood up and fought for myself every single time. I never backed out. I always tried to fight back. I was larger then any of them individually. I had my dad take me to Taekwondo from the time I was in grade 2. I started lifting weights in grade 4.
My only recourse was to avoid them. From grade 2 to grade 11 I would pretend to be sick for weeks at a time in order to avoid going to school. Avoidance was my ONLY option, nothing else worked. I would use up every single sick day I could without getting expelled in high school. I'm not even sure about elementary school, they didn't have a max number of days, but I'm sure I missed at least half of every year.
Finally in grade 11 I managed to get the fight to stop by knocking four teeth out of my main bullies mouth and giving him 18 stitches. I was knocked out cold and barely remember the fight.
Standing up for yourself doesn't always work, everyone in this thread that thinks it does is extremely naive.
I'm glad that you punching your bully once solved the problem for you though.
Problem: "Existing research indicates that (a) being bullied in childhood is associated with distress and symptoms of mental health problems...; (b) the consequences of childhood bullying victimisation can persist up to midlife and, in addition to mental health, can impact physical and socioeconomic outcomes."
I don't see how this research controls for the zero tolerance policies which have been in place for a long time, and which lots of research suggests serve to prolong and escalate conflict.
I have a pretty low opinion of the zero tolerance policies because they seem to primarily operate to the benefit of the bullies in this case: the bullying is not readily visible as a problem to the adults and when it is, many of them think as you do, that kids will be kids and they should work out their problems themselves. However, a fight is an immediate problem and the obvious instigator is the victim of the bullying.
Working-it-out is an effective approach for two people who want to solve an issue - an issue that they're both fairly responsible for.
But where you have one child experiencing long-term and unearned mistreatment at the hands of many peers - attempts at working-it-out are such a mismatched response that more mistreatment seems likely.
Do you hold this same view about adults and police?
Are we denying women a chance at personal development by having police arrest rapists rather than forcing women to develop the necessary skills of interpersonal violence to defend themselves?
I'm simply pointing to a body of research that shows we have this area of development in common with our ape relations, and that the strategies juvenile apes use to resolve conflict largely apply to children too.
With regards to sexual assault - we surely should teach vulnerable people the necessary skills to avoid violence. It (used to be) common sense not to drink in the company of strangers, especially if you are physically vulnerable (regardless of your sex). None of this is exclusive to punishing perpetrators, which we should of course continue doing.
An interesting approach I read - I think it was a novel, honestly, but may have been an autobiography - was that fights were not just tolerated but sanctioned, with one big proviso: In the gym, with boxing gloves and headgear on, and fists only. Going down or taking a knee ends the fight.
Let 'em work out the tension, but with very minimal chance of hurting anything.
I am here for safe and supervised middle school duels. It would have helped me a lot.
I went to a strict religious school and a kid who bullied me over years pushed me too far one day and I started after him, got maybe one kick to his leg in. Teachers stopped me immediately, but never did the same for the years of verbal abuse mocking me for my weight though. I ended up getting spanked by the principal with a thick wooden paddle in front of my teacher that day. This was the mid to late 90s. I heard once the kid who bullied me is in prison now.
You should get the straight facts on that kid and what he did and confront the school over it. They obviously failed across the board with him and probably someone got hurt for him to get time. They could have done things to correct his behavior, instead they punished you for lashing out against his abuse. This needs to show up when people search that school so other parents know how they really are and avoid sending their kids there.
I wonder how many people would be still willing to fight if they were forced to delay for some amount of time (hours?). My hunch is it'd be very few, which would be a win.
I was a peaceful kid and no good at gym class, which played some part in why I was bullied. What benefit would I have received from officially sanctioning my regular physical humiliation?
The bully comes up and shoves a kid around, doing some minor injuries.
The bullied raises the matter to school authorities.
Their solution is "would you like to fight the bully some more?"
---
At what point did the victim want to get involved in this? The victim didn't instigate violence, the victim didn't want to participate in violence, the victim wants the violence to stop and to feel safe at school.
And you propose to instead offer them "would you like to risk more bodily injury engaging in violence?"
Depends, if it becomes chronic rough play you know something might be wrong. If you're close enough and can see that it's asymmetrical and the victim is always the same, someone should intervene.
There is also "rough teasing" which isn't quite bullying --but can turn into bullying sometimes. It often calls for take but give. This typically can happen within your in-group.
I’m not sure if there’s data/studies on this, but I feel that bullying is a bigger problem in the US than in eg Europe and Asia. If so, would like to see more discussion on why that is and how we could improve things by comparing
My personal experience was that Western schooling was much kinder than Asian (Indian) schooling (parent's job had me moving countries every 3 years). Having been a bit of an outsider in both systems (didn't have the years of shared history in Western circles and accent was too American in Asian circles) and extremely timid, while I did initially get bullied in Western schools, it was nowhere near as pervasive, underhanded or nasty as it was in the Asian schools I attended.
In the Western system I could more often rely on just ignoring or complaining to a teacher to result in some action, in the Asian schools I went to, many of the teachers and other parents seemed almost complicit in the bullying (somewhat unsurprisingly, especially the English teachers).
I still remember that on my first day in an Indian school in 4th grade after having gone to school for ~3 years in NY, I had been mocked and called stupid in front of the class by the math teacher for writing out how I answered a problem differently from what had been taught to the rest of the class. Completely ruined me on math for several years because it made me too hesitant to ask questions about fundamental things I didn't understand and as a result I had terrible fundamentals. I only really managed to get over that by spending the entirety of 8th grade self-teaching myself math after school.
The way I like to think of it these days is that Western education made me enjoy learning and helped build up my confidence, while Asian education made me cynical and better at reading people (which isn't a bad thing to me now, but I'd still rather never go through that again).
Of course this is just anecdotal so it doesn't say a lot overall.
As someone who went through the Indian education system, teachers were some of the worst bullies who would frequently abuse their power.
- A teacher posed a question to the class and I and another boy answered immediately. The teacher was upset and said "cliquecover and boy are always putting themselves forward"
- A few senior students demo'ed a cool robotics toy they'd built. Our science teacher mocked our class for not being as intelligent as them, instead of explaining how we could build one (doubt he knew anything about it).
- A university lecturer openly ridiculed all the female CS students as "useless"
- A tendency to obscure their incompetence and lack of understanding by focussing on petty details: eg a math teacher ridiculing us for not knowing our multiplication tables and forcing us to memorize them, instead of teaching useful skills, English teachers being obsessed with spelling and handwriting instead of general reading and composition skills
- Universities engaging in extortion by refusing to release student's personal documents unless they would take up the first job offer they obtained via university placements.
Very few intelligent people in India would become teachers in the kind of school I went to. They would rather take up software/IT/private sector jobs, so you get mediocre non-entities who have free rein to treat students as they please.
Yes that roughly agrees with my experiences and the stories from friends and family. Luckily I just barely dodged having to deal with board exams and Indian university.
Not to downplay the severity of the problem in America, but bullying is pretty damn severe in East Asia. The "nail that sticks up gets hammered down" quote often used to describe the situation there. Search "japan bullying" in Youtube and you'll find a long list of videos talking about the issue in Japan in particular.
I know it's not exactly a reliable record, but Japanese high school anime are a popular genre and pretty consistently depict a fairly intense atmosphere of bullying. It's often not the focus so you have to read between the lines a bit in some of them, but it's usually there. Not sure how much of that's true and how much is fictional trope.
I'm not sure what you mean by Japanese high school anime? Some anime, particularly in the slice of life genre, depict a idealized version of high school where there is no bullying.
I came to similar conclusion. My children go to an elementary school in Canada and there is bullying even in good schools. The things that these little kids do is incomprehensible to me.
I went to elementary school in USSR and I never saw what my children experience in Canada(at least I don't remember it, but I do know that the schools in USSR had bullying issues with teenagers).
Is it because children have too much freedom in school, innatentive/overworked teachers?
My wife tends to think it's the food(sugars) and TV/computer games (even first graders spend significant chunks of their free time playing Minecraft and other games). Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids?
Dunno about Canada, but in the US schools have very limited options for dealing with problem kids, and class sizes are way bigger than they'd be if we really wanted every kid to have a great education (we would be aiming for about half what they are now, in that case)—more social problems is one consequence of that.
If we could "sacrifice" the top ~10% most-disruptive students—just keep them out of the ordinary classrooms—it'd improve everyone else's experience and ultimate educational attainment immensely. My wife used to be a teacher and days when the right couple kids both happened to be sick, all the lessons got done faster than the time she'd allotted, giving time to cover bonus material, and she said you could just feel how much more relaxed and jovial the atmosphere was, and could see it on the kids' faces. Consider how much benefit it would convey if that were every day and those effects could compound over years. First person who figures out a way to do that that doesn't condemn the 10%ers who actually have a chance of reforming, and that's palatable to constituents, will have done more for US education than anyone else has in a century, probably.
> Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids?
All children need to be "socialized", which means "taught the local method of the art of civilization". Currently in the western world there IS no "local method of the art of civilization". There's barely even a "local people". Most people grow up around transplants and whirling hodgepodge of rapidly-evolving ethno-social practices that never comes close to stabilizing on a single, repeatable way of life.
The US's and Canada's failures to raise up kids to behave a certain way is due to the fact that the modern western world is in a local period of flux/chaos. Children rarely see their full-time working parents and live in environments where they have little freedom and few trustworthy allies that will remain with them throughout their whole lives. The several people I know who grew up in the USSR did not experience this, and while they experienced shortages, authoritarianism, and poverty, they also experienced very intensely local community with people who they understood and expected to live the same way. (This broke down across ethnic lines, of course.) The necessary fixes are far more pervasive and difficult than many people realize, and mostly start with "fixing the adults" rather than "fixing the kids".
Bullying is a deeply primal instinct, with the end result of establishing a social hierarchy with the most powerful and violent on top and people who will listen to them and provide goods and services on the bottom. The reason that adults who commit crimes end up in prison is that modern western governments keep a really well-armed and nasty gang on a leash (police) and have a system to deal with the bullies who don't learn how to keep their bullying in line with social acceptability. (For instance, you can emotionally torture an employee into depression, but you can't punch them in the face.) I believe that the bullying we're seeing children do now is closer to status-jockeying in a post-civilization world than as a consequence of our current society's setup. They're trying to establish hierarchies and social norms for themselves, because they've never observed or been taught any.
Play dates really create needless friction because they don't allow children to click organically. The restoration of the public realm, making it safe for children, is the most pressing challenge for america.
The US compares relatively well because, despite having comprehensive education, the system is also designed to segregate schooling areas.
In Europe, bullying is worst in countries with comprehensive systems (UK/Nordics/Eastern Europe, unsurprisingly they are countries that have left-wing education systems built for the social justice goals of adults, not learning outcomes of kids). I believe it is as bad or worse in Asia although for different reasons.
Btw, there are also quite good stats about sexual violence against girls and, unfortunately, you actually see these levels are highest in comprehensive systems in Europe. This is likely due to under-reporting elsewhere but it is very strange to see somewhere like the UK come out worse than Afghanistan in violence against girls. I think people should also ask why this kind of stuff isn't known (again, it is because schools are designed for social justice for adults, not for kids...it is an unfortunate reality of our world).
> UK/Nordics/Eastern Europe, unsurprisingly they are countries that have left-wing education systems built for the social justice goals of adults, not learning outcomes of kid
Learning outcome rankings are commonly pretty high for UK and the Nordics -- there's a number of metrics, and some asian countries come out outlier strong depending on the test, but it's pretty common to find Finland, Sweden, and the UK in the top, and Finland in particular seems pretty enviable by a number of standards.
Also, learning outcomes for kids are social justice goals -- people who think of their social values/goals in those terms (vs people who use "social justice" as a drive-by disparaging/othering term to signal their own ideological allegiances) are almost always concerned with broadening positive educational outcomes. Perhaps you don't share those goals, or perhaps you believe that some social movements are promoting policy that isn't well-optimized for those goals, but it's entirely false to state that they're mutually exclusive.
And as they say, "citation needed" for stats about bullying or sexual violence.
What's usually blamed on bullying victims ? Is that a lack of assertiveness ?
In society there's often a reflex to blame girls from trying to hitch hike, like stepping in risky activities.. but for bullying it seems completely passive and unwarranted.
I don't think anybody really blames the victims and people understand the bullies are the problem.
The issue is, what are you going to do about it? Teachers can't be fully responsible for fixing them, and clearly the parents (often) won't. You can't really go "draconian" mode on the bullies either, they're still kids. And even if you would, they'd get even worse.
>These assaults are actually even more critical to address in childhood because as they are allowed to form patterns that persist in criminal assaults and fraud in adulthood.
It's this kind of logic that creates it actually. Trying to create Uber safe environments for hypothetical outcomes results in those behaviors being suppressed and mutated later. Children are designed to bully, the same as every other mammal species plays when young. If they were not, you wouldn't find it in every place where children are throughout the planet.
We can only mitigate severe effects. Smaller schools is the most significant step, but it will never happen.
I've written before that as I get older (as a male), I appreciate the importance of physical prowess more and more, and definitely infinitely more than I did as a teenager.
With regards to taking steps to insulate yourself and particularly your male children from physical bullying (= assault):
The first stop should be developing a body and a physical demeanor that naturally makes any bullies think twice about trying to assault you- the perceived cost should outweigh any potential benefit for them.
If that fails, and it probably will at some point, because there is always someone bigger and stronger, you need to be proficient in some kind of striking sport. Boxing is great for this. You don't need to be able to go to the final bell with Mayweather, but again, you need to be able to hurt the bully enough that in the future they'll know that the cost will outweigh any potential benefit.
(there are 300+ comments and I have only skimmed)
Q: Is there not a single (former) bully who is reading it who can share why they did what they did?
Being a short guy and a motormouth, I got bullied aplenty (perhaps beaten up is the correct word), but I want to believe that it didn't leave any long-term effects. But then I do have a short fuse and I procrastinate like there's always a tomorrow. So maybe, my self-analysis is all wrong.
Australian, male, went to shitty public school in an old and wealthy suburb that had a dozen private schools and 1 public school. I was from a dysfunctional family with a lot at home issues. I wasn’t smart or hard working and because of my metabolism and genetics, I was obese until about 18 when my body started to mature (later compared to my peers).
I got bullied. Hard. By my peers at school. By kids at my games of basketball on the weekend. By my friends. By my brothers and by my father. I’m talking about every day comments about my weight. My smell. My family. My unattractive body. My fat dumb face etc. (Verbal, never got into a violet situation).
What ended up happening is that I began to bully back. I would say nasty things back to people. I would pick things up from South Park. I would knock kids books off the table. Draw on lockers with (poorly) drawn male genitalia.
Ultimately, it felt like the normal thing to do. Just be a total fucking prick to everyone.
I’ve changed a lot since then. I personally can’t stand being around verbal conflict or even consume media that makes fun of people.
I find a lot of modern ‘comedy’ to be a form a
Bullying to someone somewhere.
I’m personally very sorry to my family and friends I still have for my actions that time. And I’m personally very sensitive to witnessing these behaviours.
In my life I try my best to be kind and considerate. I try not to judge people and keep my negative thoughts to my self.
I never wanted to be a bully. Looking back I feel as though I was just fitting in.
Redirected aggression in baboons has been proven to reduce stress hormones.
I also redirected my aggression to weaker kids in school, and I also got redirected aggression from stronger kids. We need to accept that in many cases we are not better than baboons, and try to find ways to accommodate our primal behaviours, not ignore them or pretend that we are so superior as a species.
I really wonder how many americans and asians here think, that schools in Europe are inherently less affected by bullying. I went to a public school in germany. I attended school from around 2000s-2010s, so i had a mixed bag young teachers affected by modern pedagogics, middle aged teachers and teachers who clearly showed influence of nazi like pedagogy (it’s called „schwarze pädagogik“ (black pedagogy) in german an was popular until the late 70s.
At least one girl and three boys dropped out of my high school year (we had 3 classes with around 20-30 students) explicitly because they had been bullied! Then there was at least one student, who repeated a year because of bullying. Then there were like two female and male students who got heavily bullied, but made it through high school without disturbances.
I was bullied both in school and by my own father (who has Asperger's and a mean streak of narcissism) growing up - definitely suffering the long-term and forever consequences in my life because of it. Low self-esteem, no confidence in myself, can't talk to anybody without second guessing everything.
I'm trying to pull myself out of the slump but after living on my own for 3 years I still have troubles with relationships - not trusting anybody, etc.
The sooner we can identify children who are being abused at school, at home, and adopt corrective measures (ideally keeping the child at home instead of throwing them into the foster system), the better off society will be.
Thanks for acknowledging and supporting - mental illness is such a hidden "we don't talk about this" thing in society and people don't pay a lot of attention to it because they can't easily directly observe it in others.
