I find it interesting that the NY Times published this article about bullying at school and then published this one about workplace bullies. I thought that this meant that the Times was doing a series, but unfortunately, they’re not. Which is too bad, because I think bullying is an interesting area to explore. It’s like there’s two worlds in America—the officially recognized one where people are kind and polite, and the one lurking right underneath where bullying happens.
The article about Billy Wolfe from Fayetteville, Arkansas is really the sort of feature story that the Times still excels at. It really captures the essence of bullying. The kid selected is picked for reasons lost to the mists of time, or most likely for arbitrary reasons that were rationalized after the fact. The abuse is back-breaking and non-stop. Most school officials look the other way, because, let’s face it, there’s almost something biological in people that makes them dislike the unpopular even if the unpopular are unpopular for no reason at all.
But what I really liked about the article was that it really clues you in to why bullies bully. Let’s face it; they’re proud of their behavior. Picking on other people to make yourself feel more powerful has this ability to make other people believe that you’re something special, at least for short periods of time. I got bullied in school a lot, but it really petered out in high school, and I think it’s because kids grow up and the social rewards of being brutish start to peter out as kids get more sophisticated. But Wolfe is 15, and so he’s in the thick of it.
A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.
The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.
The aggressor heads to school, to show friends the video of his Billy moment, while Billy heads home, again.
And how the school officials side with the bullies over their victims, a facet of bullying that few people like to discuss:
Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.
People get better at putting on a more politer, more docile face, but the fact that many people basically love brutality and tend to side with bullies is a little discussed problem, I think. It’s not just the way school officials side with bullies. I think this tendency goes a long way to explain why people gang up on rape victims instead of rapists, why victims of domestic violence find very little sympathy with friends and family in many circumstances, and really even why the Republicans keep winning with childish tactics. And if you are with the stereotypical domestic abuser, who can count on a lot more social support than you’re going to get, that makes it even harder to leave.
The relationship of bullying and sexual violence seems obvious to me, but this workplace bullying article had this sentence in it that kind of made me grind my teeth.
This month, researchers at the University of Manitoba reported that the emotional toll of workplace bullying is more severe than that of sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment is a form of bullying. What difference there is in the workplace probably has more to do with adults’ higher levels of sophistication than kids, so that many workplace bullies know how to bully someone without making it sexual. But kids don’t obey such fine distinctions, as Billy’s story shows.
It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up…..
In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”
Bullying or sexual harassment? Well, clearly it’s the latter, but it’s also the former. I think one thing that’s always driven me crazy about the discourse around sexual harassment is that people think the sexual part is more important than the harassment part. And there’s plenty of blame to spread around about this, but the result has been a lot of confusion about whether or not workplace flirting, hooking up with coworkers, or even talking about your dating life with coworkers are sexual harassment. To my mind, only if someone is being harassed. Which is why the hostile environment standard is so important, because bullies often work, as the Billy Wolfe story shows, by harnessing popular support for the idea that this person you’ve singled out is the scapegoat. And so they create this hostile environment, perhaps with pictures or comments designed to make the target uncomfortable while not directly attacking the target much or at all. If we understood that sexual harassment is just a form of bullying that draws attention to the target’s sexuality so as to make him or her seem even more vulnerable, I think we’d know it better when we saw it.
275 Responses to “The bullying epidemic”
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If my kid came home looking like that, somebody would get their ass kicked.
Possibly physically, possibly in court. It might be a bully, a parent, or a school administrator. I don’t care if a rampage would get me in any trouble myself, because that sort of publicity is the sort the bullying culture doesn’t like.
Then again, I was the moved-a-lot, skipped-a-grade, chubby honor student with a reputation for bully disposal. Break one arm of one of two gang-up attackers in 5th grade and no problems there on out.
Sad that such extremes are what it can take sometimes.
I’ve long believed what you do, Amanda; namely, that people tolerate and even approve of aggression and violence because they conflate it with strength. It seems that any hint of weakness (and that term itself needs to be unpacked) on the part of oneself or someone is nigh-unforgiveable.
Unfortunately, they live in Arkansas. One of the unspoken “Southern Heartland Values” is this deep respect for brainless, brutal authority. They don’t have much recourse—the school, as you see, is siding with the bullies.
I might add that if I found either of my sons involved with any of this shit, consequenses - SEVERE consequences would follow.
Schoolyard bullies teach kids that no one will help them, and that the people in power will side iwth the other people in power—the bullies.
I’m so glad that that bullshit about how the poor little bullies were just tormented sensitive souls has gone by the wayside. They’re popular kids, rich kids, what have you. They like what they’re doing. Why wouldn’t they? It gets them power and pats on the back.
The sympathy people have for bullies is really why lots of people have such contempt for people like Al Gore and John Edwards, who help the victims of bullies. That’s what corporations act like, because they can get away with it—like bullies.
You should see this shit in the military. Complain about something and you’re automatically labeled feminine and weak, a pussy. Real men attack and bully; womanish creatures whine about it. “Better to ask permission than forgiveness” is the credo of a certain kind of soldier; it’s also a rapist’s credo.
One of my most obsessed trolls titled one of his Freudian slip books that and put me in it for revenge because I banned him from bullying female rape victims at my blog. They were man haters and frothing male bashers to him.
The only thing a bully hates more than somebody he can label ‘weak’ is somebody who dares to fight back. America doesn’t value people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they distrust and hate them. Some people are supposed to be bully victims so as to serve as punching bags for bullies. What happens when those bullies don’t have an outlet for their macho rage?
Let’s not forget that in Billy’s case, the parents seem to have a naive “faith in the system” that is just prolonging Billy’s suffering.
Some parents don’t seem to understand the nature of bullying or its extend. Part of this, of course, is because their children are too embarrassed to tell them.
It used to be that bullies were thought to be these sensitive tormented souls. Turns out they’re powerful little popular kids with a streak of sadism. They’re happy bullying others. They probably grow up to be shitty bosses and other things.
One of the most awful things about bullying is that it can lead kids to try to find another target to redirect the ugliness that’s being pointed at them. I was bullied emotionally (thankfully, not physically) in 5th and 6th grades, after I’d transferred in to a new school. The other students, most of whom had been together since kindergarten, told me I was ugly, called me “dog,” shunned me, etc. There was one other girl in the class who endured such treatment, since she was considered fat. But instead of trying to be friends with her, I joined in, in the hopes that it would make me more like the rest of the kids; and she did the same to me. One time she taunted me for having divorced parents and suggested that my father didn’t love me; I responded “Well, at least I can see my toes when I look down.” It was a terribly cruel thing for me to say, and afterward some of the others came up to me and congratulated me for being so clever. What an awful, dysfunctional place it was. I still regret that I responded to bullying by trying to bully someone else.
Thank god I got out of there after 2 years and went to a huge, poor, diverse public school where there were enough kids that if you didn’t fit into one group you could just find another. Ironic - i was most miserable at the expensive, private, small Episcopal school; I was happiest and got a better education at the “bad” school.
I’m sure there’s a direct line from the schoolyard bully who beats up the official scapegoat to the college date rapist to the right wing bellicose asshole who obsesses over defending the college date rapist on the internet.
It is also worth mentioning, I think, that several years later, when we were all in high school (that private school only went up to 8th grade) and the subject came up, some of my worst tormentors remembered themselves as people who’d tried to defend me. I don’t think they were lying; they genuinely believed that it was only other kids who were mean to me. Nobody remembers themselves as the bully.
So what do we do about this? We can teach our children to not bully or stand up for the bullied, but what else? How does one stop a bully or convince authority figures to take action of they are reluctant?
“They’re popular kids, rich kids, what have you. They like what they’re doing. Why wouldn’t they? It gets them power and pats on the back.”
…
“The sympathy people have for bullies is really why lots of people have such contempt for people like Al Gore and John Edwards, who help the victims of bullies.”
Which is a large part of why we’ve been stuck with George “Bullying Asshole” Bush for the last 7+ years.
His current bullying - making (often nasty) names for people, making threats, kicking “some little country somewhere’s” ass - is all pretty standard, and adult-style, stuff.
I can only imagine the kind of bullying he did when he was a much younger punkass (no offense meant to Marc…!). But I’m sure there was plenty of it. (I see Bush as Draco Malfoy - but without the intelligence and the generous human qualities…)
This support for the bully says a lot about where America is right now…
The only thing a bully hates more than somebody he can label ‘weak’ is somebody who dares to fight back. America doesn’t value people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they distrust and hate them.
In my current community, there are people who think that their densly populated inner-ring city suburb is a small town and that they are still in high school and playing clique games.
More than once I’ve been told to “leave it to the people in charge” and that I don’t know my place. Why? Because I’m a female, duh. My crime is that I’m an educated adult female - one with far more childhood working-class background than they could claim. When I speak out it is because I have knowledge and experience well beyond the know-nothing and never left town “people in charge”. Very bad form for a women to know more than her betters and call them out for their ignorance.
In short, I don’t do what I’m told like a good Catholic ewe - something I’ve never been, am not and will never be. If you ever wonder how the priest crisis came about in Boston, it started with this ridiculous, non-Yankee culture of “don’t question authority and keep your place”. So did the organized crime and corrupt political machines, too.
Tyro: I imagine his parents simply don’t know what else to do. School administrators won’t contact the police, and if they themselves called the police — assuming Billy could identify his attackers — the police might not treat it as an actual assault.
The thing that sort of infuriated me about the article on Billy was the part that noted his grades were poor “for whatever reason.” I couldn’t figure out why they felt that detail was necessary. Also, I couldn’t figure out how on earth his grades could be good.
Poor kid. It’s unfortunate that the school district seems to want to do nothing, and the parents have as a commentor above put it “a naive faith in the system.” Billy really ought to not go to school at all. What’s the point? He can get his GED and go on to a junior college where, hopefully, he’ll be better treated.
The larger issue is that someone, somewhere, is TEACHING these kids to be bullies. I blame the parents. After all, this is where kids learn their values. The parents of the bullies are almost certainly bullies themselves, or at the very least espouse devil-take-the-hindmost values (maybe they’re libertarians?). Just as abusers learn to abuse by watching what goes on in their families, so do bullies.
Seeing as I was a total nerd when I was in school (and still am, really - I work as a software developer) I ran into more than my fair share of bullies. While I haven’t run into much of it in the workplace, I’m sure part of that has to do with working with other nerdy folks on IT projects. I certainly have seen it in other adult social groups.
I’m pretty much in agreement with Amanda here - adults may be more sophisticated than kids in how they go about being abusive, but the underlying behavior and motivation is the same. The bottom line is that abusive kids grow up to be abusive adults, pretty much guaranteed. They learn that the behavior works to get them status without any significant negative consequences from authority figures.
I’ve long been of the opinion that if the educational system made an effort to identify these kids and somehow route them into some sort of program that would either (A) teach them more constructive ways to relate to others or (B) even just separate them from the kids who are trying to learn stuff without getting beaten up or harassed, we could improve many aspects of our society. The problem with is in the implementation - how best to do it?
Every time I read stories like this, my blood pressure goes straight through the roof. I swear to god, if this kid were mine — hell, if he were a relative — I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from going to that school and putting some of those administrators in the fucking hospital. I think I’d be sending cards out afterwards: “Dear school administrators: What happens when you ignore bullying? I take out your spine.”
(And this is why I completely refused to go to my high school reunion — I was getting too much joy imagining showing up with a hatchet.)
Schools only care about violence when it’s the popular kids who get hurt. When it’s the popular kids doing the hurting, everything’s just fine with them.
We as a society have spent years promoting thuggery as a national virtue. We reward talk show hosts for screaming at their guests, we refuse to punish pundits who issue veiled death threats, we shrug when cops taser people for the crime of being handcuffed.