Only recently I've been able to actually talk or mention my upbringing - I was always shamed and threatened never to tell anybody about what was going on or else "I'd rip the family apart". It's hard to fully realize the scale of the abuse until you metaphorically swim to the surface and stick your head out of the water to see the world around you with a different lens for the first time.
I've been using a combination of strategies to try and find my way out of the mess I was thrown into - I've been seeing a psychiatrist for CBT sessions every 2-3 weeks for almost 10 years and have found it helpful, along with attempting to make daily entries in a journal (the ADHD gets in the way sometimes heh).
I'll definitely look into IFS therapy as well. I did some cursory reading and it seems like that's something that would help me.
Of course, in some places huge multinational organisations were found to be protecting child rapists and by and large got to keep running schools. Not sure governments are about to start caring about child welfare.
I was bullied pretty severely as a kid. So bad in fact I was put on medication just to deal with it. I was a weaker kid when I was younger owing to the fact I was sick a lot.
In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped. I would fight at a moments notice even sometimes in classrooms. Spent a lot of time suspended and my parents had conferences. I never lashed out at anyone. Though if someone tried to insult me, push me around, etc I would immediately switch modes and start swinging. As I got bigger and stronger it became less of an attack of weak punches to full blown knockouts.
The only way we can solve bullying is by teaching our kids that violence is not only necessary but expected. Teach them to be violent, and teach them to control it. You must defend yourself from these people. Enrolling your kids in an actual martial art (some combination of boxing, bjj, muay thai, etc) will help. When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory. You can't win with bullies by "being the better person". Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them. School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons. The sooner children realize this the sooner they realize the methods to staying alive aren't much different.
"If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless."
I was also bullied a lot. Especially between first and eight grade. I was much bigger than everyone else but I would never fight back. I always felt bad about potentially hurting someone else so I would just take it.
The kids couldn’t actually physically damage me since I was so much bigger. They did cause a lot of psychological harm. I had a very negative predisposition towards anyone that I met. I just assumed everyone would be hostile towards me and would want to make fun of me. I still struggle with this mindset and I am in my thirties. I will usually be very shut off from people I do not know.
There were a couple of times that I did stand up for myself. Each time the bullying completely stopped.
I thought I was being the better person by not fighting back but that was not true. I was being harmless. That harmlessness invited more violence.
I think the key term here is learned helplessness. Children and to a lesser extent adults push boundaries. Establishing strong boundaries is a key part of developing a sense of control over one's life.
This I have to disagree with. Some of them I believe have a terrible home life and are handing down the abuse to whomever is a weak target.
You may be right in other cases though, and that had never occurred to me. Lack of respect and self control may stem from neglect or lack of parenting rather than abuse.
Sweetie, that's a cope. Bullying is a choice. It's this kind of pro-crime, pro-rape thinking that lets all the bad things happen to people. It's always a choice. Plenty of people happen to go through much worse things without hurting other people. Like for example, the victims of the bullies. So it's clear that there's no inherent reason for the bullies to do it, they just want to.
I was picked on a fair bit in school. The nature of "zero-tolerance" meant that fights were quick. I recall one day just being shoved into a a door threshold unexpectedly. I had had it at that point from this person, so I took my heaviest book out of my bag and slammed him in the head with it as he was already walking away triumphantly. Looking back, he could have been seriously injured. Many people witnesses and laughed at him.
He never bothered me again.
But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?
> But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?
You don't but in the animal kingdom most animals haven't evolved to be able to overcome their predator, they've just evolved to make it difficult enough for their predator to decided to look elsewhere for food. Make sure they know if they pick on you their going to have trouble and they'll go somewhere else.
> School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons.
Most US public schools and low-rate private schools are like this. If your children are in an ultra-competitive public or private school however, the bullies are tossed out, the schools confident in the 100% ironclad certainty there is another family literally grateful for the opportunity to place their child in the new opening within 24 hours. The student body goes through cycles of forgetting this until a new bully is expelled, then the bullying simmers down to much more subtle forms.
In the ultra-competitive private boarding schools, the kind of over the top physical bullying you hear about in public schools is nearly non-existent because they will expel on far lower thresholds for bullying.
But yes, if your children are in US public school or you are a child in a US public school, generally speaking fighting back regardless of the zero tolerance consequences tends to stop the bullying better than going through toothless school policies. Bullies tend to prefer soft targets over porcupines. If you are being bullied and choose to fight back though, then go in at a location with adults to intervene quickly nearby expecting to get hurt and lose (in the sense the bully has the physical upper hand), but never defeated (in the sense you and the bully have to be separated before you stop). If it is a group doing the bullying, go for the leader.
The US public school systems' bullying problem won't stop until the bullies' parents know that they have a no-recourse, no-litigation-overturning consequence to bullying that sees their precious no-fault snowflake expelled to "lower class" schooling if they run out their options.
I pretty much concur. The worst part of being bullied for me was that I was punished for defending myself by the adults around me. I got charged with assault in middle school after winning a fight with a kid who chased me to the bus stop with a metal pallet strap whipping me, as soon as we were off school grounds I turned on him and beat him down with a textbook.
We both were arrested and charged, and I was told to my face by a judge that “there is no such thing as self-defense in schools.” Which is not only a bald-faced lie, it’s unconstitutional. You have a right to be secure in your person, and a right to self-defense, well established by the Supreme Court in case law and described in the Declaration of Independence.
I also didn’t get bullied again at that school after that incident. Self-defense is not just a right, it’s an imperative.
> keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge
I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side.
> kids in an actual martial art
I had this idea, based on my experience as a kid, but never actually got around to enrolling them. They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.
> I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side.
This is endemic in modern culture. The need to treat two opposing opinions as equally valid and balance them against each other as if there's some sane middle-ground to be found. There's no middle-ground between slavery and non-slavery. Or between the earth is flat and science.
Yes 100%, there's a reason for this. Distinguishing right from wrong is an absolute act, and we have been conditioned to associate that with religious zealotry or raving lunacy. By hearing both sides, people are shying away from taking responsibility. Also, by holding up an ethos (e.g. bullying is categorically wrong) to others, we hold up a mirror to ourselves. Hypocrisy is instantly revealed then. (Note for example that the religious right has no problem being hypocrites ).
> They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.
Just saying man if you are looking for a Christmas present for them get them a membership to train at a BJJ gym, if you have a daughter it will keep her safe, if you have a son it will give him the opportunity to interact and build relationships with people he doesn't know, and may not normally associate with. BJJ is all about technique over physicality and carries a low risk of injury.
For both of them it will give them the confidence that if they end up in a bad situation they know they have the skills to respond calmly. In addition if the gym is any good they'll have them do some rolling so they'll be able to learn to stay calm under pressure, which is a very transferable skill.
> In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped.
Exactly my experience as well. Fighting back is the only thing that ever made the bullying stop. I fought back once in the locker room against a boy two years and two feet older and taller than me, basically lost the fight immediately, but because I fought and wouldn't submit, everybody else stopped the fight and after that day I was never bullied in school again.
The reason I never fought back sooner is because I was scared of the rules even more than the bullies. The "Zero tolerance" rules made clear that if I fought back I would be just as bad as the bullies, and in just as much trouble (except I'd actually be in more trouble, because my parents would be livid at me for getting suspended while the bullies' parents wouldn't give a shit.) "Zero tolerance" means zero due process. It's the school administrators essentially siding with bullies by default because it makes the paperwork easier. Absolutely immoral. It should be their responsibility to figure out who actually started the fight and punish the perpetrator but not the victim.
In the end I didn't get in trouble after all, because locker room fights were beyond the eyes of adults and nobody ratted anybody out. I resent the teachers and the administration the most, for making me afraid to stick up for myself. The kids who bullied me were psychos or broken people, and I find it easy to forgive them. But the administration did harm to me by being lazy bureaucrats.
Absolutely agree. The law I ran afoul of was called the “Safe Schools Act” and predictably did nothing of the sort. Zero-tolerance is zero-accountability and zero-sense. It does nothing to address or resolve problems, just makes the lives of petty bureaucrats easier.
Fully agree. I unfortunately never had the balls to fight back, but every time I think back about it, I wish I'd just fucking punched someone. Even now, 20 years after the fact.
I was bullied quite a bit in school, now my boys are starting school and I have them enrolled in BJJ, and the first time my kids comes home upset because someone was picking on him I'll tell him to put that kid in guard and don't let go until the teachers physical remove him.
What age did you start them with BJJ? I've been considering for my 4 year old but not sure if that's too early. It seems too early to tell him to punch the bully in the face (what I did as a kid) but I like the idea of equipping him with the ability to subdue a bully until an adult can take control.
So the gym I train at (they grabbed me after I saw my kids doing it) has a rule that they need to be at least 3 and potty trained, so our youngest started a little bit ago and is more working on the skill of listening and paying attention than some of the techniques but my 5 yo is learning some good stuff and is soon going to move from the young children's class to the youth class where the emphasis moves from holding still and paying attention to actual BJJ.
So I'd say 4 is a good age to start, if you need to find a good gym I'd recommend going over to old.reddit.com/r/bjj and asking for advice on there, you'll probably get some good advice.
Also it makes wrestling with the kids way more fun when they try and practice their BJJ at the same time.
Great thanks for the feedback and resources! This led me down a path to discover we have a dojo in our neighborhood I was unaware of and they have an age 3-5 class. Just in time for winter break too! Thanks again- I would have just assumed he was too young for BJJ but this is pretty exciting actually. I probably won't do it myself but he can practice on me at home :)
While this will stop the bullying there is a serious risk of this affecting your ability to get into a competitive high school or college. My cousin defended a friend from a bully in middle school and the bully's parents called the cops on him. The charges were eventually dropped but the record stayed around and almost kept him out of the highschool he wanted to go to.
So what's the ceiling on that? What if they escalate back? What if I can't win physically?
Is head-injury risking brain damage to my opponent going too far? Do I bring weapons? Bats? Knives? This sounds like a losing escalation path really, guns are pretty readily available and a half-dozen rounds to the chest sounds like it would be a nice permanent solution to most bullying problems.
Is that going too far?
The number of people in this entire comment section who don't see "escalate the violence" as having some very obvious negative outcomes is incredible. It's all "boys will be boys" style rhetorical crap, where they pretend that there's a magic set of limiting rules and that somehow teenagers throwing punches isn't in fact gambling on serious injury and death.
Oh and the best part: the victim doesn't want to be there. The victim wants the problem to stop. The victim, is the one who in violent escalation gets held to account for going "too far" in response.
The "real world" doesn't work this way, it's not even remotely similar. In the real world in most US states if someone assaults you in public you actually can legally draw a weapon and kill them in response, but at the very least the authorities will descend and the assaulter's life as though know it - if caught - is quite thoroughly over. School's are the only place where everyone knows the identity of the perpetrators and theirs witnesses galore and the authority says "nah, the victim should handle it - but you know, not too much".
Attaching glowing review and positive outcome to a violent action in childhood is dangerous (though it did serve you, yes). The reason is obvious: it can lead to being drawn to situations likely to lead to the same result and praise.
Based on your virulent tone I suspect you still harbor strong resentment against your childhood bullies. I somewhat get that, I was bullied too and I still hate those kids.
As an adult however I realize that my bullies were actually abused children who had a rough time at home and took it out on me at school.
> When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory.
Sorry, but this is completely sociopathic insanity. Celebrating one child maiming another? What is this, the hunger games?
> Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them.
Do you think it's ever ok for an adult to beat a child? You have it all wrong, it's the kids who are beat who become bullies.
> If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless.
Capable of violence is one thing, systemically encouraging it as part of normal upbringing is however strictly antisocial.
Being rather contrary here, but is there any evidence that bullying actually improves some people's lives? As a victim of childhood bullying, the experience was awful, but I learned a thing or two as well.
My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.
I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.
Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.
Bullying encompasses such a broad range of actions, it's possible some cases can be a strengthening/educating experience in hindsight, but others can be absolutely life destroying. My experiences with bullying were pretty mild. I'd say they taught me patience and standing up for myself when it's the right time. But they were mild experiences. I can't imagine the impact of what I've seen in some videos taken by high schoolers.
If you look at countries that have large private and comprehensive education systems (and which aren't well-segregated like the US), it is very obvious that you are permanently ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of kids every year.
Whether you learn something from it or not, the purpose of school is to learn. If you went into work every day and had someone beating you up every day, would you be productive? Probably not (and btw, the only reason we have systems where this happens at all is because of what adults want, not what kids want).
Every experience has something to teach, but that just means all experiences are alike in this one regard. It's an absolutely horrible way to justify the various strains of hell that run through the world.
Please replace the word bullying in your question with the word rape or mutilation or imprisonment or starvation and see how horrible that line of thinking is.
Reminder that this study is only showing a correlation.
It could also be the well-known effect that "weaker" (physically or mentally) people are more likely to be bullied.
The way to test causation is to have a "control" group with normal environmental bullying levels, and a second group which is otherwise identical to the first, randomly targeted by the scientists for extra bullying. This would of course be unethical. It also wouldn't be double-blind, and also wouldn't be the same process anyway. In short, it's impossible to prove empirically.
"It could be that "weak" (physically and/or mentally) people tend to get bullied more."
This is absolutely true in my experience. It's the same way that many criminals prey on the smaller/older/weaker in society. Why pick a target that has a good chance of winning in a fight? I'm sure plenty of others have anecdotes, but I fought a bully, won, and they were always friendly after that.
This is why I am going to emphasize to my son that if someone begins to bully him, the sooner he corrects the bully's assessment of him the sooner it will likely stop. This may include violence (with many caveats) if necessary, as frankly, it's the only language they often understand and respect. I am not happy that this is the case, but this behavior appears to be a universal part of the human condition. Based on my experience, adult intervention or even supervision cannot be counted on, so it will be something that eventually he will need to learn to handle himself.
Bullying in it's most common and less extreme forms appears to be a way of reinforcing group conformity and norms, as it's often directed at those who are different in appearance or behavior. By calling attention to this with name calling or teasing, they publicly demonstrate their own in-group status and as a side-effect also pressure the target to conform to group expectations. Over time, this can be just as insidious and damaging even though violence may not be always involved.
In the most pathological form, you have a person that has a lot of internal uncertainty around their own position in the social hierarchy (which actually may be quite high already and part of what makes this pathological) for which bullying is a way to assert their dominance over another. These are the bullies that we all know and which seem to fixate on a particular target or group, and are the type I alluded to in my opening paragraph. They are not necessarily spoiling for a fight (that is something else entirely and distinguishing the two can be difficult) but rather have identified their target as being someone weak or low status enough that they will not fight back nor will anyone rise to defend them. However, if the target does fight back and even if they lose, if this happens consistently then that is often enough to update the calculation on their end about whether the benefits outweigh the costs (after all, they could eventually lose the fight or at least it could be close enough that they don't win convincingly which is almost as bad) and their attention will shift elsewhere.
There is also a greater likelihood that others may stand up for you if you stand up for yourself. It is another tendency of human psychology that I have observed that those who do nothing and essentially "take it" are viewed with contempt even if those observers also disapprove of the bullying. There seems to be some general undercurrent of disgust with perceived weakness, but this is perhaps rooted in some sense that the risk of intervention is less likely to be reciprocated. After all, if the victim doesn't appear willing or able to do this for themselves, why would they be expected to do so for someone else?
This isn't a study, it's a review of studies. You will also see this:
>Establishing temporal priority – what come first, bullying victimisation or poor mental health – is an essential first step. Indeed, one important alternative hypothesis that must be ruled out is that early mental health symptoms account for both an increased risk for being targeted by bullying behaviours and also for later psychopathology. Findings so far have shown that over and above early signs of poor mental health prior to bullying victimisation, being bullied in childhood or in adolescence is associated with new symptoms/diagnoses of mental health problems, and especially with later symptoms of anxiety and depression (Arseneault et al., 2006; Bowes, Joinson, Wolke, & Lewis, 2015; Kim, Leventhal, Koh, Hubbard, & Boyce, 2006; Stapinski et al., 2014; Zwierzynska, Wolke, & Leraya, 2013). These studies are robust not only because they controlled for symptoms prior to being bullied but they also controlled for a range of other potential confounders, including gender, parental socioeconomic status and low IQ.
I was bullied as a child, and as a young adult.
And yes, I have had adverse mental health effects from that.
But the thing is that I was weird before and am still weird now.
Aspergers ( sorry, must not mention that mass murderer's name ) / Autism spectrum disorder/ general weirdness.
So I do not really know if the bullying was an epiphenomenon of my weirdness and whether my weirdness would have caused my issues.
Or perhaps the bullying contributed.
In any case, it does not matter.
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin: ‘we must cultivate our garden’"
as Voltaire wrote in his Candide...
The problem with bullies will never be solved if we don't solve the problem with teacher first.
Teachers, in essence, is the most bullied class in social hierarchy. They have low wages, huge overtimes, tremendous responsibility of upbringing children, yet almost no real authority over them. It just doesn't make any sense.
Because of this I'd bet that most teachers nowadays are either spineless, or bullies themselves. Teachers that can display a real leadership are miracles.
Great that this has made it to the front page of Hacker News.
So sad that this happens. I changed schools 5 times and only 2 of them had no bullying. It's true that it changes you. There are some good resilience changes that happen, but there are bad changes too.
...Unfortunately I think it is the human condition to want to have power over others. It would be awesome if there was some way to fix this, but we are all a bit broken I think.
I was moderately bullied, there was actually this one guy who gave me panic attacks and I'd go at great length to avoid him: eg was crossing the street or avoiding certain neighborhoods where we could've run into each-other. It didn't last too long and luckily I didn't get physically harmed too much, so I consider it didn't have a deep impact at the time but from time to time I still have a nightmare, something like once every 10 years or so, I guess it left some scars on my subconscious. Luckily I'm not easily bullied and nobody can affect me much except for people I really care about.
The article has a rather convoluted definition of 'bullying':
> "Bullying, a form of peer victimisation, can take place between children, between adolescents or between adults. It is not bullying when a parent or a teacher is abusive towards a child. While the terms peer victimisation and bullying are often used interchangeably, peer victimisation is not equivalent to bullying. For example, it is not bullying when two people of about the same strength quarrel or fight, but it is peer victimisation. An especially important feature of bullying is the power imbalance between those who perpetrate bullying behaviours and their victims..."
The notion that parental or teacher abuse can't be called bullying is nonsensical, as it produces the same kind of behavior in children (fearful, submissive, avoidance, etc.). The general psychological concept is 'operant conditioning', essentially brainwashing by authority figures enforced by violence, humiliation, and so on. It's a key feature of all authoritarian systems. There's little doubt that schoolyard bullies are merely aping the behavior of adult authoritarian figures:
The best literature on bullying (and also a criticism of the British school system) IMO is "Lord of the Flies" (William Golding, 1954). Note it was not a critique of so-called 'human nature' in general but of a particular societal construct.
> "Virginia Woolf drew a very clear line between the brutalisation of little boys in a loveless environment and their assumption as adults into the brutal institutions of colonialism. It’s long been clear to many that the UK is ruled by many people who think their damage is a strength, and who seek to perpetuate it."
People are often reluctant to discuss this, because it exposes the fact that "free Western democracies" employ these authoritarian tactics (perhaps with heavier emphasis on psychological control vs. physical control) just as often as communist or theocratic states do.
i was bullied for a number of years at a local school in my home town (northern UK) from the age of 5 until 10 by the son of my school's headmaster (!!). i was even caned by that headmaster for "telling stories" that his son was bullying me.
i learned most of this much, much later as an adult, but TL;dr my parents met many times with the headmaster, who simply refused to believe his son would bully anyone. my father and the headmaster apparently almost came to blows (but didn't, my dad is a good man) and the upshot was that i was withdrawn from that school and sent to a very austere Georgian quaker boarding school for the remaining 8 years of schooling. the change of school of course removed the headmaster's son's bullying, but introduced other [boarding school type] issues which likely scarred me in other ways. but at least the bully was gone from my life!
n.b. some ~25 years later i did actually meet the bully/headmaster's son at a random event back in the UK; he had no memory of the bullying and i was heartened to observe that his life was a disaster and he was desperately unhappy.
that made the ~5 years of bullying feel at least like it got me something.
It's ironic how, in the tech sector, the bullied (the nerds) have themselves become the bullies; through censorship, monopolization of opportunities and political manipulations.
I didn't get bullied too bad in school. What I've experienced in the tech industry as an adult has been far worse.
I'm actually grateful for the schoolyard bullies as they helped to prepare me for life as an adult.
One of the huge problems in schools, as well as in cyberspace is bullying in social ostracism (shunning etc) as well as beating. It trains people to 'shed water' in their actions. Surrender to bullies, yield to their demands and otherwise 'toady' to them. Anyone who objects or fights back feels the weight of the online or schoolyard pack members.
This is, I feel, exacerbated by the relentless increase in the cost of teacher oversight. The use of teachers is an abuse of their role as teachers. They need a class of staff - watchers etc. There were often student monitors when I was young to supplement the misuse of teachers in lieu of employed as watchers.
What is the solution? There is a need for the halls/stairwells/yards to have a watcher present on each landing, hall segment, entry, exit and all corners of yards/approaches.
This is a lot of people to add to the budget = it is neglected, this is why they stopped using teachers $$.
The only solution is remote watching with a central operating room. Sounds like China? - not so much. China has a hated government, as recent riots show.
There is an old adage, 'In loco parentis' https://www.lawnow.org/search/?q=loco
What we see in unfolding in schools (and in our neighborhoods) is the same sort of structure engendered by a lack of supervision by 'Parentis' over various groups.
So we must assert control in schools/yards/neighborhoods/online to the degree needed to limit the levels of oppression exerted by peers/cliques/gangs so people are free to go about without some one/gang/clique wanting to exert control.
So if we put 4K cams in schools/yards/halls with a watch room - is that OK, what if we have 'true Parentis' watching this stream as well as staff members? If Johnny bullies Lenny and one of the parents tells Johnnie's parents - who looks at this later and chastises Johhny - will this work? Will he not care = it's a jungle, he has to 'man up' a Lord of the Flies response?
The same thing plays out in many schools/cities, the hordes of students and gangs and street people are a large LOTF experiment.
This HAS to be solved.
To what degree do other countries have this problem?
I can see that being how it would go down with a bunch of peers from similar strata. Sadly the public school milieu in the USA/UK is a bully-archy....that more closely parallels a LOTF scenario - absent supervision.
If the student isn't being bullied, then the parents are. If they try to participate in their child's education beyond volunteering for the teachers' pet projects they get slapped down and criticized and told they aren't good enough and should butt out.
Home schooling is an alternative, if you have the opportunity. Not just for religious nuts; it's for anybody that wants to see their kid get more than <10 minutes of attention a day (which schools fall woefully short of). You can beat the school curriculum by a large multiple in the first half-hour of your home-school day.
But good luck trying to check out a curriculum from your public school - you'll get glared at and lectured to and forbidden from checking out any curriculum that isn't 'age-appropriate' even though your child did all that stuff 2 years ago.
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Also, suffering can be a crucible for greatness. Hence, the story of the ascendant nerd.
I think some degree of bullying is fine as it helps to prepare children for the real world. Once you've grown up, everyone constantly tries to take advantage of you, cheats you, breaks your morale, lies to you and then gaslights you about everything... The world is run by bullies and you need some serious prep work for that!
That, said, I've heard stories of bullying where someone gets their head held down a toilet. That's crossing over the line into assault and these people should be jailed.
This is very important to talk about. I think I still have issues from being bullied and I am in my 40s now. My issues are anger, but more importantly social anxiety and much worse social skills than I wish to have at this age.
Just in case any psychologist are reading this, I would like to point out a type of bullying that I experienced but it is never talked about. It is basically sexual harassment by closeted homosexuals. One kind of assumes that homosexuals are these fey, thin mild mannered and fashionable kids, but in reality a lot of the fat nasty bullies were self hating closet homosexuals. I was always a target for them because I had this childhood disease that made me very thin and tall and pale, and apparently that is very attractive to those scumbags.
And they bullied me verbally and physically and always made me feel like shit. The worst part is I did not know what was happening to me because I did not know much about homosexuality (I grew up in a communist regime that preferred to sweep that stuff under the rug). So I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me.
There is a lot of talk about bullying of gays in school, but there is also the problem of bullying of heterosexuals by homosexuals. To solve this, schools should teach their kids about homosexuality early. Probably as soon as puberty because by then these kids will be confronted by it. And while schools do teach that sexual harassments is wrong they should make it clear that the same holds true for homosexuals. I have a feeling that a lot of gays think they are special and above the general society rules about sexual harassment. Even in my forties I still get my drinks spiked from time to time! And most importantly teachers should be taught to recognize and prevent sexual harassment in the homosexual context as well as the hetero one.
I used to help classmates that were bullied by defending them either by stopping other kids hitting them or hurting them verbally. Kids can be evil. Some people are unaware what can cause to other peoples lives. Now I have 2 boys, I teach them how to box and good manners. Reality is that they can face bullies and they should be ready to engage in physical fight, words sometimes don't matter
“ studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.”
Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction. Not that nature should be our guide, but often harsh social behavior is functional from an evolutionary standpoint. That said,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
> “ studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.”
> Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction. Not that nature should be our guide, but often harsh social behavior is functional from an evolutionary standpoint. That said,
A distinction needs to be made between post-facto "victim blaming" and prevention that involves potential victims. Conflating the two leads one to oppose good measures out of an allegiance to an unrealistically perfect, ideologically-motivated fantasy (that social problems can and should be solved only by authorities applying pressure to the "guilty" people").
Bullying as social correction is a very bad type of social correction. This way the social correction is done by the dumbest and most violent members of society in order to conform society to their vision. And then society grows up to become dumb and violent. Well lets not kid ourselves, this is exactly what has been happening in human history, and that why humanity continues to be mired in suffering and conflict and is intentionally destroying its environment. But this is something we have to change. Social correction should be done by trained adults that know exactly which traits are bad and to be corrected.
I think when the article says "that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying" they refer to more health based intervention. Such as helping kids to be healthy and not malnourished, or overweight from eating bad food.
> “ studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.”
> Sounds almost like victim blaming.
The public health measures could be directed at the bullies, no?
> Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction.
This is only true if bullying actually corrects something which is a big logical leap to just leave to an appeal to nature.
I didn’t do a close read. My comment was in response to this:
“ research has identified some factors that predispose children to be targeted by bullying behaviours. These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.”
To be clear I said nature shouldn’t be our guide. Nature often means that life is nasty brutish and short. I even quoted the famous Auden poem as support. Sheesh!
I'm always concerned when I see these types of studies that the conclusions drawn from them will lead to "cures" that are worse than the disease. God help us should we ever succeed in eliminating all the challenges of life - we'll evolve into spineless blobs.
I feel quite shocked reading the other replies to see that so many people seem to believe the only way to resolve violence is to respond with violence.
Perhaps I wasn't bullied as physically or severely as people here, but I had a few people that picked on me a lot in high school. One who ended up dating the girl I was in love with and whom I introduced to my friend group. He rubbed it in my face for almost four years that he was dating her and I wasn't. It wasn't until a few years ago, when I saw him at a friend's bachelor party and he got so drunk he got thrown out of the casino, that I started to reflect on how his life may have actually have been as a kid. His dad seemed to bully him like crazy, to have ridiculous demands on him and thus he would rebel. He didn't seem to have a lot of close friends and didn't seem to have a lot of confidence in his physical appearance. I don't know. What I did realize is that he probably struggled a lot as a kid. Same with another kid that would bully me. And another.
I just strongly reject the idea that the only way to resolve violence is to respond with violence—I don't know if I even believe it is a very effective medium- to long-term solution at all.
I think what works better is to stand up for ourselves while also trying to stand up for them. To humanize ourselves and to humanize them if we can. To say how we're feeling, to say how we imagine they might be feeling. Physical violence may cause them to feel fear, but at what point do we then become the bully trying to instill fear in them?
> but at what point do we then become the bully trying to instill fear in them?
This isn't really as ambiguous as you present it to be, the obvious answer is "when you do it to them unprovoked, that's what distinguishes bullying from self-defense".
There are scores of comments here describing a strategy that worked for them, it's evidently effective. Have you ever tried what you're preaching with real childhood bullies? I'm naturally skeptical that it's effective to ask an immature victim to play therapist with an immature bully, but I might find it more believable if you mentioned literally any reasoning or evidence at all suggesting it could work.
> This isn't really as ambiguous as you present it to be, the obvious answer is "when you do it to them unprovoked, that's what distinguishes bullying from self-defense".
I agree if I believe I did it to them unprovoked, then it would be bullying; however, how often do you think a person believes they're doing it to someone unprovoked? The receiver may believe it's unprovoked, but I'd imagine the person delivering the blow in that moment may think it was provoked. I don't think most people will self-identify as a bully, but I may be wrong about that.
Also, with regards to self-defense, in the Krav Maga and other self-defense courses I've taken, there's a lot of talk about legality of self-defense and how if one's actions tip over into being too aggressive, it can go from being self-defense to assault very quickly and become illegal. So even in physical self-defense cases, who is the defender and aggressor can change quickly depending on perspective.
> Have you ever tried what you're preaching with real childhood bullies?
Hmm, maybe not real childhood bullies because I started focusing on this in my mid-20s, however I can give one story from a few years ago. I went to a picnic with my ex-girlfriend and her family was there. First time meeting the family. One of the distant cousins came up and offered me a drink. I said I had just made a deal with myself I wouldn't drink alcohol for a month and it was just the first week. He said that he didn't know me and I was new to the culture and in his culture they make drinks for people. I said no, I didn't want an alcoholic drink. He said that he makes the drink for me to know how to trust me, if I won't take it, how will he know to trust me, it's a matter of respect. I told him:
"Listen, I made a deal with myself I wouldn't drink alcohol for a month. So while I want to respect you, I also want to respect myself."
The guy stopped trying to guilt me into taking a drink and I think walked away.
So while it may not be as an extreme example of what kids can do to each other or other adults can do, I think it may show that there are ways to resolve such conflicts with words that aren't playing therapist so much as expressing indignation and anger and strong confidence in what we want, without demonizing the other side for what they want.
> The receiver may believe it's unprovoked, but I'd imagine the person delivering the blow in that moment may think it was provoked. I don't think most people will self-identify as a bully, but I may be wrong about that.
Practically every story in this thread, notably including your own, was unprovoked. An extremely common theme is that bullies pick weak targets, if the victim fights back they pick another target. There's no provocation involved.
It doesn't matter whether a bully internally believes their actions are justified, there are basic facts and societal standards. If I beat you up for looking at me funny and I say it's justified because you provoked me with your glance, that's unreasonable nonsense and claiming subjectivity doesn't suddenly make me sympathetic.
> there's a lot of talk about legality of self-defense and how if one's actions tip over into being too aggressive, it can go from being self-defense to assault very quickly and become illegal
The legal world of adults actually has teeth in penalizing violence which doesn't really apply to the world of children. Not only would child victims be exempt from adult laws when fighting back, it is in their best interest to do so because their bullies are also exempt from adult laws in their violence against the victim. That means that victims can expect to be bullied in the future since they aren't protected by laws like adults are.
If your only point here is that fighting back can go too far, guess what, so can bullying.
> I think it may show that there are ways to resolve such conflicts with words
I don't think anyone here is saying that conflicts cannot be resolved with words, the point in contention here is whether it solves anything for bullied children. I can't even honestly characterize your anecdote as bullying, at no point was harm threatened or even implied. When a group of teen classmates corner you and threaten to beat you up if you don't give them your lunch money, do you honestly believe a confident remark about mutual respect can be a solution there?
> Practically every story in this thread, notably including your own, was unprovoked.
I read this and see that you believe that they were unprovoked, not that every human would see them as unprovoked and therefore are objectively unprovoked. Maybe you don't think there's a difference between the two, but for me, I strongly believe not everyone would see these as completely unprovoked. I have a friend whose husband threatened to kill her and she left him and her kids behind to flee for her life. When she was telling me how they'd fight, she'd tell me he would get angry at her and then she'd go quiet and then he would shout and then she would avoid him for a few days, giving the silent treatment. She didn't seem to think that her silent treatment was provoking him at all, she just focused on how his anger was the violence.
> If I beat you up for looking at me funny and I say it's justified because you provoked me with your glance, that's unreasonable nonsense and claiming subjectivity doesn't suddenly make me sympathetic.
I'm not saying I justify their behavior, it's more about whether I want it to stop in the future.
> The legal world of adults actually has teeth in penalizing violence which doesn't really apply to the world of children.
I'm not sure that's true. Kids, especially teens in the US, have definitely been charged for assault and other crimes of physical violence in schools. Now, I may agree that it's less likely they'll be charged than two adults hitting each other in a bar, but I don't think they're completely exempt from such laws, at least in most parts of the US.
> I can't even honestly characterize your anecdote as bullying, at no point was harm threatened or even implied.
Perhaps for me bullying includes teasing and verbal attacks that cut someone down, and for you you're more focused on the physical assault part of bullying. So yes, then what I described did not involve a threat of physical violence and wouldn't fit in your definition of bullying and may be why we disagree on this.
> When a group of teen classmates corner you and threaten to beat you up if you don't give them your lunch money, do you honestly believe a confident remark about mutual respect can be a solution there?
I believe a confident remark about mutual respect could prevent the situation from escalating to that level of physical threat. Now, do I believe that sometimes the situation has escalated too far? Yes. Do I think that if someone is throwing a punch at my face that I'll stop it with words? No. I'll probably do my best to block the punch and grab his arm and twist it behind his back or something of the like. But then I may try to talk about how I don't want to fight and I'm confused why he keeps picking on me and maybe he's having a rough day and I'd prefer if we talked about what was going on so neither of us gets more hurt.
Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol"
Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything that lifted you up (e.g. good grades) made you a target.
The realisation was that that will probably not to happen now. If I do something exceptional at 34 I probably wont be bullied by my peers (or heck, even if I actually was bullied for it.. who cares lol, my peers don't understand the market I work in)
I'd never reevaluated the internalised rule "If I excel, I will be bullied" until the other day.
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On a slightly more positive spin the whole thing made me quite sensitive to deception. If someone is trying to deceive or manipulate me my subconscious might as well be flashing up a Metal Gear Solid exclaim noise for how obvious it seems.
MGS Exclaim for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbeEO58Hlfo
https://sfstandard.com/business/inside-ftx-founder-sam-bankm...
Would rich kids be facing much more competition for elite spots from poor but smart kids if bullying wasn't part of the curriculum in the public schools? Given that only 10% of kids get to go to a school where dignity is assured, it could be that 90% of the smart kids are being kneecapped and don't reach their full potential. One more thing that makes a mockery of "meritocracy".
I was glad to see though that New Hampshire (where I grew up) finally passed a law making it possible to sue schools for bullying like the other 49 states.
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2021/05/26/families-deserve...
I wonder also how many Enrons and Challenger Disasters we've had because many of what could have been our best people had it beat into them that self-assertion is not allowed for them.
Obviously that's just one data point, but I don't think the incentive structure at a private school is what you think it is. There's a lot of incentive to keep issues quiet, and a lot of pressure to fit a certain mold.
Someone I know used to brag about the stunt he pulled to embarrass the private high school he went to and I shut him up pretty harshly about it because I had suffered so much in the public schools and how I would have appreciated the privilege that he got more than he did.
Of course he had his own problems including a struggle with alcoholism, getting beaten up by the cops, etc. and today he is a tenant and I am his landlord so it's not like I didn't catch some breaks.
I wasn't bullied by the other students, but I witnessed an incredible amount of racism to other students that was largely whistled under the carpet. The "vote Tory" banners under the school entrance every election day, the sheer theft of the school administration when it came to school uniforms, stationary, and simple things like paper.
And then the elitism. They tell you that you're special to be there, next world leaders in politics or industry or what have you. Of course, they don't mean you - they mean the hand-selected elites that served as prefects or head boys and other from purer backgrounds with the same grades as yours.
Uni was a breath of fresh air, like finally stepping out of the shadow of someone else's ego and never realising it until that moment.
Why wouldn't there be? Wouldn't safe, comfortable kids have less to win and more to lose from aggression?
As for taking to others bad home experiences, like mimicking an abusive parent, that can happen to rich as well as to poor kids...
There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.
It seems like a lot of the HN discussion is focused on kids being bullied for being smart, which makes sense given the audience on here. However, other kids get bullied for lots of different reasons.
This is one reason I'm up in arms about public school districts near me shutting down their gifted programs because they made certain not academically-inclined demographics feel bad about not being represented. So now, kids in my demographic get to feel bad about being bullied.
In freshman and sophomore year I decided that English classes bored me to tears, so I took non-honors English both years. There was zero overlap between that class and the kids I saw the rest of my day in honors classes. Then in junior year when I decided to do IB and was forced to take IB/AP English, suddenly boom yep exact same set of kids.
I'll admit, I enjoyed the experience. Admittedly partly because even half-assed work got me easy A's and glowing appreciation from my teachers (for actually putting in some effort and not being disruptive etc), but also getting to meet lots of different people was fun.
Also good god did I hate English class. So many insufferable books of what I still consider to be terribly little literary merit. I wish we'd been allowed to just read classical literature all year. For one of the book slots we were allowed to choose our own book, and I chose Plato's Republic, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was the only book from prior to the 20th century that I got to read for class that year as well. At least it got better in senior year when we got to do Shakespeare again.
emotional flinching
distraction is just running away from a feeling. I don't actually care about the content of the new tab, i'm not addicted to the internet, blah blah
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BTW, The old book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin really helped me here-- it's on libgen or you can youtube the authors name to see some of his one on one sessions he did with people before he died. (You can do it yourself without a person tho, it's just having a kind listener helps you stick with it)
it's NOT about adhd or focusing on stuff lol, it's the name for his diy technique of 'figuring out what the feeling is' and unlocks all other therapy stuff that you may do after
For example: I tend to be a very self deprecating individual because I like to laugh and hang out with people who say silly things but I also use it as a crutch to avoid accidentally offending people. I went to a very bad college and so was considered very good at academics while there and may have developed this then to fit in. I could also have developed it growing up because it was a way to laugh off mistakes. I could also just like the sense of humor. Heck even this statement I'm replying to that I like so much I'm certain I've heard it and resonated with it before but have just lost focus of it over time.
Anyway thanks again for sharing, it has helped refined my thinking.
I'll absolutely give that a look into, thank you!
Also for nerds who have yet to consider it: CBT is like debugging code, except the code is your brain. I'd highly recommend looking into it where possible, especially if you are opposed or wary of the "and how does that make you feel?" style of therapy. Fascinating field, and quite helpful for me so far.
Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get worse after receiving the ADHD diagnosis and medication and then hyperfocusing on their distractions even harder. From my position I see a lot of people with anxiety issues, perfectionism problems, or even textbook depression becoming convinced that ADHD is the explanation for everything in their life. Not all ADHD patients, mind you, but largely the recent influx of people who start with self-diagnosis via internet memes and TikTok (mis)info about ADHD.
It wasn't until I found a psychologist that had an opening 90 days(ish) later that I was able to get fully diagnosed that I was even mentally able to think about myself differently. That said, I had the resources to see a doctor, I'm in my 40s, so there was no family to tell me I was making things up, and the only pressure I felt was from myself to address the issue.
If I couldn't do that and was stuck in a world that acknowledged ADHD was a thing, felt I had it, and yet felt disempowered to do anything about it, I could see myself easily falling down the rabbit hole you describe.
In any case being diagnosed with ADHD was just me finding a missing edge piece of my jigsaw, it helps to know what I'm working with but there's plenty still to do.
I actually started the CBT because of that, I realised ever since I got diagnosed I was leaning into ADHD as an excuse (welp that's just me, can't help it!) and doing less overall than when I didn't know, which I thought was lame. Like that's it, I get a diagnosis and then give up trying to live? Lol no.
Eventually I came to accept that my attention and motivation problems were a combination of screen/social media addiction, drinking too much, poor sleep caused by the two previous behaviors, poor diet, lack of exercise, and the stress of pandemic isolation and working from home. Addressing those issues was much more difficult than getting diagnosed with ADHD but in the long run it has completely changed my life for the better. I do think the ADHD thing was an important detour on my path to a healthier life, but I wonder how many people who are in the same boat will move beyond the "ADHD explains everything" stage and actually solve their real problems?
People end up confused why I’m not delivering when what I do deliver is excellent. They figure I don’t care or I’m checked out, something like that. I become less reliable because not delivering is imperfect, and I begin to give up not only on my objectives but myself as well.
I’ve had this lead to catastrophe twice, but I’m much better at identifying it and speaking about it now.
It’s debilitating at times. Knowing I can do better, but it’s not there yet. I could deliver something so much faster, but if it isn’t the best I can do, I’m ashamed of it. I feel like a complete hack.
Worse still is that when I nail it, do good work, get it out on time, etc… It’s still not good enough.
Fundamentally it’s because I’m not good enough. ADHD can lead to some extremely insidious and harmful self talk.
When it comes to worrying about being bullied, I have to ask: why do you think you’re able to be bullied? Are you worth making into a target? Why did you internalize that?
Personally I think being bullied is a significant part of why I feel I’m not good enough. That’s what I was told for years! Unfortunately, I was young and dumb, very impressionable, and it stuck. Oh well, keep at it and try to do better. You aren’t someone who deserves to be bullied and I’m just fine at what I do. We’ll get there eventually.
It's overcompensating for years of not feeling like you are welcome, and years of only being acknowledged when you had a desirable item or knowledge, otherwise you were a person non grata.
Bringing a reasonably priced bottle of wine from a winery you like - nice and thoughtful. Bringing a bottle of Opus One - you're overcompensating.
Like if you're hosting a party, it's easy to obsess about there being enough entertainment, food, booze, etc, far beyond what's actually needed.
The main thing from my perspective is that I care if I don't do it, to the point of depression - hence the therapy :)
Experience that enough and I would expect one could develop quite advanced heuristics to protect oneself from deception.
Someone looks shifty, or pauses at just the right moment in their sentence. Or scratches their nose while trying to get you to do something, or can't keep eye contact when they usually would. If they excessively look away for a moment during a disagreement get yourself ready to block the sucker punch. Or they accuse you out of the blue of doing something that's a complete 180 of your character -- ask them straight back if they're doing it themselves.
I can't really explain it too well I realise, having edited this comment like 20 times, as I've only just started looking into it myself.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think its vitally important that all children learn some form of self-defense (boxing, karate, BJJ, it doesn't matter). I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation). You may be punished, but the sense of catharsis more than makes up for that.
The kind of punishment doled out by law-abiding adults to children isn't even a blip on the radar vs. suffering a vicious bully. It isn't even worth mentioning, punishment for violence is a total farce until adulthood. That's basically the whole source of the problem; bullys have realized there are no consequences.
The best response to a bully is an immediate and vigorous aggression resembling that of a honey badger, full stop. I agree it's important to teach children self-defense and get them familiar enough with conflict to not piss themselves when faced with it. It's the children who can get away with fighting back without negative consequence, and substantial upside potential.
Get angry, and hurt them.
My acting teacher told me about her fantasy of punching somebody in the face and I told her that when I tried that as a kid and really hurt my hand. In fact there was a time my son got mad and hit me in the arm and I didn't find it especially painful but his hand was still hurting 10 hours later. Usually your hand is less durable than whatever it hits, particularly the rather large bones in the face, it is a big subject of martial arts to mitigate that. Someone who smacks you has to balance the intimidation power of the smack vs the very real sting they'll experience. Packing a roll of dimes in your pocket is a deniable way (like the clipboard carried by a store manager confronting shoplifters) that can greatly improve the pain factor for both your target and yourself.
I was on both sides of bad behavior in school that involved insults, punching, etc. and this is not necessarily bullying. There was the time a friend and I did something cruel to an MR kid and his big brother (emphasis on "big") gave me the smackdown which I deserved. Not to condone my own behavior, but the fact that this kid got immediate protection from his big bro would have reduced the long term psychological effects of my transgression.
I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.
When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.
He stopped fucking with me after that.
To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.
It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.
I bought a punching bag and started training when I was 12 - in 6 months I got so strong that I was bare-hand punching into cement walls.
There was this bully who would constantly berate me - he probably had 4 inches over me and a good 15-20 pounds heavier.
This one time am walking down the street and he comes out of nowhere and throws a punch, luckily I saw it coming, ducked and it grazed my cheek.
I flew into a rage - all I remember is he was down on the ground in a couple mins and I had beaten his face to pulp - I stopped when a friend and bystanders pulled me off. So yes, learning to fight is a life skill - because there are times when there are no adults around and it's you or the bully.
That may work for the individual, but there's always going to be an easiest target. We have studies of bullying interventions, including teaching kids self respect by way of martial arts, and changing the victim doesn't work.
I suggest people should look into the actual science on this. A good start is "Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do" by Dan Olweus from 1991.
Luckily Olweus was uncommonly good at that too. It has been implemented at thousands of schools all across the world, and kept being evaluated in differing cultural contexts, and in comparison to alternative interventions, in many systematic review studies.
It's not so surprising when you think about it. Bullying is about power, but it isn't being good in a fight itself that makes some kids have power over others. It's social, not physical. The victim had the ability to strike back physically all along, they don't need special training. In theory the victim could stab the bully in the back in plenty of ways - even literally. The reason they don't do that, and the reason the bullies don't fear it, is because all the ways the victim could strike back would be scorched earth. It makes no difference if it's with freshly learned BJJ or a weapon.
Adult supervision is no guarantee either. Kids are way smarter than adults give them credit for. I remember bullying occurring in the presence of teachers who were completely unaware of the meaning of subtle language or other cues meant to be harmful (with the same meaning known to others of the in-group).
I don't think ignoring works well, if we consider "ignoring someone" as an emotional attack. The bullies may feel more hurt/rejected/ignored and therefore bully more or in different ways. The ignoring/conflict avoidance can be quite similar to a silent treatment, which can escalate conflict.
> I only realized this way later in life when I started training in Muay Thai and found I had way more confidence standing up to other men, both because I knew how to handle myself and because I wasn't as afraid of getting punched in the face. Bullies only go away if you make them go away. Fighting back is the only real solution victims have in the absence of adult supervision (which is often the situation).
I agree with you that I'd love if more people took self-defense (full disclosure, I train people in what I call Emotional Self-Defense), as when I took Krav Maga I felt more confident to stand up for myself in situations where I had previously thought I would be physically attacked. I disagree, however that "fighting back is the only real solution" because I think what I learned in Krav Maga was the confidence to stand up for myself without having to fight back. I learned that I could fight back if I needed to but that in most situations, just standing up for myself and not attacking back would bring quicker and longer lasting resolution.
Part of the reason I created Emotional Self-Defense is because I thought most self-defense/martial arts don't go far enough upstream to resolve the conflict when it's at an emotional stage and before it becomes physical violence.
A couple of years later, some other kid tried his luck against me with the same result. It's the grapevine that really does it for you. "Some kid fell down trying to tackle me" turned into "I knocked out this hapless boy with Bruce Lee's one inch punch" over the course of a week of storytelling.
Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall kind of pain, and I am amazed at how many people from broken situations who should easily understand have taken a hard stance, and missed the point on bullying. It's not the same as "getting one's ass kicked", because there is no productive lesson to be learned, it's more of a feeling of obvious rejection or being singled out in some way that hijacks the human evaluation system in a highly damaging way, that can stay with you for years - unfairly.
Worth solving: Of course, but who knows how? Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.
This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".
One of the things I've noticed the most in classes is that being attacked is often a subjective experience from the receiver, often oblivious to the giver. I have people intentionally try to reject the other and it seems very uncomfortable to try to do it intentionally.
Anyways, I find it neither dystopian nor hellish. One person who took a class said, "Jim, your workshop it f*cked my feelings but they needed it, thank you."
I don't mean to advertise here, more just to say I believe there are ways to approach it that I feel excited about.
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.
It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.
A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).
I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.
Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong. Rather than try to expound that in more detail, I'll just reference a post by The Last Psychiatrist that does the job better than I could anyway:
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/one_way_our_schools_...
The TL/DR is at the end:
"[W]hat kind of school doesn't want a kid to stand up to a bully, especially when they're doing it to help someone else? What kind of crazy school wants you to back down-- and get someone else to protect you? What kind of school indoctrinates kids that power is only possessed by a) bad people; b) the state?
Oh. All of them."
Just to be clear: I don't agree with it. All I'm saying is that child-me understood that it wouldn't be a valid defense after the fact, i.e., that there would be consequences. That, of course, affects one's decision making.
That article is very real, though. (But … and I get this gist from other comments on the thread: that article's example is a mild bully. But yeah, that's how public schools react, and how they inadvertently teach.)
If someone's talking about a real psychopath willing to break bones or with a weapon, the only real responses to run and any martial arts with class will teach you as much.
Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth. Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
The goal is change, i.e., to end the violence. That's the same motivation as Ender. (I shouldn't imply Enders-game levels of violence, sorry, I meant more the metaphor the book sets up: Ender ends the conflict, which is a mirror to his larger role in the plot.) My point is that, had I engaged in violence — I never did, but do I regret that decision? how should I advise a youth? IDK… — I'm not fighting to win that fight, I'm fighting to win all fights.
(And, as I said in the original comment, I think the question of what the child should do is itself wrong. By the time a child is thinking whether violence will or won't solve the problem, the alleged adults in the room have already failed the child. It should never have gotten that far to begin with.)
A number of commenters in this thread also seem to have the popular media trope of a bully as their impression, which is a fair bit watered down. As the paper states,
> poor outcomes throughout the life span, including mental, physical and socioeconomic difficulties.
"Throughout the life span". It has permanent, enduring effects, and I don't know that pixels on a screen capture the mental anguish bullies leave in their wake.
> Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth.
That's a good way of putting it. Unfortunately, I think the years it takes to acquire that mean you're not going to have it until after it's too late. (Or more realistically, I think bullying set back a child acquiring that sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)
> Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
Absolutely that.
There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
Actual bullies have a very keen sense of how the victim might fight back and what it would cost them. And they go ahead with the bullying - breaking down a person, because they can - because they know the victim can't effectively fight back.
I once had a teacher make me stand outside in the hall behind the coats in the coat rack (ALL DAY), don't tell me I know nothing about bullies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33808521
> There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
And the next step isn't to start arguing about what does, and doesn't, constitute a bully.