I dealt with bullying and extreme racist abuse from the ages of 8-14. I was under a lot of pressure, as a girl and a minority, to minimize it, ignore it or find nonviolent solutions… none of which worked in the slightest. The only thing that made the abuse abate even a little bit was defending myself with physical violence.
I wonder a lot about the mindset behind the bullying. It’s very atavistic behavior, pack-dog or maybe even reptilian. The group reinforces its social bonds by attacking a different, weaker member. Showing weakness is like rolling to expose your belly. It might work; but it might encourage more attacks. “There’s a dying animal… let’s poke it with a stick!”
It makes me furious when people say that dealing with bullying in childhood makes you a stronger adult. 1) bullying often causes bullying victims to become bullies themselves and perpetuate the cycle 2) bullying gets less and less social acceptable as people get older. So you’re saying it’s OK for kids to suffer pointlessly.
I don’t understand why people tolerate and even encourage this kind of negative animalistic behavior in children.
This is just one of the myriad reasons we homeschool. The Lord of the Flies culture of public school exists nowhere else in society. School leaders hide behind privacy laws to avoid allowing any outside review of their ridiculously poor decision making. They create student peer groups to handle discipline because they are afraid to. They punch a clock and let our kids get victimized. The other beuracracies of authority - like the cops - follow their lead. If the school authorities identify who they say the problem creator is in a situation, the cops line up right behind that decision. So strong/connected kids (bullies) end up running the joint, because the teachers and the administrators are wimpy little punks who are scared. They’re scared - kids get scarred. Nice set up. Pull your kids out now!
Anybody remember Katie Lyle? She was from my hometown and went to my school. She had to sue. Maybe that’s what it takes.
Why do school administrators, facing certain legal action and almost certain defeat in court, so often side with the bully? They punish girls who’ve been harassed beyond endurance, and they punish boys who’ve been judged to be not sufficiently macho or something. Why?
And if there’s one thing I absolutely despise it’s the passive, worthless, piece-of-shit advice to ‘just ignore it, it’ll go away.’ No, it doesn’t work like that. Ignoring it makes it worse. There’s tremendous pressure to do so, though—that way everybody can pretend their precious darling children aren’t sadistic little bastards.
Do bullying victims really become bullies themselves? It seems to me that that’s part of the old stereotype that bullies were once poor tormented souls themselves. My sympathy for them ends once they inflict shit on other people.
Not only that, how is it that a kid can really be expected to do their best in school when they’re scared to walk in the door? If there was some way to wave a wand and magically end bullying, I’ll bet people would quit worrying about America’s “failing educational system.” All the kids would do better in a climate of respect. Even kids who aren’t targets often live in fear of doing anything that might make them one.The Lord of the Flies culture of public school exists nowhere else in society.
I think my comment about the “stuck” people in my community and Ginmar’s comments about military behavior put the lie to your supposition.
Homeschooling is your personal answer, but it doesn’t change the societal dynamic your kids will encounter when they reach the workplace.
That was my whole childhood, exactly like that.
And then my first three jobs, bullied by psychotic people who chose to make others miserable rather than get the therapy they so desperately needed.
That sh*t makes you SO TIRED. Day in and day out, to not be able to sleep because you so dread the next day and the abuse it will inevitably bring.
I thank the goddess that I have finally found a workplace where this garbage is not tolerated, and an eclectic, open-minded group of friends who do not expect (or respect) conformity.
And the wild thing? In the great scheme of things, I’m not all that weird! Dare I say, I am even quite attractive. But that never stopped them.
Do bullying victims really become bullies themselves? It seems to me that that’s part of the old stereotype that bullies were once poor tormented souls themselves.
When I was growing up, the bullies tended to be kids who were bullied at home - by parents, older siblings, etc. They simply learned the ropes from their bullies, and seemed to not understand it any other way than a stratification scheme of eat dog.
I’m not sure if bullying victims become bullies, but I do agree with the notion that bullying is learned behavior. I’m not especially sympathetic to bullies and I think they definitely need to be held responsible for their behavior, but I think it’s worth contemplating how bullies are created. That might give us some insight in terms of how to stop them.
Seriously, WTF?! Did you not read the whole post Amanda just wrote? Her whole point was that the behaviour displayed by bullies in schools is the same kind of behaviour we see in the workplace, in college, and now as a political strategy …
I think you’re being incredibly naive to think that this only takes place in schools.
SO not a solution. One, this presumes you have the disposal income to allow one parent, or fund a nanny or the like, to teach your children, so awesome display of privilege. Second, it really displays a HIGHLY selfish attitude, in just pulling your kids out and effectively saying “I’ve taken care of mine, no more problem!” and ignoring the way this is a cultural collective issue of our society that is merely manifest in high school in the same way it is manifest in other aspects of society. Schools gain their wonderful strength through collective efforts, not by people merely being out for what is best for them.
And I’m not glamourising schools here, I was a geek, and I transferred between a number of such, so I was an outsider and obviously different. Admittedly, I was also an athlete, so this mitigated things, but I definitely got shit because of it. I would not go back to school if they paid me to.
But this is a cultural problem, so we need to deal with it on a cultural level. Libertarian ideals don’t do shit except make the issue worse by pretending it doesn’t exist or that it’s the actions merely of individuals.
And if there’s one thing I absolutely despise it’s the passive, worthless, piece-of-shit advice to ‘just ignore it, it’ll go away.’
It doesn’t. Kids are absolutely fucking relentless, and in a school where the administration actually punishes bullying, they’re sneaky as well. I say “kids” rather than “bullies” because in my experience - middle schools - the bullied are a small minority and the bullies are practically everybody else.
Yeah, workplace bullying exists. Employees won’t often put up with physical violence in the workplace, but there are other ways to threaten them. Emotional bullying is very big in the workplace.
Y’all ever read the entries in the “Worst Boss in the World” contests? It’s like wall-to-wall bullies there…
I see them as little OJ Simpsons. No big secret as to how or why they become bullies: it works. Not complicated at all. Power works. Sadism works. It gets them the ability to manipulate and terrorize and control people, and that’s all that matters to that sort of person.
Anybody who gets bullied and hten goes on to bully others doesn’t deserve sympathy; they’re worse than a privileged bully who just wants to dominate. The bully who was once a victim knows what it feels like.
Being bullied when I was a frail, ill kid made me hate kids for a good long portion of my life, and made me extremely wary of bullying behavior and patterns. I always used to wonder at the parents of those little shits.
Getting away from the persona created for me by bullies meant I had to move two thousand miles away and re-invent myself. That broke the hold. If you have to stay in that environment, it’s awful. You’re stuck in the same straitjacket your whole life.
My son is a small young eighth grader. He does pretty well socially, but has a few tormenters. Where I live the abuse is more diffuse — all kids are targets to some degree. I think most kids, esp. most girls, expect verbal abuse in middle school and high school. Kids are pretty nasty at that age.
We had a talk at the junior high that included some of the kids as speakers. One Ninth grade girl spoke about the “ho” talk in the hallways and almost seemed like she was apologizing that it made her angry. I resolved then that we as parents have to make sure kids know that this crap they are throwing at one another all day is NOT okay.
As a kid who was (psychologically, not physically) bullied in middle and early high school, I could have told anyone all along that the bullies were the so-called popular kids. “Popular with whom?” was what the 80% not among their ranks used to joke to ourselves. I was an only child, a sort of beta-personality only child with an undisguisable love of learning and an intense need to be liked that is my undoing to this day. I put up with the treatment until the day one of my so-called ‘friends’ from a quasi-popular clique who barely tolerated me basically ordered me to stop my new punk friend from Spanish class from sitting near ‘our’ table to talk to me (”he just doesn’t fit in with us” she explained in earnest tones).
The next day, I came into school in black clothes, white makeup and black eyeliner, and totally ignored everyone to whom I’d formerly tried to suck up or felt I had to suck up. The few times people tried to directly torment me after that, I acted like they didn’t exist, uttered a snappy comeback, or gave them the finger if I was certain no school personnel were looking. When and where I went to high school - central Virginia in the late 1980’s - girls just didn’t get beat up, at least not by the “popular” girls, who were aware they would have looked dreadfully unfeminine and out of type if they wailed on someone in their pom pom outfits or clothes from The Limited. Nowadays, I worry that any girl who showed any defiance such as I did, who wasn’t prepared to physically kick some ass, would get jumped.
Like Billy’s parents, my parents were initially in denial. I always got on really well with adults, and they just didn’t understand why a bright and nice kid would be rejected, when “bright” and “nice” were two traits that were sure to earmark you for torment unless you were really fucking haaawwwwt (read: blond perm, nearly inaudible speaking voice and frosted pink lipstick).
My husband’s brother got it way worse than i did, being a boy and incapable of sarcasm. He was never cured of his desire to be liked, and that was his undoing.
Okeeee….rereading this makes me want to take my 6-month-old son the hell out of NYC and raise him in a cabin in the woods. Nice knowing y’all.
Sarah, you might find it selfish, but my take on it is that the culture is irredeemable, and there are some of us who have the time and patience to try to change the culture and some of us who say, “screw you all.”
I’ve consciously avoided professions where bullying is rewarded. Is that selfish? Sure, maybe. But it’s worked out best for me. Do I feel sorry for the junior associate at a corporate lawfirm or investment bank who has to deal with bullying? Yes, I do. However, I’m not going to join that profession in the hopes of changing it. I feel the same way about a lot of school systems. The only way to defeat bullying in schools is divide-and-conquer: split schools up into as small a granualarity as possible so that bullies can be targetted and isolated. Since that’s not going to happen any time soon, I can’t blame anyone who opts for a private school or home-schooling.
Again, I think we really need to look at what makes these kids become bullies. They sure don’t learn it in a vacuum. Can “good” parents have “bad” kids? I doubt it. I think kids learn from their parents how to treat others. Even if the parents don’t bully the kids, they might see mom or dad acting cruel to others and thus learn that it’s OK to be a bully.
I share the rage expressed by so many in this thread. There is no limit to my contempt for adults that excuse this kind of thing. And sadly, they’re the fucking majority: I bet you anything most people who read that Billy article said to themselves that Billy just needs to “toughen up” and stop being “oversensitive.”
I might add that if I found either of my sons involved with any of this shit, consequenses - SEVERE consequences would follow.
This is something else I wonder about: what kind of parents do these bullies have?
Oh, I’m sure they learn it from their parents. Their parents probably worship power and its advantages and teach their kids that they’re better than everybody else. Look at Alex Kelly; domineering dad, submissive mom, and the kid turned out to be a rapist. (Funny, it’s always domineering moms that arouse the ire of the people who study crooks. Mom wears the pants in the family: bad. Dad does: good. Dad is also an abusive fuck? Even better!)
Okeeee….rereading this makes me want to take my 6-month-old son the hell out of NYC and raise him in a cabin in the woods. Nice knowing y’all.
Seriously, you are probably better off in NYC.
While there is a healthy whallop of townie stupid going around the Boston area, we aren’t in geographically and economically isolated situations. Even balkanized urban areas have to deal with far more diversity, and that results in higher awareness.
My son’s middle school has been set up to disrupt the tendency toward self-segregation that leads to cliques and bullies emerging. They mix things up, create limits and expectations of behavior, and enforce them. This is partly due to the high level of diversity in the school system, particularly in the city-wide schools, that can build to racial and ethnic tensions if kids don’t have to work together on a rotating basis. They separate the grades, too, which helps with the heirarchical issues between sixth and eighth grades.
There are still some incidents on the bus, but some kids have started taping them with their phones and also report nonsense because they know people will listen. Parents in urban areas are less hog-tied by local ties (particularly us “outsiders” who didn’t go to school here and don’t depend on local ties for our jobs) and thus may be less afraid to sue school systems that don’t effectively deal with these problems.
Sorry, not going to work. What smaller groupings produce is clique-ish control of identity and appropriate behaviours, as all smaller groups do develop a tighter reign on individualism and diversity; it’s simply part of group dynamics.
What this means is that smaller groups will be MORE likely to allow bullying behaviour, as it will be merely an adjunct to such identity policing.
You cannot take yourself out of culture, we are all invested in it, whether we are a hermit in a log-cabin in the woods, or living in an apartment in a downtown urban space. I view merely taking care of yourself as, yes, selfish, and I do wish more people would pony-up and take responsibility for our culture.
LOL. Me, too. How sad is it that I’m 45 and would still, if given half a chance, take a shovel and beat the living shit out of some of the jerks I went to high school with? Between a bully of a father and a brutally clique-ish junior high/high school, my teen years were a living nightmare. Did the bullying make my stronger? I’m sure it did, but it also did serious emotional damage. I still struggle with chronic depression.
And that would explain my intense desire to grab a shovel whenever I see his face on my television. Here I was thinking that I just wanted to get some gardening done…
there are some of us who have the time and patience to try to change the culture and some of us who say, “screw you all.”
The problem is that you do your own child no favors with your central digital salute to society, if that is the only reason you would homeschool (there are a lot of reasons to homeschool that depend on your situation, but i don’t think this is a terribly constructive one in and of itself). You may opt your kid out for a time, but what happens when that same sheltered kid has to make a living, go to college, etc.?
What I would like to see: a Student’s Bill of Rights passed by Congress that would guarentee every student a right to attend school and learn in a secure environment, with rights of redress for those who just think kids will be kids and nothing can be done about it.
I spent most of my school life being bullied. It started in kindergarten, and I wound up suffering a near-breakdown at university level because I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the victimisation to start all over again. I can still remember the intense anger I felt about the whole business, because I *knew* there hadn’t been some massive change in me over the twelve weeks between the end of high school and the beginning of university - I hadn’t suddenly become more popular, or changed personality. The only thing which had altered was the expectations of the people around me. The sort of crude bullying which had made my schooldays a misery wasn’t tolerated at university level.
Being fair to the teachers and other students at my schools, I have to admit the bullying never had a physical component. It was emotional bullying, which I found completely soul-destroying by the age of fourteen because of factors internal to myself (chronic depression manifesting in the middle of the rest of the adolescent hormonal insanity). It wasn’t the sort of thing which could be easily spotted, or easily stopped by a teacher. It’s the sort of silent bullying which is particularly the province of teenaged girls - the destruction of the reputation through words.
My parents weren’t much help. I don’t think my mother had ever been bullied in school (she was a tomboy who played cricket and similar, and the impression I get is she would have been one of the popular kids in her school) and while my father might have been bullied, I don’t know whether he got angry about it. The only advice I got was “ignore it and they’ll get bored”, which is probably the worst advice known to mankind. If you ignore bullies, they don’t get bored, they get challenged, and they work harder to get a reaction. They go further, they make nastier comments, and they push harder at the painful spots they know of already, while looking twice as hard for new ones.
About the only thing I ever found which would make a bully shut up and stop bugging me was blowing up at them in public. I did this with one particular boy who’d always sneered at me and treated me as though I were something scraped off the bottom of a rock. On this occasion, we’d been put into groups, by the teacher, by surname. His was Smith, I’m Thornton, so we wound up in the same group. The comment of his which set things off “why do I have to go into the bad group?”. When one of the other guys took issue with this, asking why our particular group was a “bad” group, young Master Smith replied “it’s got Meg in it”. At which point, I lost it rather spectacularly, and made a number of comments, the gist of which boiled down to not only was he being rude, but he wasn’t doing it well, and my younger brother could do a better job of insulting me and save me the train fare. This was followed by me stomping out of the classroom. I later heard from a classmate my telling off Master Smith had been regarded as a Good Thing overall. It certainly knocked down the amount of torment I received from that particular group of classmates.
You don’t have to live in Arkansas for the school administrators to side with the bullies. Any school, anywhere will display the same characteristics — it’s all based on the socioeconomic status of the victim. As to where the bullies learn it? At home. Bullies tend to breed bullies.
http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/queerlaw-edit/msg03126.html
Katy Lyle’s case. This case made precedent, so you’d think school administrators would be more aware of it.
What does help with school bullying - and again, this is just based on personal observation - is to have all the adults on board with anti-bullying actions. That is, there has to be consequences, they have to be known to all, and they have to be seen to work. The consequences can range from juvie to enrollment in compulsory anger management classes (kids hate those).
Then you need a high adult-to-child ratio so the kids are under observation all the time, and if something happens, there’s an adult handy to intervene. No intervention policies work if there are too few adults to supervise the kids, and adults who don’t care are worse than no adults at all.
Sorry, not going to work. What smaller groupings produce is clique-ish control of identity and appropriate behaviours, as all smaller groups do develop a tighter reign on individualism and diversity; it’s simply part of group dynamics.
Actually, “granularity” does work if the school is set up to remix kids each class period, each year, etc. and you know you are going to have to work with just about everyone at some point. That’s what my son’s classes do - he is not with all his friends all of the time all day, and no one else is either. Group work is valued, but your group changes constantly - class to class, project to project, etc. Don’t like someone in your group this time? Tough. Make it work.
Oops: Better to ask forgiveness than permission, should be the phrase.
I spent most of my school life being bullied. It started in kindergarten, and I wound up suffering a near-breakdown at university level because I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for the victimisation to start all over again. I can still remember the intense anger I felt about the whole business, because I *knew* there hadn’t been some massive change in me over the twelve weeks between the end of high school and the beginning of university - I hadn’t suddenly become more popular, or changed personality. The only thing which had altered was the expectations of the people around me. The sort of crude bullying which had made my schooldays a misery wasn’t tolerated at university level.
Being fair to the teachers and other students at my schools, I have to admit the bullying never had a physical component. It was emotional bullying, which I found completely soul-destroying by the age of fourteen because of factors internal to myself (chronic depression manifesting in the middle of the rest of the adolescent hormonal insanity). It wasn’t the sort of thing which could be easily spotted, or easily stopped by a teacher. It’s the sort of silent bullying which is particularly the province of teenaged girls - the destruction of the reputation through words.
My parents weren’t much help. I don’t think my mother had ever been bullied in school (she was a tomboy who played cricket and similar, and the impression I get is she would have been one of the popular kids in her school) and while my father might have been bullied, I don’t know whether he got angry about it. The only advice I got was “ignore it and they’ll get bored”, which is probably the worst advice known to mankind. If you ignore bullies, they don’t get bored, they get challenged, and they work harder to get a reaction. They go further, they make nastier comments, and they push harder at the painful spots they know of already, while looking twice as hard for new ones.
About the only thing I ever found which would make a bully shut up and stop bugging me was blowing up at them in public. I did this with one particular boy who’d always sneered at me and treated me as though I were something scraped off the bottom of a rock. On this occasion, we’d been put into groups, by the teacher, by surname. His was Smith, I’m Thornton, so we wound up in the same group. The comment of his which set things off “why do I have to go into the bad group?”. When one of the other guys took issue with this, asking why our particular group was a “bad” group, young Master Smith replied “it’s got Meg in it”. At which point, I lost it rather spectacularly, and made a number of comments, the gist of which boiled down to not only was he being rude, but he wasn’t doing it well, and my younger brother could do a better job of insulting me and save me the train fare. This was followed by me stomping out of the classroom. I later heard from a classmate my telling off Master Smith had been regarded as a Good Thing overall. It certainly knocked down the amount of torment I received from that particular group of classmates.
This contiues on and on because the parents of bullies refuse to take responsibility or to make their children take responsibility for their heinous actions.
A bunch of my friends are teachers and they complain that they’ve given up telling parents the truth about their children at parent/teacher conferences; the parents insist their kids are perfect and that’s that.
Oh yes, I agree, but that is in spite of the granularity, not because of it, ie it’s mitigating the effects of small-group behaviour. Such a technique would also work at the larger scale I would think, though it would take some wrangling
Another horrible aspect of bullying is that it creates a “shit rolls down hill” effect, for lack of better words.
When I was in elementary school and junior high, I was bullied by those who were higher up on the popularity scale. But I wasn’t just a victim, I was also a victimizer. I would end up bullying kids who I deemed to be below me.
When I was in junior high, there was this one annoying, slow-witted kid that I constantly harrassed. Thinking about it today, I feel horrified at the way I treated him. I failed to feel empathy for others who went through the same thing I went through. However, it is a lesson I intend to instill in my own children.
I was a fat kid, and very smart–which made me a double target. Life was hell for a while–my parents were obviously working with the school officials, who came up with a solution that worked.
They skipped me a grade.
It worked: they pulled me out of the group that contained the bullies, put me in another where I was a curiosity–and work was more challenging, though not by much.
This was back in the 60’s, and skipping is now frowned upon–but it worked for me.
Sarah, the other advantage to the smaller environments is that it makes it easier for the parents to leave in favor of a better environment, if the first one becomes highly dysfunctional.
Cultures don’t change. Cultures are only defeated. Since there’s little hope of “winning” a fight with an entrenched culture that favors bullying, the best thing to do is walk away from it. If bullying cultures are that toxic, they will fail. My cynical opinion is that they’re self-sustaining and the best you can do is find a place where the bullying culture isn’t valued and encouraged rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
I know, since, you know, women still can’t vote, or own property, and blacks are legally 3/5ths of whites, and gays and lesbians aren’t able to live lives as gay in the slightest.
/snark
I’d be the first person to say our culture still has a LONG way to go, but good-grief, this just reeks of post-hoc justification. The way we change our society is by people getting involved and taking responsibility, not by running away from issues.
Just want to say I’m glad to see this issue brought up here.
I was viciously bullied for two years in the 4th and 5th grades and no one ever believed me even when I was being choked in school classrooms. Something triggered two girls to threaten me with homophobic comments simply because I was different looking or more intelligent than them (being a “genius” does suck sometimes). Either way, no one believed me and it took me years to come to terms with my sexuality when I came out as bisexual after all those years of being teased because “lesbian” was the most disgusting, horrible word 4th graders could come up with. /sarcasm
Some bullied kids learn to survive by hiding and becoming invisible. I did that for too many years until as an adult a few years of therapy finally sorted me out.
As a teacher, this is one of my pet causes to stop bullying and implement effective programs at all educational levels.
As for the (main) bullies…Katherine Beckley and Brigid McGrath…I still hope you’re rotting in hell somewhere.
So, do no teachers read this blog? Let’s hear from them. (I guess they might be at work.)
in my experience - middle schools - the bullied are a small minority and the bullies are practically everybody else.
Yeah, this was my experience in middle school too. Unfortunately.
After reading the article, I’m a little disappointed to see focus on the physical aspects of bullying when it is much more than that. They also fail to touch upon the differences between girls who bully, who most often use ostracizing tactics, and boys who bully, more often with physical threats. The article raises awareness, but not of the myriad forms bullying takes…which Amanda touches upon in her response.
NYT: so, what’s w/the lack of NAMES in that story? Billy’s parents are suing, so aren’t the respondents (?) names part of the public record?
What’s the principles’ names? The names of the administrators? The school superintendent?
Weak journalism.
God this topic just brings back horrible grade school memories. I cried myself to sleep for about a year, with my dad sitting beside my bed rubbing my back. I was most afraid of a boy in my class, who lived up the street and was on my bus route. He tormented me. And being picked on by alleged “friends” (girls) just hurt and confused me so much. I never bullied anyone because I had compassion for other people and my parents would have nipped it in the bud anyway.