---
The way my mother tells it, I started crying when I got into the car after school and wouldn't tell her what was going on. After the 3rd day in a row she got very insistent, I finally told her and she never left that parking lot before having it cleared up with the school. They removed me from her class and put me in another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker (whom I adored).
You're mistaken if you think my argument is that there aren't situations in which the parent MUST step in.
If you can get out of it on your own toughness alone, it probably wasn't bullying. It's part of the definition of bullying that it's one-sided, that the victim has no good ways to fight back.
If they DO have a way to fight back, it's called conflict, not bullying. It's of course possible that one side in a conflict is a big jerk, a wannabe thug, etc.
One of the big conclusions from bullying research is that treating bullying as if it was conflict (e.g. teaching kids "negotiation strategies") makes things actively worse.
I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B.
Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.
Outside of that, they need to be taught that buttholes exist and dealing with them is a fact of life. They shouldn't start things, but they definitely should end them. That was the metric for us while in school, especially if we got into "fisticuffs".
I think for you it's important to understand that school and teachers can't be trusted. I'm not saying teachers suck, but shitty teachers exist. My middle brother once had a teacher take a dislike to him because he corrected her in class. I once had a teacher that would make me stand out in the hall behind the coats on the coat rack. My mother showed up at the school for both, I was pulled from that class and put into another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker, whom I absolutely adored. I still remember the song we would sing at the beginning of class (about parking cars).
My point is that if your child is having an issue with a teacher, don't assume it's the child, my experience is that it very often wasn't. You build trust with your children by SHOWING them that you're there for them. Of course, that doesn't mean every poor interaction with a teacher is the teachers fault. We were dirt poor so I suspect that had something to do with it as well.
---
Anyways, none of that is really concrete, I don't know that concrete advice really applies to a question like that. Imo, kids learn what you teach them even if you don't know you're teaching them, and there is no such thing as a single glorifying lesson, it's a slow march over time, exactly as you would do to build trust with someone.
The only thing you can teach a bullied child to do is to fight back. They will lose the fight but the bully will usually move on to an easier target.
Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they absolutely knew who they had a physical edge on, and were absolutely willing to do nothing but escalate.
We don't need to "teach children to deal with bullying" we need god damn physical security around and within schools, and a panopticon of surveillance to make sure that justice happens swiftly and accurately.
Worked for me, never had any problems with his clique afterwards.
That is a sad comment on the adults in the community failing to provide proper parenting, families, and civil government.
Maybe the bully is the biggest kid in class but it won't matter if every kid knows how to defend themselves and also every kid will team up to pull them off of someone.
This is a stupid idea that doesn't scale, and continues the cycle of victimization: the victim gets to take on all the risk of physical retaliation. Maybe the next punch kills someone? It's impossible to know. Now they get to be on trial for murder while everyone declares they "just don't see how little <bully> could have deserved this".
Solutions may have to be drastic, like electronic surveillance or sending troublemakers to different schools.
We cant even manage the latter a dedicated judicial system.
There are many novels directed at young people that show how to behave in these situations. It’s not clear that anyone reads them anymore.
It’s important to work these things out early in life, before the “events” get too serious. Refer to the Wikipedia article on “The Dozens”.
(I have no idea how mothers traditionally taught their daughters to stand up to bullies, but I’m sure they did.)
This has in fact been done, and nothing resembling your approach, what one might call the "Manhood YouTube channel" approach, has done well at all.
Do you have a reference for your claim?
Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread the book that is school bullying 101, "Bullying in school: what we know and what we can do", Dan Olweus, 1991. It contains the results of the first large scale intervention studies on preventing bullying in schools.
Or, maybe you think raising your kids not to be savages is an “intervention”?
I say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot.
Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.
What a ridiculous take. Helping people build the skills needed to defend from being bullied is nothing like victim blaming, at all.
At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.
My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.
One of my favorite lines:
> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
Regardless, as others have said here, I have way more avenues for dealing with bullies as an adult, including but not limited to getting my own lawyers.
But, as it turns out, people fuck, and it's far more effective to teach people how to deal with sex than to argue the "real" solution is abstinence.
Similarly, teaching kids how bullying functions and a robust environment that prevents the causal factors of bullying can cut down on the actual bullying behavior.
- property manager put a lock on the door 3 days before I had to be out, went in and removed a few of my animals. Took the bitch to court, to this day I'm not sure if she was unaware that there are laws on the books in my state SPECIFICALLY to deal with that exact situation.
- VP got pissed off at me and told my manager to write me up. I refused to sign the document, immediately quit, and she was fired roughly 8 months later. 10 months later that same manager contacted me wanting to hire me (I refused).
I could go on, but I won't. If you've never dealt with a malevolent person who actively wanted to take advantage of you in over 30 years, congratulations. But that sure as shit isn't normal.
"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
We have a word for those people: "sociopath"
0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29598432/ " Results indicate that psychopathy is significantly correlated with childhood trauma. For the Missouri data, trauma significantly predicted psychopathy scores for both boys and girls."
If "ordinary people" are on the right of centre of the bell curce, all you are arguing is that the culture you are in encourages sociopathic behavior.
The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.
One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".
In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
Why not both?
This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.
The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.
Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).
So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time.
We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense.
This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this.
The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim.
The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight.
I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.
Group? What university was this? Who was the resident assistant? Was that particular incident with the rock written up somewhere?
What you've written here isn't run-of-the-mill college bullying anecdata-- it is the beginning of a serious piece of investigative journalism.
When Chris did this in front of witnesses he was expelled immediately although I did see him come back to sell drugs on campus a year later.
Before that incident the dean of students, Frank Etscorn, told me that it was just "my word against his" and that he could not press charges.
Chris was criminally minded and he certainly inspired a group of students into more criminal behavior than they would have done on their own. I don't believe that New Mexico Tech was much worse than other schools at this time, in fact around this time there were high profile incidents involving bullying and suicides of gay students at other schools.
As the parent of both a bully and a victim (two different kids), I can say that correcting the bullying behavior is not as easy as it might seem. Many (most?) bullies are charming and manipulative and most victims are not, so convincing those who have the ability to correct the power imbalance is quite challenging.
I could make a laundry list of examples just from my own direct experience, but I'll limit it to one:
(Pre COVID, as it does involve tech in the class room, which changed a lot in 2020).
We refused the school-issued Chromebook for my daughter and the administration agreed that she could do all of her work on paper. One of her teachers "didn't feel right singling her out" and "she is such a good kid" so without telling us gave our daughter the classroom Chromebook to do in-class assignments, which she used to cyber-bully a classmate to the point that the child left the school and the child's parents, who were previously friends with my wife, will no longer talk to us.
The reason people bully is the same reason people kill is the same reason people commit genocide.
If you’ve got a solution for that, I’d love to hear it. Seems to me that teaching resilience is a much more productive approach.
I have run into parents who homeschooled their children and let them follow their curiosity. Some of the results I saw them get were completely out of this world. The kids taught themselves multiple languages and instruments.
I’m going to be faced with a similar choice with my kids. I will likely put them through public elementary school. Junior high I feel is abusive to children.
They are going through very complex hormonal and emotional changes and on top of this you dunk them in a tank surrounded by parasites who are garaunteed to act like savages.
With mobile phones and cameras.
I think I could see a strong argument to skip junior high and high school altogether and explore home school.
If anything like what happened to me happens to them (and I honestly didn’t have it that bad), I will seriously consider pulling them out.
The damage that was done to me lasted 15 years. That is unacceptable.
I personally had severe acne. Putting me in junior high to get taunted - irreparable self esteem damage.
Parents need to understand.
Let’s be honest. The elephant in the room is human beings get ahead by bullying Eachother and forming mobs and cliques.
This behavior has shown up at every job I have ever had. The dumber the people are the more likely they will use this “strategy” to get ahead. It is the go to dumb person strategy.
You can only avoid it often by working at smaller companies or developing much better social skills.
A person perceives abuse as much worse than the person that deals it out. Hazing is the person being abused then delivering worse punishment than they received to the next round of people, again because their perception of the original hazing abuse was worse than what their abusers perceived.
School tolerance of abuse/bullying is essentially this hazing cycle occurring over generations, more slowly.
That's not the only fucked up human psychology loop in play. Denial, stockholm syndrome, and of course, laziness all come into play.
It sounds like a best of both worlds. Avoid bullies and other bs associated with institutional education and instead have a customized, curiosity driven education.
As someone who was bullied at school, let me assure you, the only socialisation I received from the experience, was an appreciation for how fucking horrible humans can be.
There are other ways to socialize kids besides school. As I understand it, things like field trips and social gatherings are an important part of a well balanced homeschool experience.
Instead of just studying about government from books, take a field trip to City Hall, observe a public meeting and talk to people there.
Spend time with other home school families (via homeschool associations) and other families in general. Take trips with them. Let the kids hangout among themselves.
Homeschooling gives you that freedom.
Anecdotally, I personally know homeschooled young adults that are confident, have great social and communication skills and are doing very well in life thus far.
I feel that motivation of most homeschoolers - a lot of time fuelled by their own bad memories - is to provide an "adequate", contained, controlled chicken coop. Life is anything but that. I can't believe one can go in with a pharmacy scale and make a just fine sampling of daily societal life.
Source, somehwat: I was also bullied in school a lot, but in the end I think I could learn and grew from the experience.
While assigning them to read and discuss Lord of the Flies...
I transferred from a chill private school to a public school because, well, my Dad wanted me to have some “experience”…needless to say, the experience I got was that even teens can be extremely cruel to each other…the funny part is that most people here see it as normal and laugh about it, like they don’t realize they’re living the equivalent of a wild animal farm…but for some reason, I got over the horrific bullying real quick…or maybe I’m scarred and don’t know it.
Lucky for me I sprouted between elementary and junior high, I also got meaner, and the problems stopped.
I turned out okay but I’m sure it shaped me in various ways.
They’re helping the abuse by lying to those children in their role as a trusted adult.
I think it’s fair to criticize such people, or point out why it’s a problematic approach, but many parents are just trying to do what they believe is the right thing, misguided though it may be.
Education and correcting misconceptions is important, and applying a binary mindset to anyone who shields their kids in this way is not going to move the needle, nor is it likely a fair representation of these individuals.
It's the same thing, this is clearly harmful. If you're uncomfortable with calling them bad people, then call them bad parents.
This is a deeply fallacious argument, and these are not equivalent things.
You seem to be concluding that the only thing that matters is outcome, not intent.
Comparing a parent who makes a well intentioned mistake with a parent who intentionally puts their child in the care of a predator is ridiculous.
One of these parents may even be criminally liable for their actions.
> If you're uncomfortable with calling them bad people, then call them bad parents.
It’s not a matter of comfort, but of effective communication and acknowledgment of nuance. Words have meaning, and boiling complex things down to hardline binary positions is rarely helpful.
Yes, calling someone like this a bad parent is somewhat better than calling them a bad person, because the implications of the two accusations are drastically different.
One implies a moral failing, while the other implies a lack of knowledge/understanding, which are two entirely different categories.
I say somewhat, because these “bad parents” may still be doing almost everything right, and may not have been exposed to situations that would give them the wisdom to impart proper guidance to their kids on this particular topic.
I know some truly lovely and sincere people who just aren’t very good at parenting yet. Every parent starts there. They know it, and they’re doing their best to learn and improve as they go. They grew up in sheltered environments and didn’t exactly have model parents to emulate.
These are not bad people.
A hacker who intentionally breaks a critical system in a hospital is a bad person.
A freshly graduated sysadmin who causes an outage to the same system due to incompetence is not automatically a bad person.
Both events may have similar outcomes, but to claim that the people involved belong in the same category is nonsensical.
If a parent isn't preparing children for life as an adult they're bad parents.
I'm a bad basketball player and my intent has fuckall to do with that judgement.
> I'm a bad basketball player and my intent has fuckall to do with that judgement.
Being a bad basketball player doesn't automatically mean you're bad at all sports. And it certainly doesn't mean you're a bad person.
> If a parent isn't preparing children for life as an adult they're bad parents.
I mostly agree with this statement, but this isn't where we started.
And just like failing at basketball doesn't mean you're failing at all athletic or sporting endeavors, failing at one aspect of parenting doesn't mean you're failing all aspects of parenting (an enormously complicated and diverse set of responsibilities).
If a parent is failing the most critical aspects, or most aspects, yeah, they're bad parents.
Bad parents still aren't automatically bad people.
At this point, I think the horse has been beaten sufficiently.
> If you're uncomfortable with calling them bad people, then call them bad parents.
I think teaching your kids not to defend themselves is obviously bad parenting — and the people who do that, to the result of their own children getting hurt, are bad people.
There are many extremely complex issues that do not have obviously right or wrong answers.
Being bad at something is not the same as being a bad person.
How would you describe the difference between a parent who actively abuses their kids and a parent who loves and provides for their kids, but fails in some area along the way?
You’ve gone right back to a binary stance here.
Highly recommended for any parents of boys out there - it is the best way to address this problem.
"Get a piece of wood then"
I did. As I approached the playground, I felt ridiculous. This wood still wouldn't do anything. To my surprise, the bully fled the scene, clearly afraid.
This incident has taught me a lot. It wasn't the wood that did it. It was the fact that I came back. He could now easily kick my ass again, wood or not. But I might come back yet again, and what (or who) will I bring next time?
From fearful to being feared. A pure mind play.
I do not believe in the perfect world-to-be where one day we've eradicated all bullies and other bad actors by educating them. Life will test you and learning to stand your ground and retaliate is a skill I wish we didn't need, but most definitely need. Address the problem from both angles at once.
There was also the fact that my parents spent beyond their means for “good” schools - but I was a tiny kid and otherwise would have made an ideal target.
I think two scuffles overall, both were the first and last time, and one of the bullies became my friend afterwards. No blood was drawn at any point.
Having the confidence to start a fight with a bunch of classmates/teachers watching makes a big difference, they will usually break up the fight.
I was constantly beat up, physically, until I was 16. It wasn't just by one kid, it was often by multiple. This was even in front of teachers, principles, etc. They watched and did nothing. Other kids watched and did nothing. We don't all get to live in nice communities.
Other kids could pick me up by the neck and choke slam me down into the ground and did so. I wasn't able to do anything about it because I just wasn't that big. If I had done anything to fight against it - I would've been expelled.
It's different when you're a small brown kid in a super racist small town America where your average parent is absentee and on meth half the time.
Don't give advice when you never got into a physical confrontation to begin with. How fucking privileged.
I hope you’ve been able to deal with the trauma, and if not, I sincerely hope you find some peace with the world soon. If you can get into a martial art, that’s the best suggestion I can offer. It will help you heal.
Also, you have to realize that insulting me and dismissing my experience just because you were so badly abused is another kind of bullying. Don’t fall into that trap.
Even if you do catch the bully in a 1 v 1 fight, will the next fight be 1 v 1?
I do agree that this won’t work in all situations.
For everyone that thinks this advice always works... some bullies aren't cowards they're worse... they are arrogant assholes that think they can get away with what they are doing, or are entitled to do it... they may not back down, and may just get worse when confronted.
... Be careful
I was also a tiny kid and it worked for me…
My decision to cross the street could result in me getting hit by a car, I'm still going to do so. Life is risk, these types of comments are useless.
Violence committed for the welfare of man is a virtue.
“We don’t hit girls” was an unqualified demand, though.
Is that before or after their arrest, incarceration and juvenile court hearing?
Also, most bullies wouldn’t tell anyone, since they are usually bullying people in the first place because their parents abuse or ignore them. Needless to say, if you are a shitty parent, this is a very bad idea.
The consistent pattern across episodes is interesting. Pretty much every time the bully barely (or not at all) remembered the bullying. Not as a type of denial, they were genuinely shocked to learn that they were a bully, or that the bullying they did remember had such massive impact.
And when you looked at these grown up bullies, they seemed perfectly normal and reasonable adults. Not at all mean, manipulative, aggressive, or cut-throat.
Whilst none of this helps those victims, it does tell us that bullying is not some permanent character trait. It seems more a fleeting behavior of an undeveloped human being. Probably often performed under group pressure, being an "also-bully". I think that's a much different take from the notion that it's some highly planned, rational behavior driven by evil.
The trouble is that he, for some reason, sees elevating himself and pushing others down as an appropriate thing to do at times. He is fairly insecure and reflexively does this. His mom is quite similar, and like him, also unaware of how it affects people.
When either of them do this, they are entirely oblivious to how uncomfortable or upset they’ve made someone feel. His mom is much better at apologizing even if incredulously, but he still lacks the social tact to recognize the importance of acknowledging and apologizing if it was insensitive. If anything, over time he may actually be less receptive to the idea that he’s doing anything at all.
I have no doubt that many kids will think he was a bit of a jock and a bully later in life. He will remember school as a somewhat lonely and confusing point in time.
Even discussing this with him openly has yielded no results. It makes no sense to him. Likewise, his mom is also still positive that anyone she offends simply misunderstood her, or that people are too sensitive or lack a sense of humour.
I wish I understood it better. At any rate, I’m fairly certain that a lot of bullies are very misunderstood and often potentially quite miserable and lonely. The more they push people away, the fewer opportunities they get to grow and improve themselves with deeper relationships. It’s not a good situation for anyone.
The problem is all the bad behavior they don't see. The bullies just learn to do it when no adults are watching. Teaching the kid how to fight back is a great solution and several answers have said that.
But suppose he or she just can't (sick, handicapped, uncoordinated, tiny, etc.)?
This is where the kids who are not being bullied can step in. Teach your big strong kid it's not cool to just watch it happen; confront the bully yourself. Protect the kids who can't protect themselves.
Couple that with GROUPS of bullies, what do you advocate?
Well, the modern solution to war is more firepower, and that is the firearm. So essentially, the end state of advocating violence is school shootings.
Also firearms: that wasn't part of it until you brought it up, either.
The advocacy of violence in response is a further stepping over of a societal boundary, essentially the same one used by bullies.
So the boundaries are crossed, both legal, institutional, and societal.
But you want to be pedantic about "problem statements"? That firearms and school shootings are some boundary that is fantastical and doesn't get crossed in the real world (that is, the USA conception of the real world)?
You want boundaries on the problem statement, which is about using violent extralegal means to address violent extralegal threats?
What a bizarre comment. Like, you don't think gangs exist? You don't think bullies who crave power and strength don't crave strength in numbers? You don't think gun violence exists, exists at schools?
Are you in some fantasy land where BJJ is the solution for world peace? Are you some gun nut scared that this will cross into gun control? Are you just some spectrum resident pendant/troll?
Weird.
"Bullying" on the original article had nothing to do with firearms & school shootings, as you would know if you read it. It has to do with one nasty kid picking on another one. It very rarely makes the news.
If you need to have the last word, go ahead. I'm not replying any further.
Violence is almost never the answer, but modern bullies seem to be artificially building situations where it's the only answer, since they know they'd get their way otherwise.
It's true that many abusers become this way due to violence at home, but abandoning any option in responding to force with force seems absurd.
May as well be the rest of the quote.
At this point you may as well just advocate for executing the poor.
That's why it's so bad. One employee starts pulling dumb shit and several employees report it to the manager, good chance that employee's not going to be able to keep it up much longer or they'll be gone. Yes, abuse happens at workplaces, but school-type bullying doesn't have the same kind of cover it does in a school. Several students report a bully, that bully will still be there next week. And next quarter. And maybe in their class next year. Still being a bully.
Selection bias during admissions gets talked about a lot when it comes to private schools, but they also have the superpower of being able to tell a kid who won't shape up to GTFO permanently. One family's tuition isn't worth risking several other students leaving. This can and does happen, and it doesn't solve all the problems, but it means the worst of the worst don't stick around like they do at public schools, poisoning the whole school atmosphere.
Maybe things are different now, with kids spending too much time indoors playing video games instead of running around in the woods. But I think violence is generally an outcome from boys being together and relatively unsupervised. The insidious part about violence in schools is the double-jeopardy you face from administration; first you get your ass kicked by the bully, then you get your ass kicked again by the bureaucracy putting you through the wringer.
A boxer obviously will see violence, so will a pigskin football player. Those are things they signed up for and the violence is part of the voluntary activity.
A soldier (or policeman) signs up to be in war, either an active one or one that might happen.
A high school student, a cube worker, a barista, a fireman, they do not sign up for violence.
The difference is that children have no choice but to go to school. They are sent to the slaughter.
in my home growing up we were bullies. I unfortunately carried this into school and didn't learn manners until later
It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children who are totally out of control, they blame the victims and compartmentalize the assaults as being somehow different since they involve children.
These assaults are actually even more critical to address in childhood because as they are allowed to form patterns that persist in criminal assaults and fraud in adulthood.
This type of failure is one reason that we don't truly have a civil society. There is this facade of order, but really at the heart it's just the animal kingdom. There is some aspiration by those with the responsibility, but on average the teachers etc. have little real resolve, courage, or capability to actually deal with the broken and dangerous children that are common in schools. So they blame the victims.
Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.
As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.
In the end, I needed to change for the issue to be resolved - which I did, and, along with moving to a new environment which helped reset a lot of my social interactions, that helped a lot. Obviously that's not some instant magic wand solution - I went through five long years of this experience, with various teachers and other adults trying to help me before things started clicking and I started being able to move on - but in my experience there aren't really many better solutions.
So, while I can't reiterate enough how unacceptable bullying is, and what a negative impact it had on those years of my life, I do agree with the previous poster: the ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of victim (n.b. not literally: I never found violence helped me), and trying to resolve the situation via visible external intervention may well have little impact. For me at least, a better social education would have made me much more prepared to deal with the issues that I faced.
And that's not going to work for everyone, so obviously there still needs to be repercussions for people who do bully others, and we should make it clear that bullying is never acceptable, but I think we need to concentrate more on helping the people being bullied to grow, rather than stopping the bullies themselves. To come back to your maths analogy, if someone's struggling with arithmetic, you can't just make the subject easier and tell them they don't need to worry about it, they still need to actually learn the subject, even if it's hard for them.
The only meaningful difference between now and then is that in adulthood I have more such avenues and they are much more effective. The fact that they were less effective in childhood is an indictment of the administrative and social structure we have constructed schools to have, not of nonviolent methods themselves. I reject your assertion that it’s helpful for a bullied child to model behavior on chimpanzees in the jungle or criminals in prison. Becoming violent in childhood would have had negative long‐term effects on me, and I’m glad nobody back then gave me the “advice” you’re sharing now.
Im guessing most of them don't involve the lowest functioning portion of the population, eg, people who regularly comment violence, rape, and beat their wives, or are currently incarcerated. Public schools cut across the entire population spectrum and include children with legitimate social and cognitive deficiencies.
Adults also have more developed brains and better incentives to obey. a hostile worker might still care about losing their income, car, or house. It is hard to find comparable incentives for children and young adults.
Is there anyone who doesn't have 'sampling bias' in their adult interactions? This seems like a misapplication of a technical term.
"the well adjusted adults I know easily resolve issues without violence" does not mean that you should expect the same results for all adults, or for all children.
Certainly I don’t pretend there aren’t environments where adults are violent and unreasonable. Such as prisons, or other places with “people who regularly commit violence, rape, and beat their wives.”
If your argument is that school environments must be similarly unpleasant because they take students from all strata of society, I counter: we do not take teachers and administrators from all strata of society, and society should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly, because we can take lessons from environments where such things are not normal.
This seems harmfully naïve to me. In pursuing this aspiration we ignore the realities that exacerbate conflict. Children and teenagers are literally not cognitively developed enough (on average) to function to this standard. This remains true no matter how much we wish it weren't.
More effective policy comes from embracing this reality. "Violence and mental abuse" are inevitable consequences of the construction of hominid dominance hierarchies. Instead of fighting their construction, we should create environments where they can occur most naturally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795206
Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved?
Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish the perpetrators.
Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality.
It tells you what children might do if left to their own devices without adult supervision – i.e. in an environment completely unlike a school. The Lord of the Flies is also a work of fiction that's not based on any real life events, as far as I'm aware. In any actual instances of kids being stranded on an island that I've been able to find, the results were rather different: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
>Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies
In my school there was an effective intervention: you got punished if you beat someone up, and excluded from the school if you kept doing it. I guess no-one had told us that we were required to form 'hominid dominance hierarchies' and that we were cognitively incapable of responding to simple incentives.
>I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment
And what would this mean, exactly, beyond just accepting the inevitability of violence?
The simple fact that you think it's not a problem to somewhat approvingly compare schools to prisons is already a bad sign. Schools shouldn't be like prisons. Prisons shouldn't be like prisons either, but that's another story...
This was covered by the paper. You are talking about Peer Victimization without bullying. Bullying is a form of peer victimization in which there is a power imbalance (size, numbers, status, etc).
A shame sometimes the best way to resolve a conflict is eye gouging the aggressor before they permanently break a part of your body
The thing that stuck with me the most by getting the "resolve your conflicts by yourself" treatment was that no matter how much someone is being a piece of shit, the only one you can count on is yourself
Everyone else will watch as you break, and only intervene if you fight back. And punishment is only ever dished out in equal measures between aggressor and victim
Noticing that was probably the start of considering people to be rotten by default, reasons are needed to assume someone isn't
To be clear, as a victim, I was subject to unprovoled physical battery like this more time than I can count between the start of middle school and my second year of high school. As a bully, in my senior year, I never engaged in any kind of physical violence, just name calling and verbally provoking someone prone to emotional outbursts.
As you point out unprovoked battery and name calling fall under the same terminology, but the appropriate responses are obviously not the same.
1) If you're roughly evenly matched, you should fight
2) If you're not, your peers should intervene - "pick on someone your own size"
3) If this doesn't work, escalate to older peers
4) If that doesn't work, escalate to adults
This relies on children being taught and encouraged to intervene in unfair conflict, which the research indicates they are naturally inclined to do.
I'm suggesting that the current "zero tolerance" approach practiced in North America does more harm than good by halting this process before it can resolve conflict - thus harming both the bullied and the bully.
So in rural areas if a child in school grabs another child, throws them on the ground, and starts beating them in the middle of math class, the teacher will not attempt to intervene?
Sorry but I don't believe this.
Will you do the same when your child is being bullied? How do you think that may affect them and their relationship with you? How do you think a child feels when they realize that the adults around them do not have their back? What does it do to their sense of safety and their self-esteem?
I have lived through this and have my personal take on these questions, but I'd love to learn about yours.
It's clearly a fine line to walk, but if you're being bullied then what you need is to learn how to address/discourage that behaviour - not an intervention. Otherwise all you're doing is deferring the learning experience until next time. Past a certain window it's very hard to learn this skill, and you can be stuck with a helpless mentality for your whole life.
But I did become a "fan" of boxing at a very early age and studied how boxers fought. How they setup opponents, threw punches, and especially how they avoided getting hit. Most kids don't do that so it's pretty easy to gain an advantage. And bullies tend to leave kids alone who they know will fight back.
I grew up in some pretty rough neighborhoods so I was motivated to learn.
I grew up with 2 brothers and lots of cousins and learned how to fight by watching boxing on TV.
I fought my 2 year older brother to a draw when I was 6 years old. I dropped a 15 year old kid who was way bigger than me and bullying me by kicking him in the balls that same year and then stood over him while he was on the ground writhing and crying in pain and told him he was lucky I wasn't kicking his face in. He never came near me again.
By the time I started school kids in my neighborhood knew I would fight and when I started Jr. High kids in school already knew I would fight, and I was not a big kid, I was pretty small compared to most kids my age.
When I was 14 a kid I didn't know and was way bigger than me hit me in the head with a hockey stick at a city park and knocked me out cold. When I came to he was skating away from me. I skated as fast as I could, caught up to him and jumped on his back and knocked him down and I started wailing on him. I really don't remember how but I ended up sitting on his chest slugging him in the face as hard and fast as I could when I started hearing people yelling "Stop! Stop!" and realized there was a crowd of people watching me.
When I was in my late teens I started taking MMA classes. That taught me how to use an opponent's force against them and when I was 21 I literally bounced a guy who'd been pestering me for years to "wrestle" off his bedroom ceiling. He was in my face pestering me again so I gave him and little shove and he came back trying to shove me as hard as he could, so it was mostly his energy, I just redirected it. He was in shock because it happened so fast. I was stunned at how well it worked.
When people know you will fight back they tend to not mess with you and getting hit is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You'll heal up. Not fighting back sticks with you and hurts forever.
Bullies will only keep bullying kids who don't fight back. I taught my 5 kids this and none of them were bullied in school.
100%
I once had a kid walk up to me and tell me he had to show me something out in the recess yard. We get out to a certain spot, he bends down and picks up a screwdriver and throws it at me, slammed into the side of my head. To this day I have no idea why, didn't know the kid.
I chased him back into the school building, he turned a corner and the principal was standing there talking to a teacher. I remember very clearly he drew up next to the principal and had a shit eating grin on his face.
I removed that grin from his face very quickly, he thought I was afraid of the consequences of beating him in front of the principal. He learned otherwise.
To the principals credit, once I told him the story, saw the knot on my head, AND the screwdriver I got away with absolutely no punishment.
I've never been one to start things, and in fact often times I let them go too far, but I've never actually been afraid of a fight. I used to move a lot as a kid and at some point I just got used to having to fight atleast 1 person at a new school, once people realized you wouldn't take their shit, they didn't give it.
My bullies would tackle me, surround me, and kick me while I was down for minutes. Never less then 6 of them at a time. I had 3 concussions from being tackled and having my head smashed against the floor.
They would throw sand into my eyes. I remember not being able to see while being beat. I remember having to wear an eye patch for a week from the abrasions.
They would throw large sticks at me, I have numerous scars from being hit in the face.
They would break my things, I had multiple bikes smashed on the bike rack.
They would steal my things, if I had anything nice in my desk they would steal it when the teacher was out of the room.
They would shove dog shit in my face when they tackled me to the ground in their groups.
They would ostracize me from every other person at school, anyone I tried to talk to would have to ignore me for fear of being beaten up and treated the same. Even those that I was good friends with outside of school felt they couldn't let it be known in school.
I'd have my pants pulled down almost every single day while I was walking in crowds.
I stood up and fought for myself every single time. I never backed out. I always tried to fight back. I was larger then any of them individually. I had my dad take me to Taekwondo from the time I was in grade 2. I started lifting weights in grade 4.
My only recourse was to avoid them. From grade 2 to grade 11 I would pretend to be sick for weeks at a time in order to avoid going to school. Avoidance was my ONLY option, nothing else worked. I would use up every single sick day I could without getting expelled in high school. I'm not even sure about elementary school, they didn't have a max number of days, but I'm sure I missed at least half of every year.
Finally in grade 11 I managed to get the fight to stop by knocking four teeth out of my main bullies mouth and giving him 18 stitches. I was knocked out cold and barely remember the fight.
Standing up for yourself doesn't always work, everyone in this thread that thinks it does is extremely naive.
I'm glad that you punching your bully once solved the problem for you though.
This feels like it's missing context.
Solution: Let 'em work it out themselves.
I have a pretty low opinion of the zero tolerance policies because they seem to primarily operate to the benefit of the bullies in this case: the bullying is not readily visible as a problem to the adults and when it is, many of them think as you do, that kids will be kids and they should work out their problems themselves. However, a fight is an immediate problem and the obvious instigator is the victim of the bullying.
Working-it-out is an effective approach for two people who want to solve an issue - an issue that they're both fairly responsible for.
But where you have one child experiencing long-term and unearned mistreatment at the hands of many peers - attempts at working-it-out are such a mismatched response that more mistreatment seems likely.
Are we denying women a chance at personal development by having police arrest rapists rather than forcing women to develop the necessary skills of interpersonal violence to defend themselves?
…where is the line?
With regards to sexual assault - we surely should teach vulnerable people the necessary skills to avoid violence. It (used to be) common sense not to drink in the company of strangers, especially if you are physically vulnerable (regardless of your sex). None of this is exclusive to punishing perpetrators, which we should of course continue doing.
Let 'em work out the tension, but with very minimal chance of hurting anything.
I went to a strict religious school and a kid who bullied me over years pushed me too far one day and I started after him, got maybe one kick to his leg in. Teachers stopped me immediately, but never did the same for the years of verbal abuse mocking me for my weight though. I ended up getting spanked by the principal with a thick wooden paddle in front of my teacher that day. This was the mid to late 90s. I heard once the kid who bullied me is in prison now.
And of course both sides must agree, you can't be forced in to it.
The bully comes up and shoves a kid around, doing some minor injuries.
The bullied raises the matter to school authorities.
Their solution is "would you like to fight the bully some more?"
---
At what point did the victim want to get involved in this? The victim didn't instigate violence, the victim didn't want to participate in violence, the victim wants the violence to stop and to feel safe at school.
And you propose to instead offer them "would you like to risk more bodily injury engaging in violence?"
In the Western system I could more often rely on just ignoring or complaining to a teacher to result in some action, in the Asian schools I went to, many of the teachers and other parents seemed almost complicit in the bullying (somewhat unsurprisingly, especially the English teachers).
I still remember that on my first day in an Indian school in 4th grade after having gone to school for ~3 years in NY, I had been mocked and called stupid in front of the class by the math teacher for writing out how I answered a problem differently from what had been taught to the rest of the class. Completely ruined me on math for several years because it made me too hesitant to ask questions about fundamental things I didn't understand and as a result I had terrible fundamentals. I only really managed to get over that by spending the entirety of 8th grade self-teaching myself math after school.
The way I like to think of it these days is that Western education made me enjoy learning and helped build up my confidence, while Asian education made me cynical and better at reading people (which isn't a bad thing to me now, but I'd still rather never go through that again).
Of course this is just anecdotal so it doesn't say a lot overall.