Truly, I blame parents who don’t instill good values in their kids.
One of the worst bullies in my small-town junior high was the mayor’s son. He often cut in line and threatened anyone who challenged him, and attracted a ring of thugs who liked to be his enforcers.
In the middle of high school, this same guy has a car accident and winds up paraplegic. We had a big school assembly about it, little poems in the yearbook about poor Mayor’s Kid, weepy testimonials from school administrators about his courage in the face of adversity.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I laughed out loud when I found out the bastard was crippled and would be miserable for the rest of his life. I couldn’t help smiling when someone would feign sadness over the little shit’s predicament, and I suspect that most people in the school had felt the sharp end of his stick at least once, so it’s likely that everyone was faking.
What sucks is that nothing has changed. Generation after generation gets bullied and in adulthood they find themselves in a position to do nothing about it. Or they choose not to.
My observation even as a student was that many teachers were former dorks who were now being Eddie Haskelled by the cool kids, and they loved it. Same with the McCain barbecue contingent. The world is full of outgroupers trying to get ingroup, and they care not a shit if some kid just like them gets the fuck beat out of him on their watch.
Why yes, I’m a misanthrope. Why do you ask?
“It’s not just the way school officials side with bullies. I think this tendency goes a long way to explain why people gang up on rape victims instead of rapists, why victims of domestic violence find very little sympathy with friends and family in many circumstances, and really even why the Republicans keep winning with childish tactics.”
It’s true. People are sheep and will bleat submissively for those in authority, even if that authority is gained by sheer brutality.
I think another big part of why rape victims are often blamed is what social psychologists call “belief in a just world.” The nature of the crime is such that it is hard to prove; consensual sex and date rape can be difficult to distinguish with physical evidence. Rather than acknowledging that they have acquitted based on insufficient evidence, juries have to convince themselves that the woman is lying or she deserved it. They do not want to believe that an innocent woman was raped but that they are bound by the standards of evidence to acquit her attacker. In a universal sense it seems unjust.
God, I still have the scars from bullying. Literally and figuratively. I had fantasies of walking into gym class with a suicide bomber’s vest on. Ho shit is it that I can say that HIGH SCHOOL was actually a good time for me, compared to the shit that Jr. High put me through? Thank god I had a healthy family life at home.
It takes a lot to fight that programming where the peer pressure not to tell is tremendous, and the administrative efforts are virtually non-existant.
The only way my friends and I managed to stop the bullying, and even then only temporarily, was to get violent. No-holds bared violent. Dislocated ribs, cracked skulls, kicks to the balls kind of unexpected violent. Don’t fuck with us, we will HURT YOU. It works, but only for you, and only temporarily. The bully doesn’t change, they merely go to another target. And I live with that dark little core of violence that I have to clamp down on when I get seriously angry. Unfortunately, wen it comes to “physical humor” that doesn’t take much. My friends know very quickly that I don’t accept that sort of behavior.
That should never be a viable lesson to teach a child in a civil society, and yet it was the solution. And unless we manage to fix the culture so that bullies are promptly and proactively dealt with by the school authorities, that would continue to be my advice.
“Like Billy’s parents, my parents were initially in denial. I always got on really well with adults, and they just didn’t understand why a bright and nice kid would be rejected, when “bright” and “nice” were two traits that were sure to earmark you for torment unless you were really fucking haaawwwwt (read: blond perm, nearly inaudible speaking voice and frosted pink lipstick.”
I hear you Wishy Washy. My parents meant well and so took me to a child psychologist to see what was wrong with me…by the suggestion of the school (who thought I was the problem and not my bullies.) Sadly, my parents weren’t even aware of how badly I was being bullied until I asked them a year ago how they felt about it. They both said they had no idea. They just knew the school wasn’t going to be good for my education.
Some time ago I was forced to check out some “traditional values” websites for work. One of the things that I unexpectedly discovered is how much they support bullying. They try to cover themselves slightly by saying “of course bullying is wrong..” but then they’d explain that some anti-bullying program was wrong or more insanely “anti-Christian” because it suggest that people should tolerate differences.
It was clear that they were relying on youth-peer violence to uphold their homophobia, so in their view, bullying was wrong but for the correct cause it’s OK. Or just that bullies are wrong, but gays and lesbians are worse.
Presumably race, politics, or religion/non-religion could also be an “acceptable” use of peer violence, but even they weren’t demented enough to openly suggest that.
Or, worse, blame and punish the victim. I’ve seen some parents and others go nuts at the “zero tolerance” policies because they treat a victim defending him/herself exactly the same as they treat the thug.The Matthew Show, my male bully shot himself in the head after high school. Fucker.
Sounds like my experiences in school, both in TX and New England. First it was non-sexual, then graduated to sexual-harrassment in HS. The dynamics of the school is ALWAYS blame the victim, side with the bullies. I’d be frankly shocked if I heard of it going the other way - I used to have Columbine-style fantasies decades before Columbine. Several kids the next town over who were bullied killed themselves, and one left, during the same time frame, but their school claimed no systemic problems.
And surprise, surprise, conservative pundits ALWAYS turn up complaining about the few schools that have or start anti-bullying intiatives…making our boys unmanly, donchaknow.
It seems to be something in our primate nature, to turn the evolutionary thing back - kiss up, kick down is the Middle Monkey way.
I think it’s wrong to blame Billy’s parents. It sounds like they are doing everything they can to help their son. I blame the parents of the bullies and most of all the school. Maybe we don’t have the whole story, but I am reading a high level of tolerance for bullies. There is no excuse for that.
School does not have to be that way. My own child attends an excellent public elementary school and one of the many things I value is the diversity that she experiences at school. I am a middle class white woman and the truth is that I do not know very many African American people. Most of my friends are white women like me. Because my child attends a public school with an English as a second language program, she interacts with and makes friends with children from around the world including children of visiting University professors from Korea, children of Mexican laborers, as well as African American children from our own community.. If we home schooled, she would mostly meet people just like herself.
Sniper: I say “kids” rather than “bullies” because in my experience - middle schools - the bullied are a small minority and the bullies are practically everybody else.
Everybody else? They are and they aren’t.
When we had that rash of school shootings in 1997-98, I gave the subject a lot of thought, as part of the greater “what leads a kid to do this?” question. I get one-on-one revenge, but it took me a while to grasp how a mass murder attempt becomes acceptable to someone.
I see school society breaking down into five categories. The victim, the victim’s friends, the bullies, the enablers, and everyone else. The first three categories are self-explanatory. The enablers are all the kids that laugh, point, and otherwise encourage and reward the bullies. Everyone else stands by and does nothing. They may not approve, they may even find witnessing those events painful. But they don’t stand up and do anything about it.
I place a ton of blame on the enablers. It’s their approval that perpetuates bullying. I’ll place a little blame on everyone else, but it’s hard to take that very far. I get it, not everyone has it in their personality to stand up and object, especially when it brands you as a new target. I get not providing an account to administrators, when Ms. Kate’s “people in charge” often side with the bullies. But at the very least, you have to be able to go home and say to your parents, “This crap is going on, and they let it happen!”
All that’s required for evil to win, and all that…
I had my own bully in 7th grade. She threatened to beat me up almost daily. I was lucky—I don’t think she ever actually hit me. I got a lot of stomachaches that year, usually in 6th period so I could go home just before school let out. It was the only time in my life where I ever contemplated suicide, and I wasn’t even being bullied physically.
At the workplace, we had a bully. She managed to corner bits of power and control for herself, but eventually it was discovered that she was not actually doing her job. She got canned, but sadly, the entire rest of the department had to pick up the slack and play catchup for all of her publications, which were months behind schedule.
Good connection, Amanda, on the sameness of bullying and sexual harassment. I’m gonna remember that one.
For anyone who wants to read more on Bully-Victim research and prevention just look up anything written by Dan Olweus: http://www.clemson.edu/olweus/history.htm
He’s one of the lead researchers on the subject.
One of the problems with fighting back (physically) is that bullies tend to have a finely tuned understanding of what they can get away with, while the victim does not. That means the victim can be painted as the aggressor when the violent incident was entirely due to the bully, and all the victim did was fight back.
My various schools had the following attitude about bullying:
-if it happens to you, shut up
-if you complain to a teacher then you’re in trouble
-you deserve it anyway for being so different/poor/nonwhite/gay/otherwise nonstandard
-the administrators don’t want to hear your worthless whining over the abuse you deserve for the above reasons.
Oh, and:
-bullying is good for kids. It toughens them up and gets them ready for the real world!
I got kicked around for being bookish and smart whilst female, but never got the real crap because there were so many juicier targets around. In my middle school, a gay boy was driven to suicide in the 8th grade. He took an overdose of pills. The day after it was in the news, his tormenters were giddy with joy over it. It was soooo cool, they said. They were such godly badasses- they KILLED someone! wowee wowee. After that, I hammered at my (rather indifferent) parents until they granted a transfer to a new school. That atmosphere was just too toxic.
I agree completely that our culture loves bullies and despises their victims. I’m sure it’s some ape troop thing, but you’d think we could overcome it- if we wanted to. Naturally we don’t want to. Bleh.
Mrs Nice Guy here. When my kids were bullied (and the school didn’t care, beyond calling *me* into the office regularly to complain about *my* kid) I went looking for self-defense classes. There were none for kids, but there was a self-defense-for-women class, so I went to it, and took my kids with me. Surprise! every woman there had one or more kids standing behind her. The adults would copy what the teacher showed, and the kids would copy the adults.
Later, I went into the office at my son’s school and I detailed the problems he’d been having, ending with “he spent all of Xmas break on crutches, because a classmate deliberately broke his foot by jumping on it.” Then I said, “I got the kid some attack training, and the next time I’m in here, it will be because someone else got hurt. Just warning you.” Apparently, that got his attention, because there were no more incidents.
I recommend self-defense classes, if they are available, and if not, then martial arts classes of whatever kind.
I was under a lot of pressure, as a girl and a minority, to minimize it, ignore it or find nonviolent solutions… none of which worked in the slightest.
Yeah, it was always kind of funny how it was the kids getting bullied got told to deal with shit nonviolently. Like hey, maybe fuckin’ tell that shit to you know… the bullies?
And if there’s one thing I absolutely despise it’s the passive, worthless, piece-of-shit advice to ‘just ignore it, it’ll go away.’
I agree: this hands down the worst advice to give a child who’s a victim of a bully, because it blames the victims for circumstances beyond their control. (Hmm…sound familiar?)
When I was growing up, I was bullied by nearly everyone, but it was mostly emotional/psychological bullying, at least. I was basically told three things:
1) “if you didn’t cry, they’d leave you alone” (i.e., it’s all your fault)
2) “they are just teasing” and/or “they are just jealous because you’re smart”(i.e., you are such a whiny baby for getting your feelings hurt: grow up and get over it and/or you should be flattered)
3) “you’re the youngest of a large family: it’s just the pecking order” (i.e., bullying is completely normal behavior, and it just sucks to be you)
That third one is the most revealing, I think: what that told me was that bullies are acting according to the natural order of things. In other words, it is right and proper for “the strong” to bully “the weak”. (Even more telling, I was raised in a very Catholic family and went to Catholic schools: in my religion classes, we were taught to be good to the poor, to stand up for the weak, etc.; outside of my religion classes, though, not so much. Although this may have been what spared me from actual physical bullying most of the time.)
With sentiments like this, we as a society actively encourage bullying because that’s how things are supposed to work. Bullies aren’t just allowed to bully: they are entitled and expected to.
As far as victims turning around and bullying other kids, some of that may be because it’s difficult to relate to other people if you grow up thinking that bully behavior is “normal” or even worse “flattery”.