- A teacher posed a question to the class and I and another boy answered immediately. The teacher was upset and said "cliquecover and boy are always putting themselves forward"
- A few senior students demo'ed a cool robotics toy they'd built. Our science teacher mocked our class for not being as intelligent as them, instead of explaining how we could build one (doubt he knew anything about it).
- A university lecturer openly ridiculed all the female CS students as "useless"
- A tendency to obscure their incompetence and lack of understanding by focussing on petty details: eg a math teacher ridiculing us for not knowing our multiplication tables and forcing us to memorize them, instead of teaching useful skills, English teachers being obsessed with spelling and handwriting instead of general reading and composition skills
- Universities engaging in extortion by refusing to release student's personal documents unless they would take up the first job offer they obtained via university placements.
Very few intelligent people in India would become teachers in the kind of school I went to. They would rather take up software/IT/private sector jobs, so you get mediocre non-entities who have free rein to treat students as they please.
Is it because children have too much freedom in school, innatentive/overworked teachers? My wife tends to think it's the food(sugars) and TV/computer games (even first graders spend significant chunks of their free time playing Minecraft and other games). Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids?
If we could "sacrifice" the top ~10% most-disruptive students—just keep them out of the ordinary classrooms—it'd improve everyone else's experience and ultimate educational attainment immensely. My wife used to be a teacher and days when the right couple kids both happened to be sick, all the lessons got done faster than the time she'd allotted, giving time to cover bonus material, and she said you could just feel how much more relaxed and jovial the atmosphere was, and could see it on the kids' faces. Consider how much benefit it would convey if that were every day and those effects could compound over years. First person who figures out a way to do that that doesn't condemn the 10%ers who actually have a chance of reforming, and that's palatable to constituents, will have done more for US education than anyone else has in a century, probably.
All children need to be "socialized", which means "taught the local method of the art of civilization". Currently in the western world there IS no "local method of the art of civilization". There's barely even a "local people". Most people grow up around transplants and whirling hodgepodge of rapidly-evolving ethno-social practices that never comes close to stabilizing on a single, repeatable way of life.
The US's and Canada's failures to raise up kids to behave a certain way is due to the fact that the modern western world is in a local period of flux/chaos. Children rarely see their full-time working parents and live in environments where they have little freedom and few trustworthy allies that will remain with them throughout their whole lives. The several people I know who grew up in the USSR did not experience this, and while they experienced shortages, authoritarianism, and poverty, they also experienced very intensely local community with people who they understood and expected to live the same way. (This broke down across ethnic lines, of course.) The necessary fixes are far more pervasive and difficult than many people realize, and mostly start with "fixing the adults" rather than "fixing the kids".
Bullying is a deeply primal instinct, with the end result of establishing a social hierarchy with the most powerful and violent on top and people who will listen to them and provide goods and services on the bottom. The reason that adults who commit crimes end up in prison is that modern western governments keep a really well-armed and nasty gang on a leash (police) and have a system to deal with the bullies who don't learn how to keep their bullying in line with social acceptability. (For instance, you can emotionally torture an employee into depression, but you can't punch them in the face.) I believe that the bullying we're seeing children do now is closer to status-jockeying in a post-civilization world than as a consequence of our current society's setup. They're trying to establish hierarchies and social norms for themselves, because they've never observed or been taught any.
Well, unless you count getting griefed on MC as bullying...
In Europe, bullying is worst in countries with comprehensive systems (UK/Nordics/Eastern Europe, unsurprisingly they are countries that have left-wing education systems built for the social justice goals of adults, not learning outcomes of kids). I believe it is as bad or worse in Asia although for different reasons.
Btw, there are also quite good stats about sexual violence against girls and, unfortunately, you actually see these levels are highest in comprehensive systems in Europe. This is likely due to under-reporting elsewhere but it is very strange to see somewhere like the UK come out worse than Afghanistan in violence against girls. I think people should also ask why this kind of stuff isn't known (again, it is because schools are designed for social justice for adults, not for kids...it is an unfortunate reality of our world).
Learning outcome rankings are commonly pretty high for UK and the Nordics -- there's a number of metrics, and some asian countries come out outlier strong depending on the test, but it's pretty common to find Finland, Sweden, and the UK in the top, and Finland in particular seems pretty enviable by a number of standards.
Also, learning outcomes for kids are social justice goals -- people who think of their social values/goals in those terms (vs people who use "social justice" as a drive-by disparaging/othering term to signal their own ideological allegiances) are almost always concerned with broadening positive educational outcomes. Perhaps you don't share those goals, or perhaps you believe that some social movements are promoting policy that isn't well-optimized for those goals, but it's entirely false to state that they're mutually exclusive.
And as they say, "citation needed" for stats about bullying or sexual violence.
In society there's often a reflex to blame girls from trying to hitch hike, like stepping in risky activities.. but for bullying it seems completely passive and unwarranted.
The issue is, what are you going to do about it? Teachers can't be fully responsible for fixing them, and clearly the parents (often) won't. You can't really go "draconian" mode on the bullies either, they're still kids. And even if you would, they'd get even worse.
It's this kind of logic that creates it actually. Trying to create Uber safe environments for hypothetical outcomes results in those behaviors being suppressed and mutated later. Children are designed to bully, the same as every other mammal species plays when young. If they were not, you wouldn't find it in every place where children are throughout the planet.
We can only mitigate severe effects. Smaller schools is the most significant step, but it will never happen.
With regards to taking steps to insulate yourself and particularly your male children from physical bullying (= assault):
The first stop should be developing a body and a physical demeanor that naturally makes any bullies think twice about trying to assault you- the perceived cost should outweigh any potential benefit for them.
If that fails, and it probably will at some point, because there is always someone bigger and stronger, you need to be proficient in some kind of striking sport. Boxing is great for this. You don't need to be able to go to the final bell with Mayweather, but again, you need to be able to hurt the bully enough that in the future they'll know that the cost will outweigh any potential benefit.
I’ll speak up. Context:
Australian, male, went to shitty public school in an old and wealthy suburb that had a dozen private schools and 1 public school. I was from a dysfunctional family with a lot at home issues. I wasn’t smart or hard working and because of my metabolism and genetics, I was obese until about 18 when my body started to mature (later compared to my peers).
I got bullied. Hard. By my peers at school. By kids at my games of basketball on the weekend. By my friends. By my brothers and by my father. I’m talking about every day comments about my weight. My smell. My family. My unattractive body. My fat dumb face etc. (Verbal, never got into a violet situation).
What ended up happening is that I began to bully back. I would say nasty things back to people. I would pick things up from South Park. I would knock kids books off the table. Draw on lockers with (poorly) drawn male genitalia.
Ultimately, it felt like the normal thing to do. Just be a total fucking prick to everyone.
I’ve changed a lot since then. I personally can’t stand being around verbal conflict or even consume media that makes fun of people.
I find a lot of modern ‘comedy’ to be a form a Bullying to someone somewhere.
I’m personally very sorry to my family and friends I still have for my actions that time. And I’m personally very sensitive to witnessing these behaviours.
In my life I try my best to be kind and considerate. I try not to judge people and keep my negative thoughts to my self.
I never wanted to be a bully. Looking back I feel as though I was just fitting in.
I also redirected my aggression to weaker kids in school, and I also got redirected aggression from stronger kids. We need to accept that in many cases we are not better than baboons, and try to find ways to accommodate our primal behaviours, not ignore them or pretend that we are so superior as a species.
At least one girl and three boys dropped out of my high school year (we had 3 classes with around 20-30 students) explicitly because they had been bullied! Then there was at least one student, who repeated a year because of bullying. Then there were like two female and male students who got heavily bullied, but made it through high school without disturbances.
I'm trying to pull myself out of the slump but after living on my own for 3 years I still have troubles with relationships - not trusting anybody, etc.
The sooner we can identify children who are being abused at school, at home, and adopt corrective measures (ideally keeping the child at home instead of throwing them into the foster system), the better off society will be.
Only recently I've been able to actually talk or mention my upbringing - I was always shamed and threatened never to tell anybody about what was going on or else "I'd rip the family apart". It's hard to fully realize the scale of the abuse until you metaphorically swim to the surface and stick your head out of the water to see the world around you with a different lens for the first time.
I've been using a combination of strategies to try and find my way out of the mess I was thrown into - I've been seeing a psychiatrist for CBT sessions every 2-3 weeks for almost 10 years and have found it helpful, along with attempting to make daily entries in a journal (the ADHD gets in the way sometimes heh).
I'll definitely look into IFS therapy as well. I did some cursory reading and it seems like that's something that would help me.
In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped. I would fight at a moments notice even sometimes in classrooms. Spent a lot of time suspended and my parents had conferences. I never lashed out at anyone. Though if someone tried to insult me, push me around, etc I would immediately switch modes and start swinging. As I got bigger and stronger it became less of an attack of weak punches to full blown knockouts.
The only way we can solve bullying is by teaching our kids that violence is not only necessary but expected. Teach them to be violent, and teach them to control it. You must defend yourself from these people. Enrolling your kids in an actual martial art (some combination of boxing, bjj, muay thai, etc) will help. When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory. You can't win with bullies by "being the better person". Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them. School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons. The sooner children realize this the sooner they realize the methods to staying alive aren't much different.
"If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless."
The kids couldn’t actually physically damage me since I was so much bigger. They did cause a lot of psychological harm. I had a very negative predisposition towards anyone that I met. I just assumed everyone would be hostile towards me and would want to make fun of me. I still struggle with this mindset and I am in my thirties. I will usually be very shut off from people I do not know.
There were a couple of times that I did stand up for myself. Each time the bullying completely stopped.
I thought I was being the better person by not fighting back but that was not true. I was being harmless. That harmlessness invited more violence.
This I have to disagree with. Some of them I believe have a terrible home life and are handing down the abuse to whomever is a weak target.
You may be right in other cases though, and that had never occurred to me. Lack of respect and self control may stem from neglect or lack of parenting rather than abuse.
Sweetie, that's a cope. Bullying is a choice. It's this kind of pro-crime, pro-rape thinking that lets all the bad things happen to people. It's always a choice. Plenty of people happen to go through much worse things without hurting other people. Like for example, the victims of the bullies. So it's clear that there's no inherent reason for the bullies to do it, they just want to.
The violence rate of east Asians who were spanked at home hard by their parents is likely astronomically lower than Americans who weren't spanked.
It's not about being spanked, it's about why you were spanked. Be just.
I was picked on a fair bit in school. The nature of "zero-tolerance" meant that fights were quick. I recall one day just being shoved into a a door threshold unexpectedly. I had had it at that point from this person, so I took my heaviest book out of my bag and slammed him in the head with it as he was already walking away triumphantly. Looking back, he could have been seriously injured. Many people witnesses and laughed at him.
He never bothered me again.
But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?
You don't but in the animal kingdom most animals haven't evolved to be able to overcome their predator, they've just evolved to make it difficult enough for their predator to decided to look elsewhere for food. Make sure they know if they pick on you their going to have trouble and they'll go somewhere else.
Most US public schools and low-rate private schools are like this. If your children are in an ultra-competitive public or private school however, the bullies are tossed out, the schools confident in the 100% ironclad certainty there is another family literally grateful for the opportunity to place their child in the new opening within 24 hours. The student body goes through cycles of forgetting this until a new bully is expelled, then the bullying simmers down to much more subtle forms.
In the ultra-competitive private boarding schools, the kind of over the top physical bullying you hear about in public schools is nearly non-existent because they will expel on far lower thresholds for bullying.
But yes, if your children are in US public school or you are a child in a US public school, generally speaking fighting back regardless of the zero tolerance consequences tends to stop the bullying better than going through toothless school policies. Bullies tend to prefer soft targets over porcupines. If you are being bullied and choose to fight back though, then go in at a location with adults to intervene quickly nearby expecting to get hurt and lose (in the sense the bully has the physical upper hand), but never defeated (in the sense you and the bully have to be separated before you stop). If it is a group doing the bullying, go for the leader.
The US public school systems' bullying problem won't stop until the bullies' parents know that they have a no-recourse, no-litigation-overturning consequence to bullying that sees their precious no-fault snowflake expelled to "lower class" schooling if they run out their options.
We both were arrested and charged, and I was told to my face by a judge that “there is no such thing as self-defense in schools.” Which is not only a bald-faced lie, it’s unconstitutional. You have a right to be secure in your person, and a right to self-defense, well established by the Supreme Court in case law and described in the Declaration of Independence.
I also didn’t get bullied again at that school after that incident. Self-defense is not just a right, it’s an imperative.
I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side.
> kids in an actual martial art
I had this idea, based on my experience as a kid, but never actually got around to enrolling them. They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.
This is endemic in modern culture. The need to treat two opposing opinions as equally valid and balance them against each other as if there's some sane middle-ground to be found. There's no middle-ground between slavery and non-slavery. Or between the earth is flat and science.
Just saying man if you are looking for a Christmas present for them get them a membership to train at a BJJ gym, if you have a daughter it will keep her safe, if you have a son it will give him the opportunity to interact and build relationships with people he doesn't know, and may not normally associate with. BJJ is all about technique over physicality and carries a low risk of injury.
For both of them it will give them the confidence that if they end up in a bad situation they know they have the skills to respond calmly. In addition if the gym is any good they'll have them do some rolling so they'll be able to learn to stay calm under pressure, which is a very transferable skill.
Just a suggestion.
Exactly my experience as well. Fighting back is the only thing that ever made the bullying stop. I fought back once in the locker room against a boy two years and two feet older and taller than me, basically lost the fight immediately, but because I fought and wouldn't submit, everybody else stopped the fight and after that day I was never bullied in school again.
The reason I never fought back sooner is because I was scared of the rules even more than the bullies. The "Zero tolerance" rules made clear that if I fought back I would be just as bad as the bullies, and in just as much trouble (except I'd actually be in more trouble, because my parents would be livid at me for getting suspended while the bullies' parents wouldn't give a shit.) "Zero tolerance" means zero due process. It's the school administrators essentially siding with bullies by default because it makes the paperwork easier. Absolutely immoral. It should be their responsibility to figure out who actually started the fight and punish the perpetrator but not the victim.
In the end I didn't get in trouble after all, because locker room fights were beyond the eyes of adults and nobody ratted anybody out. I resent the teachers and the administration the most, for making me afraid to stick up for myself. The kids who bullied me were psychos or broken people, and I find it easy to forgive them. But the administration did harm to me by being lazy bureaucrats.
So I'd say 4 is a good age to start, if you need to find a good gym I'd recommend going over to old.reddit.com/r/bjj and asking for advice on there, you'll probably get some good advice.
Also it makes wrestling with the kids way more fun when they try and practice their BJJ at the same time.
So what's the ceiling on that? What if they escalate back? What if I can't win physically?
Is head-injury risking brain damage to my opponent going too far? Do I bring weapons? Bats? Knives? This sounds like a losing escalation path really, guns are pretty readily available and a half-dozen rounds to the chest sounds like it would be a nice permanent solution to most bullying problems.
Is that going too far?
The number of people in this entire comment section who don't see "escalate the violence" as having some very obvious negative outcomes is incredible. It's all "boys will be boys" style rhetorical crap, where they pretend that there's a magic set of limiting rules and that somehow teenagers throwing punches isn't in fact gambling on serious injury and death.
Oh and the best part: the victim doesn't want to be there. The victim wants the problem to stop. The victim, is the one who in violent escalation gets held to account for going "too far" in response.
The "real world" doesn't work this way, it's not even remotely similar. In the real world in most US states if someone assaults you in public you actually can legally draw a weapon and kill them in response, but at the very least the authorities will descend and the assaulter's life as though know it - if caught - is quite thoroughly over. School's are the only place where everyone knows the identity of the perpetrators and theirs witnesses galore and the authority says "nah, the victim should handle it - but you know, not too much".
As an adult however I realize that my bullies were actually abused children who had a rough time at home and took it out on me at school.
> When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory.
Sorry, but this is completely sociopathic insanity. Celebrating one child maiming another? What is this, the hunger games?
> Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them.
Do you think it's ever ok for an adult to beat a child? You have it all wrong, it's the kids who are beat who become bullies.
> If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless.
Capable of violence is one thing, systemically encouraging it as part of normal upbringing is however strictly antisocial.
My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.
I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.
Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.
Whether you learn something from it or not, the purpose of school is to learn. If you went into work every day and had someone beating you up every day, would you be productive? Probably not (and btw, the only reason we have systems where this happens at all is because of what adults want, not what kids want).
Please replace the word bullying in your question with the word rape or mutilation or imprisonment or starvation and see how horrible that line of thinking is.
It could also be the well-known effect that "weaker" (physically or mentally) people are more likely to be bullied.
The way to test causation is to have a "control" group with normal environmental bullying levels, and a second group which is otherwise identical to the first, randomly targeted by the scientists for extra bullying. This would of course be unethical. It also wouldn't be double-blind, and also wouldn't be the same process anyway. In short, it's impossible to prove empirically.
This is absolutely true in my experience. It's the same way that many criminals prey on the smaller/older/weaker in society. Why pick a target that has a good chance of winning in a fight? I'm sure plenty of others have anecdotes, but I fought a bully, won, and they were always friendly after that.
Bullying in it's most common and less extreme forms appears to be a way of reinforcing group conformity and norms, as it's often directed at those who are different in appearance or behavior. By calling attention to this with name calling or teasing, they publicly demonstrate their own in-group status and as a side-effect also pressure the target to conform to group expectations. Over time, this can be just as insidious and damaging even though violence may not be always involved.
In the most pathological form, you have a person that has a lot of internal uncertainty around their own position in the social hierarchy (which actually may be quite high already and part of what makes this pathological) for which bullying is a way to assert their dominance over another. These are the bullies that we all know and which seem to fixate on a particular target or group, and are the type I alluded to in my opening paragraph. They are not necessarily spoiling for a fight (that is something else entirely and distinguishing the two can be difficult) but rather have identified their target as being someone weak or low status enough that they will not fight back nor will anyone rise to defend them. However, if the target does fight back and even if they lose, if this happens consistently then that is often enough to update the calculation on their end about whether the benefits outweigh the costs (after all, they could eventually lose the fight or at least it could be close enough that they don't win convincingly which is almost as bad) and their attention will shift elsewhere.
There is also a greater likelihood that others may stand up for you if you stand up for yourself. It is another tendency of human psychology that I have observed that those who do nothing and essentially "take it" are viewed with contempt even if those observers also disapprove of the bullying. There seems to be some general undercurrent of disgust with perceived weakness, but this is perhaps rooted in some sense that the risk of intervention is less likely to be reciprocated. After all, if the victim doesn't appear willing or able to do this for themselves, why would they be expected to do so for someone else?
>Establishing temporal priority – what come first, bullying victimisation or poor mental health – is an essential first step. Indeed, one important alternative hypothesis that must be ruled out is that early mental health symptoms account for both an increased risk for being targeted by bullying behaviours and also for later psychopathology. Findings so far have shown that over and above early signs of poor mental health prior to bullying victimisation, being bullied in childhood or in adolescence is associated with new symptoms/diagnoses of mental health problems, and especially with later symptoms of anxiety and depression (Arseneault et al., 2006; Bowes, Joinson, Wolke, & Lewis, 2015; Kim, Leventhal, Koh, Hubbard, & Boyce, 2006; Stapinski et al., 2014; Zwierzynska, Wolke, & Leraya, 2013). These studies are robust not only because they controlled for symptoms prior to being bullied but they also controlled for a range of other potential confounders, including gender, parental socioeconomic status and low IQ.
Dang, I was going to post this suggestion as a joke (because “proof that weak people deserve it”—get it?).
But the thing is that I was weird before and am still weird now. Aspergers ( sorry, must not mention that mass murderer's name ) / Autism spectrum disorder/ general weirdness.
So I do not really know if the bullying was an epiphenomenon of my weirdness and whether my weirdness would have caused my issues.
Or perhaps the bullying contributed.
In any case, it does not matter.
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin: ‘we must cultivate our garden’" as Voltaire wrote in his Candide...
Teachers, in essence, is the most bullied class in social hierarchy. They have low wages, huge overtimes, tremendous responsibility of upbringing children, yet almost no real authority over them. It just doesn't make any sense.
Because of this I'd bet that most teachers nowadays are either spineless, or bullies themselves. Teachers that can display a real leadership are miracles.
So sad that this happens. I changed schools 5 times and only 2 of them had no bullying. It's true that it changes you. There are some good resilience changes that happen, but there are bad changes too.
...Unfortunately I think it is the human condition to want to have power over others. It would be awesome if there was some way to fix this, but we are all a bit broken I think.
> "Bullying, a form of peer victimisation, can take place between children, between adolescents or between adults. It is not bullying when a parent or a teacher is abusive towards a child. While the terms peer victimisation and bullying are often used interchangeably, peer victimisation is not equivalent to bullying. For example, it is not bullying when two people of about the same strength quarrel or fight, but it is peer victimisation. An especially important feature of bullying is the power imbalance between those who perpetrate bullying behaviours and their victims..."
The notion that parental or teacher abuse can't be called bullying is nonsensical, as it produces the same kind of behavior in children (fearful, submissive, avoidance, etc.). The general psychological concept is 'operant conditioning', essentially brainwashing by authority figures enforced by violence, humiliation, and so on. It's a key feature of all authoritarian systems. There's little doubt that schoolyard bullies are merely aping the behavior of adult authoritarian figures:
https://www.thoughtco.com/operant-conditioning-definition-ex...
The best literature on bullying (and also a criticism of the British school system) IMO is "Lord of the Flies" (William Golding, 1954). Note it was not a critique of so-called 'human nature' in general but of a particular societal construct.
https://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/07/englands-ruling-patholo...
> "Virginia Woolf drew a very clear line between the brutalisation of little boys in a loveless environment and their assumption as adults into the brutal institutions of colonialism. It’s long been clear to many that the UK is ruled by many people who think their damage is a strength, and who seek to perpetuate it."
People are often reluctant to discuss this, because it exposes the fact that "free Western democracies" employ these authoritarian tactics (perhaps with heavier emphasis on psychological control vs. physical control) just as often as communist or theocratic states do.
i learned most of this much, much later as an adult, but TL;dr my parents met many times with the headmaster, who simply refused to believe his son would bully anyone. my father and the headmaster apparently almost came to blows (but didn't, my dad is a good man) and the upshot was that i was withdrawn from that school and sent to a very austere Georgian quaker boarding school for the remaining 8 years of schooling. the change of school of course removed the headmaster's son's bullying, but introduced other [boarding school type] issues which likely scarred me in other ways. but at least the bully was gone from my life!
n.b. some ~25 years later i did actually meet the bully/headmaster's son at a random event back in the UK; he had no memory of the bullying and i was heartened to observe that his life was a disaster and he was desperately unhappy.
that made the ~5 years of bullying feel at least like it got me something.
I didn't get bullied too bad in school. What I've experienced in the tech industry as an adult has been far worse.
I'm actually grateful for the schoolyard bullies as they helped to prepare me for life as an adult.
We have all read/seen Lord of the Flies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
What we see in unfolding in schools (and in our neighborhoods) is the same sort of structure engendered by a lack of supervision by 'Parentis' over various groups. So we must assert control in schools/yards/neighborhoods/online to the degree needed to limit the levels of oppression exerted by peers/cliques/gangs so people are free to go about without some one/gang/clique wanting to exert control.
So if we put 4K cams in schools/yards/halls with a watch room - is that OK, what if we have 'true Parentis' watching this stream as well as staff members? If Johnny bullies Lenny and one of the parents tells Johnnie's parents - who looks at this later and chastises Johhny - will this work? Will he not care = it's a jungle, he has to 'man up' a Lord of the Flies response?
The same thing plays out in many schools/cities, the hordes of students and gangs and street people are a large LOTF experiment. This HAS to be solved. To what degree do other countries have this problem?
Welcome to the school system.
Home schooling is an alternative, if you have the opportunity. Not just for religious nuts; it's for anybody that wants to see their kid get more than <10 minutes of attention a day (which schools fall woefully short of). You can beat the school curriculum by a large multiple in the first half-hour of your home-school day.
But good luck trying to check out a curriculum from your public school - you'll get glared at and lectured to and forbidden from checking out any curriculum that isn't 'age-appropriate' even though your child did all that stuff 2 years ago.
Anyway, sorry, hot button.
They lump squabbles between similarly weighted peers with the situation where individual children get systemically singled out for mistreatment.
Lord of the Flies is the most realistic book about children that I know.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
That, said, I've heard stories of bullying where someone gets their head held down a toilet. That's crossing over the line into assault and these people should be jailed.
I used to feel that way, but found I was continually having those experiences because of the people I was with, and the expectations I had.
It's possible to have a life surrounded by supportive, loyal, strong and gentle people who treat you with respect.
Just in case any psychologist are reading this, I would like to point out a type of bullying that I experienced but it is never talked about. It is basically sexual harassment by closeted homosexuals. One kind of assumes that homosexuals are these fey, thin mild mannered and fashionable kids, but in reality a lot of the fat nasty bullies were self hating closet homosexuals. I was always a target for them because I had this childhood disease that made me very thin and tall and pale, and apparently that is very attractive to those scumbags.
And they bullied me verbally and physically and always made me feel like shit. The worst part is I did not know what was happening to me because I did not know much about homosexuality (I grew up in a communist regime that preferred to sweep that stuff under the rug). So I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me.
There is a lot of talk about bullying of gays in school, but there is also the problem of bullying of heterosexuals by homosexuals. To solve this, schools should teach their kids about homosexuality early. Probably as soon as puberty because by then these kids will be confronted by it. And while schools do teach that sexual harassments is wrong they should make it clear that the same holds true for homosexuals. I have a feeling that a lot of gays think they are special and above the general society rules about sexual harassment. Even in my forties I still get my drinks spiked from time to time! And most importantly teachers should be taught to recognize and prevent sexual harassment in the homosexual context as well as the hetero one.
/s
Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction. Not that nature should be our guide, but often harsh social behavior is functional from an evolutionary standpoint. That said,
What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
> Sounds almost like victim blaming. If true, if there’s something about the bullied that causes them to be bullied, perhaps bullying is actually a form of social correction. Not that nature should be our guide, but often harsh social behavior is functional from an evolutionary standpoint. That said,
A distinction needs to be made between post-facto "victim blaming" and prevention that involves potential victims. Conflating the two leads one to oppose good measures out of an allegiance to an unrealistically perfect, ideologically-motivated fantasy (that social problems can and should be solved only by authorities applying pressure to the "guilty" people").
I think when the article says "that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying" they refer to more health based intervention. Such as helping kids to be healthy and not malnourished, or overweight from eating bad food.
> Sounds almost like victim blaming.
The public health measures could be directed at the bullies, no?
This is only true if bullying actually corrects something which is a big logical leap to just leave to an appeal to nature.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhosLaughingNow
I disagree. They are not suggesting that the interventions specifically target the victims.
“ research has identified some factors that predispose children to be targeted by bullying behaviours. These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.”
To be clear I said nature shouldn’t be our guide. Nature often means that life is nasty brutish and short. I even quoted the famous Auden poem as support. Sheesh!
Perhaps I wasn't bullied as physically or severely as people here, but I had a few people that picked on me a lot in high school. One who ended up dating the girl I was in love with and whom I introduced to my friend group. He rubbed it in my face for almost four years that he was dating her and I wasn't. It wasn't until a few years ago, when I saw him at a friend's bachelor party and he got so drunk he got thrown out of the casino, that I started to reflect on how his life may have actually have been as a kid. His dad seemed to bully him like crazy, to have ridiculous demands on him and thus he would rebel. He didn't seem to have a lot of close friends and didn't seem to have a lot of confidence in his physical appearance. I don't know. What I did realize is that he probably struggled a lot as a kid. Same with another kid that would bully me. And another.
I just strongly reject the idea that the only way to resolve violence is to respond with violence—I don't know if I even believe it is a very effective medium- to long-term solution at all.
I think what works better is to stand up for ourselves while also trying to stand up for them. To humanize ourselves and to humanize them if we can. To say how we're feeling, to say how we imagine they might be feeling. Physical violence may cause them to feel fear, but at what point do we then become the bully trying to instill fear in them?
This isn't really as ambiguous as you present it to be, the obvious answer is "when you do it to them unprovoked, that's what distinguishes bullying from self-defense".
There are scores of comments here describing a strategy that worked for them, it's evidently effective. Have you ever tried what you're preaching with real childhood bullies? I'm naturally skeptical that it's effective to ask an immature victim to play therapist with an immature bully, but I might find it more believable if you mentioned literally any reasoning or evidence at all suggesting it could work.
I agree if I believe I did it to them unprovoked, then it would be bullying; however, how often do you think a person believes they're doing it to someone unprovoked? The receiver may believe it's unprovoked, but I'd imagine the person delivering the blow in that moment may think it was provoked. I don't think most people will self-identify as a bully, but I may be wrong about that.
Also, with regards to self-defense, in the Krav Maga and other self-defense courses I've taken, there's a lot of talk about legality of self-defense and how if one's actions tip over into being too aggressive, it can go from being self-defense to assault very quickly and become illegal. So even in physical self-defense cases, who is the defender and aggressor can change quickly depending on perspective.
> Have you ever tried what you're preaching with real childhood bullies?
Hmm, maybe not real childhood bullies because I started focusing on this in my mid-20s, however I can give one story from a few years ago. I went to a picnic with my ex-girlfriend and her family was there. First time meeting the family. One of the distant cousins came up and offered me a drink. I said I had just made a deal with myself I wouldn't drink alcohol for a month and it was just the first week. He said that he didn't know me and I was new to the culture and in his culture they make drinks for people. I said no, I didn't want an alcoholic drink. He said that he makes the drink for me to know how to trust me, if I won't take it, how will he know to trust me, it's a matter of respect. I told him:
"Listen, I made a deal with myself I wouldn't drink alcohol for a month. So while I want to respect you, I also want to respect myself."
The guy stopped trying to guilt me into taking a drink and I think walked away.
So while it may not be as an extreme example of what kids can do to each other or other adults can do, I think it may show that there are ways to resolve such conflicts with words that aren't playing therapist so much as expressing indignation and anger and strong confidence in what we want, without demonizing the other side for what they want.
Practically every story in this thread, notably including your own, was unprovoked. An extremely common theme is that bullies pick weak targets, if the victim fights back they pick another target. There's no provocation involved.
It doesn't matter whether a bully internally believes their actions are justified, there are basic facts and societal standards. If I beat you up for looking at me funny and I say it's justified because you provoked me with your glance, that's unreasonable nonsense and claiming subjectivity doesn't suddenly make me sympathetic.
> there's a lot of talk about legality of self-defense and how if one's actions tip over into being too aggressive, it can go from being self-defense to assault very quickly and become illegal
The legal world of adults actually has teeth in penalizing violence which doesn't really apply to the world of children. Not only would child victims be exempt from adult laws when fighting back, it is in their best interest to do so because their bullies are also exempt from adult laws in their violence against the victim. That means that victims can expect to be bullied in the future since they aren't protected by laws like adults are.
If your only point here is that fighting back can go too far, guess what, so can bullying.
> I think it may show that there are ways to resolve such conflicts with words
I don't think anyone here is saying that conflicts cannot be resolved with words, the point in contention here is whether it solves anything for bullied children. I can't even honestly characterize your anecdote as bullying, at no point was harm threatened or even implied. When a group of teen classmates corner you and threaten to beat you up if you don't give them your lunch money, do you honestly believe a confident remark about mutual respect can be a solution there?
I read this and see that you believe that they were unprovoked, not that every human would see them as unprovoked and therefore are objectively unprovoked. Maybe you don't think there's a difference between the two, but for me, I strongly believe not everyone would see these as completely unprovoked. I have a friend whose husband threatened to kill her and she left him and her kids behind to flee for her life. When she was telling me how they'd fight, she'd tell me he would get angry at her and then she'd go quiet and then he would shout and then she would avoid him for a few days, giving the silent treatment. She didn't seem to think that her silent treatment was provoking him at all, she just focused on how his anger was the violence.
> If I beat you up for looking at me funny and I say it's justified because you provoked me with your glance, that's unreasonable nonsense and claiming subjectivity doesn't suddenly make me sympathetic.
I'm not saying I justify their behavior, it's more about whether I want it to stop in the future.
> The legal world of adults actually has teeth in penalizing violence which doesn't really apply to the world of children.
I'm not sure that's true. Kids, especially teens in the US, have definitely been charged for assault and other crimes of physical violence in schools. Now, I may agree that it's less likely they'll be charged than two adults hitting each other in a bar, but I don't think they're completely exempt from such laws, at least in most parts of the US.
> I can't even honestly characterize your anecdote as bullying, at no point was harm threatened or even implied.
Perhaps for me bullying includes teasing and verbal attacks that cut someone down, and for you you're more focused on the physical assault part of bullying. So yes, then what I described did not involve a threat of physical violence and wouldn't fit in your definition of bullying and may be why we disagree on this.
> When a group of teen classmates corner you and threaten to beat you up if you don't give them your lunch money, do you honestly believe a confident remark about mutual respect can be a solution there?
I believe a confident remark about mutual respect could prevent the situation from escalating to that level of physical threat. Now, do I believe that sometimes the situation has escalated too far? Yes. Do I think that if someone is throwing a punch at my face that I'll stop it with words? No. I'll probably do my best to block the punch and grab his arm and twist it behind his back or something of the like. But then I may try to talk about how I don't want to fight and I'm confused why he keeps picking on me and maybe he's having a rough day and I'd prefer if we talked about what was going on so neither of us gets more hurt.