It starts when kids are very young and it’s insidious. I’m teaching my son to verbally stand up for himself already at age 4. Now I have to figure out how to teach him to stand up for other kids without being a tattle-tale.
I think about that myself… I’m not sure there’s a clear black-and-white answer to it. On the one hand, I don’t think there’s always necessarily an absolute link between bullies and coming from situations of being bullied… at the same time, some of the most violent psychopathic bullies I knew growing up came from really, really shitty homes, where abuse was almost certainly a facet of their homelife.
Pulled out a paper from later in the semester in one of my Psych classes - “Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of Self Esteem.” The premise is that “violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened egotism-that is, highly favorable views of self that are disputed by some person or circumstance.”
I think this is why bullying shows up so viciously in late elementary school/middle school. It’s the stage where kids are becoming aware that the greater world will not love them as much as their parents do. One of the best arguments against homeschooling that I’ve heard is that the function of schools is not only to educate the child, but for the parent to learn that their precious child is only one among many. That is what the parents of bullies who condone their actions are refusing to accept.
In a different class, we talked about bullying, and how the most effective intervention is not with the bullies or the victims, but the bystanders. Part of bullying is the audience. Cutting off that oxygen seems to be effective.
But humans are pack animals and highly hierarchical, so this will probably never fully go away. The worst bullying I’ve ever seen - a hospital where I temped for two weeks. The frozen glee with which shit was flung downhill amazed me. I left after some items on my desk “disappeared,” which amazingly enough happened right after one of the doctors asked if I would be willing to stay on full-time if the woman I was filling in didn’t come back from maternity leave. And she said this in front of the woman’s friends. Nice place.
Addendum, before I have to run off here:
I agree that violence is the ONLY way to stop a bully. I believe that most are deep-set cowards. They want a target without teeth. But as soon as they get their asses handed to them, they back off REAL QUICK.
However, others have mentioned that a bully is a seasoned manipulator who knows exactly how much brutality s/he can get away with. They’re also excellent at painting the victim as the evil evil aggressor.
I’d like to add to that:
In my experience, there is so limited tolerance from bully-lovers for boy victims who fight back. There is however NO tolerance for girl victims who do so. A girl who uses this tactic- the only one that works at all- is suddenly an evil insane monster.
After all, any woman who fights back physically is an unnatural evil jezebel psychopath demon, to our culture.
So yeah, needless to say, I’m 100% on board with the intersection of bullying and sexual harassment/rape. If the victim fights back, SHE’S the criminal. The rapist was just having a little fun!
NY Times — This month, researchers at the University of Manitoba reported that the emotional toll of workplace bullying is more severe than that of sexual harassment.
Amanda — Sexual harassment is a form of bullying.
Of course it is. But women are more likely to be the target of sexual harassment, while men are more likely to be the target of “plain” bullying. Therefore, since the emotional well-being of women is FAR less important than the emotional well-being of men, it’s OBVIOUS that sexual harassment doesn’t have as much effect as workplace bullying. Q.E.D. [/sarcasm]
Ginmar:
Yes, the same way that victims of abuse often go on to become abusers themselves. I think one of the key elements is experiencing bullying or abuse but still having an underlying feeling of entitlement arising from some form of privilege.
A pretty good example is the “nice guy” phenomenon. These are people whose behavior is influenced by their experience of emotional abuse in the past (inflicted for failing to live up to the bullshit patriarchy standard for masculinity and “strength”) but who nonetheless believe that they’re entitled to sexual attention from women — so as their ability to leverage their privilege as men increases, they apply it to duplicating the same abusive behaviors towards women who won’t give them what they “deserve.”
The middle ranks of bullying supporters, too, are often made up either of previous victims or potential victims who are trying to stave off bullying by sucking up to the person with the most power — much like some of the women who offer up the “rape victims deserve it” line in order to curry favor with the patriarchy.
This absolutely doesn’t excusing bullying in any way; I think it really just points to how horrible the problem really is. Like the way that patriarchy turns different victims of oppression against each other, the cycle of bullying and violence pushes people who are victims into becoming victimizers, which just ensures that more people suffer in total.
thematthewshow: I wasn’t bullied per se, but when I learned one of the lowlifes who gave me shit in jr. high died by electrocution from falling on a lamp while sniffing glue, I laughed out loud.
high-five!
/hangs head
I did that too. I was the #3 dork in school, so making fun of #’s 1 and 2 or just not helping them was a way to tell myself that I wasn’t the worst loser around.
All the people I knew (one girl, a bunch of guys) who were bullies were real macho, beer and football type kids who were the children of fathers that beat them. I know that’s not always the case, but that was my experience.
It is amazing to me how young the bullying starts. 7 and 8 year olds being emtionally abusive. It is also an example of the value of being a bully in our culture that parents (not just teachers) turn a blind eye. Of course the parents are the role models for the little bullies.
Unless she was somehow intimidating a/some coworkers, she hardly qualifies.
Don’t broaden the definition to the point of uselessness .
Something my husband, a substitute teacher, has noticed is that some students will defend their bully. Especially girls being harassed by boys. He has tried to step in when this happens and has often been told by the girl, “it’s fine, I don’t want your help.” I think there is a fear of beeing tormented more if the girl “allows” a teacher to help her.
I think parents, and teachers need to praise kids who treat fellow students (and people at large) with respect. If kids start seeing being kind to people will be met with praise and admiration, and bullying is scorned maybe we can start to see a reversal of this behavior. An example is a boy who was harassing an autistic boy by making noise he knew bothered the autistic kid. My husband handled it by telling the bully “You have the power to be this kid’s hero today by being kind to him”, and it worked. It might have only been for that day, and it will not work with every bully, but if we can start teaching children this lesson from their earliest days maybe a lot of bullying won’t take place later in school. I know some schools try to incorporate “No Bullying” lessons, but I don’t know what they entail.
i>Seeing as I was a total nerd when I was in school (and still am, really - I work as a software developer) I ran into more than my fair share of bullies. While I haven’t run into much of it in the workplace, I’m sure part of that has to do with working with other nerdy folks on IT projects.
I follow you — I am a former bookworm bully victim and now I’m in academe. But what’s really sad is that I figured academe was the one place it’d be safe to be bright. Not so. I was realy distressed by thid article because it described my workplace so perfectly, and here I am, two decades later, still hiding from bullies.
At least these guys are not allowed to grab at my crotch or repeatedly slam my head into the surface of my desk. In a way I almost wish they would, because at that point, under the law, I’d be within my rights to hurt them a very great deal, and as an adult I’m physicially capable of doing so. But alas . . . all they do is glare, sneer, gossip, and threaten.
What I was always told was ‘they only tease you because they like you.’ Even if that were true (and it isn’t), why is their sick inability to express their feelings my problem?
I was about second to bottom on the social ladder at my junior high and I was an asshole to people on the bottom rung, for the same reason.
I observed, as a victim of bullying, that a lot of people won’t participate in the bullying, but they’ll avoid the victim as much as they can — because they don’t want to be “tarred with the same brush.” They may remember this as “being the good guy”.
I still have issues related to the years of bullying and social isolation. People from my junior high school, and people who remind me of my more powerful junior high classmates, bring out the absolute worst in me — the misogyny, the fatphobia, the Schadenfreude. I lord over them whatever I feel that I have. I’m a huge clotheshorse/makeup junkie, more than is healthy, and I know it’s because I spent so many years being told I was ugly and I’m not over it.
Teachers can BE some of the worst bullies, as well, is my experience. I went to an extremely academically competitive junior high/high school (David Frum went there, if that means anything to anyone) and I had teachers who absolutely tormented me. It still enrages me that people who teach 12-year-olds can do things to them that adults would NEVER be expected to tolerate.
I’m really saddened to see so many people offering violence as the only solution to this problem. In a space where people are usually full of wonderful ideas and often convey sympathy for other commenters the joy mentioned at the misfortune of past bullies, whether sarcastic or not, is disturbing.
Dude, we’re only human. We all have dark sides. Being angry when people hurt you badly and wanting to hurt them back (or see them hurt) is normal. I don’t get the sense that anyone here is particularly proud of feeling that way, but it’s not “disturbing.”
Some bullies never quit. My spouse had a boss who was a bully. Until the boss left for illness, it was hell on skates for my SO.
The local school district has a general low tolerance for bullies and when I teach, I have no pity at all for them. Bullying can cost a student academic and sports privileges. Strictly on my sayso. They might do it elsewhere, but never in front of me…or anywhere I might see them.
Part of the success is that I don’t care who your parents are or if your absence form the team costs the ability to attend states’.
He has tried to step in when this happens and has often been told by the girl, “it’s fine, I don’t want your help.” I think there is a fear of beeing tormented more if the girl “allows” a teacher to help her.
At our school teachers are taught to actually say something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter if you’re not bothered by it, this kind of behavior is completely unaccaptable in a school.” Then the bully is marched off to the office.
But that doens’t mean our policies work all the time - far from it. Like I said earlier, sometimes the kids just get more subtle and sneaky - cases of cyberbullying offer good examples here. Sometimes the parents condone or even encourage bullying! They’re proud of their big strong kid (or pretty, popular kid) for running the show. Or they don’t understand why a teacher is calling about this “petty crap” instead of just beating the kid with a big stick like they do at home.
I was bullied, but it’s difficult for me to write off the bullies as subhuman or irredeemable. They were kids, too, and I knew two of them - they were former friends - well enough to know that they had issues of their own, like bullying parents. I wouldn’t say they were misunderstood lambs, but no one really is.
In situations like this kid’s, I lay the blame at the feet of the adults. The parents of the kids, the teachers and administrators at the school - they have a responsibility to protect those kids, both from each other and from their own worst impulses. They’re not doing either and they deserve to be held responsible for it.
The parents of this boy, I feel for them, too. It’s so easy to say, “I would raise hell.” That’s what they are doing, and it’s not doing them any good. No one cares. Even if they moved, or moved their son to another school, there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t become a victim again; and then he wouldn’t even have the friends I’m sure he has here. They’re totally powerless. It’s scary.
“Do bullying victims really become bullies themselves? It seems to me that that’s part of the old stereotype that bullies were once poor tormented souls themselves. My sympathy for them ends once they inflict shit on other people.”
If you’re a kid who’s being bullied, you don’t have to bully other kids, but sadly, you might have to become a little like them to make them stop.
When I was in the sixth grade, I was bullied relentlessly by one of my female classmates, until I decided I’d had enough, and pushed her down a flight of stairs. No more bullying after that.
I’m really saddened to see so many people offering violence as the only solution to this problem.
I wish there was a better solution. But I have never seen anything else work. Trying mediation doesn’t work- the bullies like and are proud of their behavior. Trying to get the administrators to give a flying fuck is impossible. The only thing that shifts the situation at all IS blowing up at the bully and breaking their nose. Brutality only understands brutality. I wish it was different, but I have never seen anything else work.
Sniper - that’s good advice and I’ll pass it along to my husband.
Elinor - Yes we are only human, but it’s that kind of thinking that allows bullying to continue. “We are only human” is essentially “kids will be kids and bullies are just a part of childhood.” How can an adult who finds joy in someone else’s misery teach children to be kind? I know not all people have children, but for those who do we are their biggest influence and the best method for teaching is by example.
I had teachers who absolutely tormented me. It still enrages me that people who teach 12-year-olds can do things to them that adults would NEVER be expected to tolerate.
Total word to this. Once I told a teacher, in 7th grade, that I thought the way he was yelling at this other girl was inappropriate. I have never heard such a shocked silence in my life–and then I got sent to the guidance counselor’s office.
Tangentially, this is one reason I could never get into the Harry Potter books: Professor Snape is clearly a vicious bully, yet Dumbledore keeps him at the school, and J.K. Rowling defends this in an interview as Dumbledore preparing kids for the reality that “life is unfair” or something like that. Far too many adults take that attitude in real life.
Yes, it is disturbing and I’m one of those people who still, on occasion, wants to inflict some physical damage on the bullies in my past. Would I hurt them, if I were actually given the chance? No, not really. I’d walk away. But I think it speaks volumes about the amount of pain inflicted upon us as kids that we’re still so angry. This is not an issue that should be so easily dismissed by any adult.
No one yet has brought up the idea that some of the school shooters were bullying victims who decided to take matters into their own hands. Does anyone know if this is true or urban legend / MSM baloney?
Olivia, I agree. While I understand the need to punish anyone who bullies your child or tolerates the abuse, the way to do it is not to (as a parent) turn vigilante and physically attack (bully) the administrators or the bullies. That’s the mindset that leads to a cycle of violence. Laws, courts, and persistence to teachers and administrators and bosses, combined with activism to force them to acknowledge the victims has to be a better answer than more violence.
Okay, if some kid walked up to my kid and punched him in the head, then filmed it, that would be the end of the world.
If the local DA wouldn’t prosecute, I’d launch a civil suit, against the kid and against the school for failure to adequately protect my kid. Also, no way on God’s green earth would I send my kid back to that school.
If that didn’t work, I’d leave town. And, later, I wouldn’t leave fingerprints.
Olivia, what are you going to tell your kids if they end up relentlessly tormented by a bully?
Billy’s parents aren’t dumb people. The parents saying stuff like “ignore it; it will go away” and “they’re just jealous” are probably pretty smart themselves. But their approach to dealing with bullying comes across as… naive. What is it about us that, when we get older, causes us to be hopelessly clueless about how to deal with the crises faced by our own children?
I was bullied badly pretty much all the way through elementary and most of high school. I’m female, have cerebral palsy, was heavy, and demonstrably “smarter” in ways that were obvious to most of the kids (I talked like an adult when I was still in the single-digit ages). Being disabled adds an extra-crispy layer to being bullied — you can’t even run away, and you’re likely not to be able to fight back all that well.
I had kids throw me in snowbanks, rub my face in gravel, beat me up, break into my lockers and steal my stuff, and once, threaten me with a knife (because my high school’s druggie contingent somehow became convinced I was a narc). Also, because I was fat and disabled, a lot of the boys thought it was terribly high-larious to grope me while everyone was in line. That was besides all the verbal and emotional abuse.
Oh yeah, and when I was in high school, a family of evangelical fundamentalist Christians moved into the attendance district. I was an outspoken atheist, so I got a lot of crap about that. I’ve sort of lost count of the number of times someone oh-so-saccharinely informed me they were “worried about me” because I wasn’t “saved” and therefore was going to Hell when I died.
You can count me in with everyone else here who has said that the only way to stop the bullying is with violence. I tried going to the administrators, and while they were sympathetic, they were also inclined to be overly “fair,” which meant the remedies had absolutely no teeth. The problems didn’t actually stop until I started stomping on the feet of caff-line gropers, slugging the cut-ups who’d push each other into me in the hall, and generally carrying on cranky.
My folks were no help at all — every time I’d mention the problems to my parents, my mother would say, “What did you do to make them mad? You must have done something…” I wonder why it is that some people just pathologically feel compelled to blame the victim?
Olivia–I disagree. Revenge fantasies are healthy in moderation, so long as they stay in fantasy and don’t translate into vindictive action. Bullying is an act. Schadenfreude is a feeling. There’s a difference. We should control our feelings, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel or express them.
How can an adult who finds joy in someone else’s misery teach children to be kind?
Easily. Such an adult understands the consequences to the victim of unkindness, the darkness that bullying can enable in its victims. Such an adult probably also understands some of the roots of bullying, namely the sadism, and can therefore better recognize bullying when she sees it and help students fight the impulse to bully.
That’s a bit like asking “how can an adult who has a dark side teach children to be good?”, honestly. We all do have darker impulses, which does not disqualify us from being good people or setting good examples. And being forced to deny our bad impulses or be silent about them is itself a form of oppression that bullying victims often experience. Not only have you been bullied, but you have to be NICE and FORGIVING about the people who bullied you, because you don’t have the right to your raw, fierce rage. I don’t support this mandatory forgiveness/turning the other cheek/whatever you want to call it. We have the right to our anger and hatred, so long as we don’t let it consume us or lead us to do anything wrong.
Actually, yes.
My brother was (is!) a total sadist and was a bully. Completely out of the blue. Nothing in our family history or family life with our kind and gentile and thoughtful parents could have predicated or predicted it.
It broke my mother’s HEART that people always jumped tpo tthe conclusion that his nastiness was SURELY her fault. Because you know, it is ALWAYS the mother’s fault.
Oh, and what I’d tell a kid who was being bullied is, “It’s important to treat other people the way you’d want to be treated, but if someone goes after you, defend yourself — bring out the big guns first. Do what you need to do to stop it before it really gets going.”
On the other hand, I’m not a very nice person, and I’ve learnt from experience that respect until provoked, then deterrence by any means necessary is the best policy.
Tyro, I was bullied and it included sexual harassment. I was told to ignore it, and I know that doesn’t work. I’m not naive. What I am, and have been doing throughout this thread, is asking if anyone has a better idea than ignore it or use violence. I genuinly would like to hear other ideas so that I can have a better plan when my own children face this.
I am sooooooooooooo with you on that one, Scott.
My friends who went were like, Oh, you should have come! Everyone was so nice! Nobody acts like that anymore. They lobbied for a good 4-5 months to get me to go. I didn’t bother to explain to them that they never got the brunt of the harassment - they got very little at all - and don’t have the kind of lingering resentment that makes you want to laugh over the dead bodies of the haters you used to get bullied by. I got everything from private verbal harassment to pinching and touching while on school property, starting in first grade and not ending until senior year of high school.
I never discussed any of it with my parents because the touching aspect of it wasn’t until 11th and 12th grades. By that point, my verbal harassment had been ignored by enough teachers that I basically considered self-defense from bullies the only “adult” option: that asking a parent or school administrator to fight on my behalf would result in nothing serious happening to the bully, and a lot of retributional behavior heaped back on me.
I would take punishment of bullies one step further though. I absolutely advocate physical punishment for the crime of verbal abuse/bullying. And now with all the cyberbullying going on, I would recommend a technical blackout for all bullies. This kind of behavior should also go on their high school transcripts. Colleges should be warned they have enrollment candidates who are primed for date rape and violence.
I haven’t followed school shootings systematically, but in the ones I have paid attention to, the issue of bullying usually comes up fairly early as an explanation as to why the shooters commit their crimes.
One example is the infamous shooting at Columbine High School. It became common currency that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were victims of bullying and outcasts who were striking back at their tormentors. Some investigators I’ve read who have taken a look at the case more deeply have come to a very different conclusion: Harris and Klebold were not particularly tormented or teased. The underlying reason they cite is actually more frightening: Harris was a budding sociopath and Klebold was a self-destructive, suicidal person whom Harris brought into his orbit and manipulated. Now, I know one must take these post hoc diagnoses with a grain of salt, but it looks to me that the evidence was that Harris in particular was capable of violence and any indication that he gave that he was “striking back” was more sociopathic manipulation on his part.
Olivia, I agree. While I understand the need to punish anyone who bullies your child or tolerates the abuse, the way to do it is not to (as a parent) turn vigilante and physically attack (bully) the administrators or the bullies. That’s the mindset that leads to a cycle of violence.
That’s nice Susan. So nice to hear that you have never been so brutally physically attacked by one or more people that you didn’t feel the need to violently defend yourself.
Nice of you and Olivia to offer some effective and concrete solutions. Do you have any effective suggestions (beyond martyrdom) to the cause, or are you content to wring your hands and scold?
Kate, wtf? I just wrote that I am looking for suggestions. I don’t claim to have the answers. Way to go with respecting other people’s opinions.
I always used to wonder at the parents of those little shits.
I lived in a small town, so you knew who people’s parents were. My take is that most are bullies themselves or completely oblivious. Which says to me that it really is a parenting issue, and why I think some schools in places where masculinity is of such great importance (like Arkansas, or any red state) probably have much worse problems.
and then he wouldn’t even have the friends I’m sure he has here.
You can’t even imagine that a kid in this level of hell could have no friends? Really?
You say you were bullied yourself, and nobody wants to play bully olympics–but you must just have no idea how bad it can be. None. Having one or two bullies is not the same as being universally hated.
You are right, however, that it might be worse to start all over in a new place and have it all happen again. If he stays, he can tell himself it’s his shitty town. If he moves and it doesn’t stop, he’ll know it’s him.
Well, Olivia, to a degree this is why I advocate withdrawal from the culture as one of the only tangible solutions.
You can really either strike back at the bullies, learn to “deal” with bullying, or simply leave for an environment in which bullying isn’t valued and encouraged. The violent offender needs to either be subdued with violence or removed as a disruptive force. As John Edwards said, “You can’t ‘nice’ them” into compliance.
I’ve seen people be bullied by colleagues and supervisors whose solution was to simply continually succeed at their job to the point where the bullying couldn’t interfere with their success and allowed them to use their success as leverage to work around the bullying. That’s one solution, but everyone shouldn’t be expected to live that way… plus advocating such a solution just blames the victim by telling them that they’re too weak to deal with it.
I wish there was an effective nonviolent way. However, there’s really nothing more effective for bullying victims than physical defense. Expecting them to do more is unrealistic and cruel. That’s way too much burden to place on a child. Would you hand your paycheck over to your child and tell them to pay all your bills and work your job for the next month? It’s just something they don’t have the resources to handle.
I had an incredibly amount of guilt for a long time about defending myself physically, but I let it go because I realized there was nothing else I could have done… absolutely nothing.
When it comes to parents, there’s a lot more options. Educate other parents, try to use public shaming to stop bullies, remove your kid from the situation. However hard the solutions are, they’re a million times easier for you than for the bullying victim.
Now to my non-violent suggestions:
As mentioned before, creating appropriate environments where populations are constantly mixing and adult supervision is present to hold the boundaries seems to keep the bullying down in my son’s middle school.
I would also like to see one of two types of legislation:
1) A federal student’s bill of rights that outlines the responsibility of administrators to maintain a safe and secure learning environment - and their liabilities if they fail to do so
2) A proviso as part of a larger funding bill (such as NCLB and their ilk) that requires administrators and staff to receive training and to maintain safe schools, under penalty of lost funding and liability for their inattention
In other words, the adminstration of a school or school system would be required to prevent bullying or face liability and loss of funding for their actions and inactions in cases like that noted in the original article. There are ways that schools can be organized, people can be trained, and age-appropriate environments constructed to prevent bullying. There is a lot of research post-Columbine that can be put to work. I think the Feds should require it.
“I wonder why it is that some people just pathologically feel compelled to blame the victim?”
Interrobang, it’s so that they can distance themselves; “that would never happen to ME, because I’m different/would handle things differently.”
I’m a substitute teacher and I agree that bullying is rampant in the public schools. Especially among junior high kids (that is a horrible age–I hate working with that group), but in elementary and high schools as well. It’s very much a class issue as well. The richer, more middle class and above kids are usually the bullies, in my experience. They also have the parents who are either oblivious or who believe their little angel could do no wrong, ever, and enable it. And blame other kids and/or me for their kids’ inappropriate, evil, sadistic behavior. The more working class and/or poorer kids seem to be the targets and/or have more empathy for the targets than the others. And their parents are the ones who listen if I have to bring up issues and will work with the teachers/school/whoever to take care of it.
I agree with Ms. Kate way upthread. If I ever found out one of my boys was a bully, there would be consequences and that behavior would stop.
And since everyone is sharing their own personal stories, here’s mine:
I was kind of a nerd in school and kept to myself. I was generally liked, since I helped out the popular kids with their homework and my mom was their math tutor, but there was this one girl in high school who absolutely hated me. I have no idea why, especially since we were good friends in junior high, but there it is. Anyway, junior year she decided I needed to have my ass kicked for some random reason and jumped me in a classroom between classes. It took four people to pull her off me. She got suspended, but graduation was the next week and she was supposed to be an usher and the principal let her do it, even though she was suspended. My mom flipped and decided to press charges on her. So we went to court and she ended up on probation and with a restraining order our senior year (mom was friends with the judge). After that I didn’t get harassed at all, because I had the crazy mom who took kids to court.
The really bad part about the whole thing, though is that I got in trouble for not defending myself (I didn’t think to fight back–I just covered my head and waited for her to finish). My dad was into the whole, ‘don’t throw the first punch, but be sure you throw the last one’ and the fact that his daughter had her ass handed to her just pissed him off. So I was grounded and made to learn self defense that entire summer. Also, my younger sister beat the shit out of that girl later on for hitting me (she provoked her into starting a fight). B also subscribes to dad’s philosophy and is very protective of family.
Oh god, I was bullied so bad in school. I was the go to guy in high school to pick on, it got so bad that it would leach out into stuff outside school. I would go to camp and so would a classmate and the whole thing would start over in a different environment.
I thought I was going to have to go to college in Timbuktu to get away from it all. Thankfully I was wrong, I should have noticed back then but all of these bullies were profound idiots and all I had to do was go up the academic ladder to escape them.
Odd thing, it really was the rich spoiled kids that bullied me, the brutes with a history of violence (and juvenile criminal records) left me alone, heck I ended up playing DnD with a bunch of them.
I dont remember most of their names but their faces are burned in my mind. Im not planning on ever going to a highschool reunion, unless I turn out to be a multimillionaire rocket brain surgeon, and then I would only go to rub it in their faces.
creating appropriate environments where populations are constantly mixing and adult supervision is present to hold the boundaries seems to keep the bullying down
I can’t help but think that this, particularly the adult supervision issue, is one of the most important. Children have to be properly socialized in the ways of adult behavior. Children are not going to end up properly socialized just by dealing with each other. In fact, that’s probably one of the worst ways to do it.
And even then, you have to find adults who hold the same value systems as you do, particularly when it comes to issues like bullying.
“Well, Olivia, to a degree this is why I advocate withdrawal from the culture as one of the only tangible solutions.
I’m rather curious what you mean by this. How does one withdraw from the culture? Get a shack in Montana?
Olivia, I realize what you were asking - although I already offered at least one non-violent response.
That said, the bulk of my snark was directed at Susan, who took a rather judgemental tone based on an oft-chanted mantra about violence that I don’t think applies here.
Why? Because I had a tendency to go ballistic when attacked, inflict major hit points, and then not remember what happened. When a kid tried to pin my arms behind me so another could pummel me, I flipped him over my back and broke his arm according to witnesses. The result was that I was left alone until I moved again. My brother didn’t fight back, and was mercilessly harassed, beat up, threatened, thrown in a creosote pit, etc. The “cycle of violence” business doesn’t seem to hold IMHO.
Does anyone have any data or anecdotal evidence for this behavior being more present in public schools than in private ones? Or in nontraditional educational programs like Montessori? I swear, the second my son comes home with some kind of bullying story, I can’t imagine being psychologically able to send him back. We need options.
I was harassed and bullied from third grade (age
through the end of high school, to some degree or another, physically, verbally, sexually, you name it.
And I figure, the only way to stop it is if parents, teachers and administrators have a no tolerance policy, and make safety at school even more important that the teaching. And, because adult involvement can make things worse for kids being harassed, even if it is only their kids’ own fear o it getting worse, parents, in particular, have to go to administrators and talk to teachers WITHOUT their kids knowing, if at all possible. Teachers should not discipline the bullies in front of the class for the same reason. The bullies and harassers need to be removed from the classroom/cafeteria/playground/where ever, because they are the ones making the school unsafe for the other students. The adults are the only ones who can do anything about it. And anti-bullying rules need to be enforced constantly and consistently.
This of course leaves the problem of adults sympathizing with the harassers, or not seeing the bullying going on. Now, I’m not a teacher, but I think that the folks who run schools must be pretty dense to miss all the stuff that goes on. I don;t think they miss it; I think they don’t care, or don’t want to deal with it, and this is unacceptable.
matthew show, by finding a school and community compatible with your value system, or homeschooling. There’s little room to maneuver– we can’t all move to Montana and it’s probably a bad idea to, in the first place, but it’s hardly a bad thing to say to a school system that encourages bullying, “screw it, this isn’t for me.” I truly believe that such a dysfunctional culture isn’t going to change just for you, and there’s little point of trying to “work within the system” once you realize that’s the case, as Billy’s parents seem to insist on.
You’ll never hear a peep out of me from parents who pull their kids out of the system rather than sticking with it on the premise that “we’re all in this together.” I’m more sympathetic with the attitude of, “I’m not going to let you drag me down with you.”
“I’m rather curious what you mean by this. How does one withdraw from the culture? Get a shack in Montana?”
…yeah, and then mail wooden bombs to people you hold responsible for the problems of the world…
That’s absurd. There is a difference between feeling angry and vengeful about someone who has really hurt you and being sadistic towards someone who hasn’t. Asking the victims of any kind of bullying or oppression (large-scale, small-scale, whatever) to be better people than the bullies who torment them, to the point of not even wanting to hit back, is oppressive crap.
It’s the feelings I’m defending, not the actions. Physical violence was never a real option for me in school because I was a tiny, uncoordinated child.
I don’t think there is a solution here. For the child victim of bullying, literally hitting back is sometimes the only thing that works. If I were the parent of a bullied child, I would raise as much (nonviolent) hell about it as I could.
“Children have to be properly socialized in the ways of adult behavior” I completely agree with this. Everything from how to use utensils and using a toilet, to how to interact well with other people is about teaching kids to be good adults.
And I’m reading a lot of good suggestions. Now if we can just get the adult bullies to cooperate.
God, I still have the scars from bullying. Literally and figuratively. I had fantasies of walking into gym class with a suicide bomber’s vest on. Ho shit is it that I can say that HIGH SCHOOL was actually a good time for me, compared to the shit that Jr. High put me through? Thank god I had a healthy family life at home.
Left_Wing_Fox, I can so relate. I remember the horror that was middle school like it was yesterday. One incident in particular has always stuck with me. I was trying to order lunch in the cafeteria and a group of older kids surrounded me and were screaming at me, how they were going to kill the fag, and I really didn’t know what to do. I remember just standing there, not looking at anyone, and trying to just order a burger from the lunch lady. I remember thinking, “if they hit me, let it be quick.” I think the entire episode lasted about 5 minutes, but it felt like slow motion the entire time.
Interestingly enough, during those miserable years, I never shed a tear about it. Not once.
I read an interview with people at Columbine a few years after the fact where the administrators and the survivors simultaneously said over and over again “Nobody bullied them and they were fags so they deserved it,” with complete Kernlike oblviousness.
My parents were narcissists, and resentful of us, and oblivious to a couple siblings’ suicide attempts, molestation-by-family-friend, and my own cutting as well, so I’m not inclined to them a pass on their “ignore it it’ll go away” attitude either. They both did their own fair bit of bullying of us and each other, and were victims of parental and school bullying, which we heard ENDLESSLY about how much they had suffered, FWIW.
In workplaces in particular, only part of the bullying is directed at the overt victim. The bullying is also (perhaps even more) directed at the audience, who have to decide whether to challenge the bully or be complicit. And it’s almost always easier to be complicit. You get that frisson of forbidden power, and you get to imagine that you’ll stay out of the bully’s line of fire. Oh, and you get the feeling of having sold out that makes it almost impossible to challenge the bully at some later time.
I think children not only need to be socialized, they need to have age-appropriate environments. Too many middle schools in particular mistake height and weight for maturity. Kids need challenges they can grow with but boundaries that keep them safe. Turning them loose without supervision just because they can manage their clothing and possessions is folly - just cheap and lazy and ignorant of their needs.
I second the thoughts that violence doesn’t actually work. All it does is add another layer to the guilt and pain and damage that the young victim feels (in my own experience) because you suddenly realize that you are and can be “one of those people” someone who gets ahead by stepping on backs and faces.
And of course the next bully in line will draw a bead on you because you’re the “bad ass” who took out the last one(s). feh.
I have presonally avoided my highschool reunions (and facebook cliques) because I am far too tempted to list all my mental imbalances (inability to trust - particularily handsome intelligent men, ridiculously bad self-image, fear of being ‘outspoken’, fear of being in a leadership role, fear of being seen as ‘too’ intelligent, etc.) and saying to them all “this is what you made. Any of you with kids you are proud of, little johnny who’s just like his daddy… this is likely what they are making too”. And I’d say it hoping that they have changed, and that it would hurt them to know how badly they screwed up another person’s life. A person who wasn’t more than a moment’s entertainment to them…
Does anyone have any data or anecdotal evidence for this behavior being more present in public schools than in private ones? Or in nontraditional educational programs like Montessori?
I actually was bullied worse in my private elementary school than in the large, public middle and high schools I went to. A large part of it was numbers; in elementary school I was the *only* true nerd/geek, but in the larger schools I could find others like me and spend time with them.
One thing from the “going postal” was the followup that showed the supervisor was continually bullying the employee. Nothing was done to discipline the bully and the employee lost it. Columbine had the same MSM last page story. The kids had been subjected to bullying and that the malefactors had received absolutely no punishment.
Olivia: One thing that appears to work at the elementary school level is for the child being bullied to create a commotion the instant the bullying begins. I have worked out scripts with my kids and practiced with them, and they have only had to use them once or twice.
1. If it is a physical attack, scream!!!! Yell loudly, “HEY!! You (whatever) me! Stop!” If taking martial arts classes, use defensive blocks while yelling. If scared about the violence being really bad or if outnumbered, offensive moves to disable are allowed. Then run to the nearest adult as fast as possible, yelling the entire time. (Sorry that this response includes violence, but if I don’t see any value in passively allowing oneself to get beaten to a pulp. Both my kids take Tae Kwon Do, and my older kid is preparing to test for black belt. She could probably take out most of the kids in her school if she were so inclined, which she isn’t.)
2. If it is a verbal attack, say or yell very loudly one of the following (use your judgment): 1) “Hey, you’re not allowed to say that to me!” 2)”Wow. That was really rude.” 3)”Who helped you think that one up?” 4) “Captain, I think this ensign just broke the lame barrier.” If the insult crosses a certain line, report it to an adult immediately.
3. Report any incidents to Mom or Dad ASAP, and help them document it. The parent is then responsible for kicking this up the line. If your school is unresponsive, lawyer up or TV up. (Let the school know you will do this if no action is taken first, though.) One of our local TV stations has a reporter whose main beat is documenting cases of organizations not doing what they should to protect consumers, and it’s cheaper to call them than a lawyer.
The one time my daughter used a defensive block to keep from being punched in the face, the bully was so astonished that she backed off immediately and has left my kid alone to this day. The verbal bullying is taking longer to disappear, but I think less is happening since we started using the scripts. The hardest part is getting them over the hump of not wanting to make a fuss, though.
It’s also important for your kids to see you’re willing to go to bat for other kids. I sent a note to school last month because one of the worst verbal bullies started threatening some of the other kids with unspecified consequences after she was caught red-handed and punished for goading another kid into tears.
Apparently some methods of restorative justice are useful from separating the bullies from their supporters and enablers in the general populace, but without a system in place to identify, prevent and persecute bullies in the first place, the restorative methods are just going to sit there unused.
First place has to go with the administration, being sure that there is a zero tolerance policy for bullies, and being unafraid to bring in criminal charges against physical abuse and sexual harassment.
And quite honestly, If the child is a bully because of an abusive family, then it’s probably a good idea to use bullying as a way to prosecute adult abusers, not just childhood bullies.
As I said, violence may not be the best solution. It may even be a bad solution. But it is at least a solution.
I saw something on t.v. last night, a show called “What would you do?” They set up a situation on a boardwalk where a group of actors, first 3 young women then 3 young men, taunted a heavy woman sitting on a bench. The filming was set up to see how many people would try to intervene. It was appalling so few people did. One man was about to level the three male actors before the producers stepped in.
Can we improve things by encouraging the so called innocent bystander kids to either intervene or at least protest. The bully usually needs a sympathetic audience doesn’t he/she?
I remember the story out of Nova Scotia last fall when a 9th grader was teased and bullied for wearing a pink shirt. Two seniors rallied classmates and 400 kids wore pink shirts the next day. http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourview/2007/09/bullied_student_tickled_pink_b.html
I recall smaller scale rescues in h.s., since the upper grades began to become more civilized and some people do intervene. I imagine it is a worse problem in middle school, where no one wants to be uncool by calling out the bullies.
What a great thread (and post).
Excellent insight, Paul; I think you’re right about effect of workplace bullying on bystanders. I share an office with a woman who is a bully and, I think, a true sociopath. I don’t think she’s a sadist, but she’s clearly incapable of participating in what most of us would consider normal, civil workplace interaction, and the bullying seems to be her attempt to compensate for that deficit the only way she knows how (turns out she’s not that bright either). But I’m always amazed and appalled at how nobody will challenge her, and it’s clearly because fear becoming a target.
Lee, those sound like great tactics and have the advantage of giving the victim something to do at the time of the incedent, instead of just tell authorities later. As an adult, I find #1 and #2 to work quite well when I’ve been harassed. Seriously, this is the kind of stuff I was hoping to find here!
Ok, in my post above (#126), I tried to type 8 and it cam eout as a smiley face. Not sure now, but it was meant to be an 8.
You can’t even imagine that a kid in this level of hell could have no friends? Really?
I can imagine it. My mother describes her elementary school years in that way. But when I read the article when it was linked from Prometheus 6, and again here, I didn’t see the writer say, “He has no friends.” So I assumed that he had friends, interests, and any number of things that he might not want to leave behind, bullying notwithstanding.
Otherwise, it’s good that we’re not going to get into the victim olympics. I know I wouldn’t win. I know I didn’t have it as bad as my sister did, for example, who was bullied by a teacher in elementary school, and who was driven to anorexia as a result of bullying about her weight in middle school, but still, my time in hell was not pleasant and I don’t care to be told that my insights on the experience are irrelevant. So it’s good that it’s not going to happen.
Tyro:
That’s only an option open to the privileged, though; it leaves the kids whose families don’t have that option out to dry.
Everyone has to do what they can to protect their own kids, but just yielding the public school system to the bullies gives them free reign on the kids who can’t escape. An actual successful public education system that doesn’t victimize kids (or separate the economically disadvantaged into a ghettoized, lower-quality education) is something vital to building any kind of progressive society and probably key to reducing or eliminating adult bullying as well (by cutting off the reward for it at an early, impressionable age.)
Olivia, I think you have the right spirit about this topic.
Myself, I knew a lot of bullies when I was a kid through my mom. She was a school secretary, and one of the things that meant was she saw a lot of bullies in downtime.
Now, my mom was a kindhearted Christian soul (and I’m not) and when I was little, she thought these boys needed a friend - like me.
I disagreed, but so it goes. So, I did a lot of tutoring of kids who, to my ten year old eye, were as big and dangerous as godzilla. And my sense was not that these boys were in the direct line to the GOP talking heads. Those talking heads are, I think, more inclined, even when younger, to proxy bullying - through cliques and shit. Although never having gone to Andover or fancy schools, I wouldn’t know. But in the school I went to, the kids almost always were reflecting, as I look back on it, deep family problems. These kids were falling through the cracks. And they still are. I can’t say they were inhuman thugs. I can say that when I was bullied later on, in high school, I was never physically set upon - I think partly because I had made connections with the bullies I tutored! Maybe my mom knew what she was doing…
As I said, violence may not be the best solution. It may even be a bad solution. But it is at least a solution.
The problem is, it is an individual solution. You get left alone, but someone else gets to be the target.
That’s why I am not buying the “its the parents” meme, either. One set of parents can try to keep their one kid out of the bully mess, but there will still be plenty of kids to join in. Parents don’t always and sometimes can’t know what their kids are up to - I have heard from my son that he got in trouble for mixing it up at school, but did I get a call from the Principal? No. Did I think my son was a big part of the problem with the dust-up? Yes. I think some administrators don’t bother calling parents about these things, for what ever reason they may have.
This is a cultural problem. It is an environment problem. That means it is an administrative problem. Administrators have to set policies, create boundaries, and enforce rules. They also need to construct an appropriate learning environment that restricts the ways in which bully cultures form and promotes a safe learning environment for kids to grow in.
Yet another story to add to the list…
I was a victim of bullying in elementary school, and to a lesser extent in middle school. Most of the time it consisted of teasing and verbal abuse which was an attempt to upset me and get me to be the one to “start” a fight.
When I hit high school, the physical bullying finally stopped. (Socially, I honestly don’t know if it did - I was so fucked up by that point that I couldn’t tell the difference between honest, friendly interest and someone looking for an opening to ridicule me.)
It also fucked me up by making me almost singlemindedly focused on becoming “popular” as a way to erase the stain of being a victim. Not that I had any idea how to do that, of course. The best I could do was to avoid anyone who was in the same situation, or worse off than I was. I never bullied them, but I was probably a huge jerk and missed out on some potentially good friends.
All the advice I got from adults on how to stop it was useless. I was supposed to never respond to “just words” physically, and if I did the entire incident became my fault (I remember being instructed that even making a fist - not threatening anyone, just clenching my hand in anger - was inappropriate behavior). I was supposed to find solace in the fact that the bullies were jealous of my intelligence - I was a child prodigy. (Though I don’t remember ever being bullied by much older students when I took classes with them, just by kids my own age. I suppose there’s not much social cachet in a 16-year-old picking on a 12-year-old.) On the other hand, I was told to not be so arrogant (see above for why I didn’t respond well to friendly overtures) and they wouldn’t hate me so much. I was supposed to not stand out so much so that they wouldn’t find me an attractive target, as if the bullies would suddenly forget that I was easy to upset and not a threat to hurt them if I fought back. Though I couldn’t see it at the time, it all boiled down to “shut up and stop bothering us about it.”
And the really, really sad thing? It’s painfully obvious to me that I had it easy compared to some of the other kids out there.
Olivia, I’m glad you find it helpful. The most important thing after parental support is school support. I am lucky that our current principal is very anti-bullying. My friend is not so lucky - the school her kid goes to is loudly zero-tolerance but actually very resistant to doing anything. She was in the principal’s office on a regular basis to complain about her son being bullied, but when it escalated to the point where the bully broke her son’s arm and they tried to tell her that he had done it to himself, that’s when she lost it. She showed up the next day with a lawyer and a camera crew, and only then did the bully get reassigned to a different class. Another friend who is a retired principal says that one of the problems is that in most states, you have to have an adult witness or other objective evidence of the incident before you can go anywhere with legal action, so it’s easier and more convenient to ignore stuff that is one kid’s word against another’s. That’s why Ms. Kate’s legislative proposals are so important.
In 9th grade, my solution to the bully who was popping me on the head with his bass bow when the orchestra director turned her back: I threw myself straight up out of my chair, spun around and screamed in his mean, squinty-eyed, astonished face, something like, “Stop hitting me with your fucking bow you fucking asshole or I’m gonna knock your fucking teeth down your fucking throat!”
There was silence as I glared at him, my breath heaving through my flared nostrils.
He finally broke off eye contact.
I picked up my chair and music and sat back down.
Somehow I managed not to snap my instrument’s neck in half.
The class resumed rehearsal.
Jackass never bothered me again.
I loved our director - she was 24 and so fucking cool in that dorky nerdy orchestra geek kinda way.
And did I mention that in 9th grade I was already 5′-8-3/4″ tall? I think that helped. Plus the fact that my face flushes at the drop of a hat.
What does help with school bullying - and again, this is just based on personal observation - is to have all the adults on board with anti-bullying actions. That is, there has to be consequences, they have to be known to all, and they have to be seen to work. The consequences can range from juvie to enrollment in compulsory anger management classes (kids hate those).
This. Also, I guess I must have looked more fearsome than I thought as a kid, or the bullies had other targets. I did have to chase one choad who groped me in junior high, and if I’d caught him, would have tried to wail on him. He never bugged me again, and most of the teasing I got was of the mean girls type. But I got pretty good at ignoring them. Reading these stories, though I think I was just lucky. It helped that we moved a lot.
Our son is already way taller and bigger than other kids his age, but not really aggressive. And yeah, I’d be relieved if that meant he got less shit, but just being around that kind of stuff is bad for everyone.
I moved to an insular town right before kindergarten; and to the poor section of a wealthy town. I was “it” right away. The teacher, whose husband had relocated and left her to sell the house, blamed me. The principal and my tireless mother had my back for the first few years. Then he went into local politics and his replacement was pro-bully, and my mother started to self-medicate for depression and bad marriage with alcohol.
So it was my turn in the barrel, for years. I ran a lot, and I hated myself for running. I threatened things that, if I said them today, would bring the police to my house. I got my ass kicked a lot. Like others here, I bullied the few people even farther down the pecking order. One year I didn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria; I hid in an empty classroom every day.
The administration continued to blame me. The towering middle school principal threatened to throw me through a wall.
I fought back when I could. When I did, it helped, at least for a while. Then I studied martial arts, and they left me alone.
The truth is, the anger never left. I’m a litigator. I sue corporate America. I beat up the bullies and I take their lunch money. I love it. I love deposing the same rich kids who made me miserable and watching them squirm.
My niece was bullied a few years ago. I wrote a letter on firm letterhead, setting forth the facts of the administration’s refusal to address the situation and invoking the state’s bullying laws. Apparently, there is a requirement that administrators count their bullying incidents, and they all magically end up with zero. I demanded that they deem the events a bullying incident. In order to preserve their precious zero, and to maintain the discretion that the bullying designation takes out of their hands, they were willing to make all sorts of arrangements to separate the bully from the victim. It worked like a charm; it has been several years and she’s been left alone. Apparently the only thing that works better than hitting the bully back is hitting the administration back. If one has the means, I highly recommend it.
IMHO, “zero tolerance” policies are a recipe for disaster. They engender the “we don’t have any bullies here because we have a zero tolerance policy” attitude that becomes a total charade. This further degenerates into a “your kid was attacked = your kid was in a fight = your kid must be disciplined for fighting because we have zero tolerance” situation.
The middle school my kid did not go to had that sort of attitude and had a reputation for problems. (it has sinced changed with new administration). One reason I wanted him to go to the one that he does.
Ms. Kate, I absolutely agree.
I hate ‘zero tolerance’ policies. They just don’t allow the administration or teachers (the ones who actually want to do their job) to account for the actual situation and what really happened. Self defense is treated as exactly the same as starting the fight yourself, whether you are defending against verbal or physical abuse (and I do think that some verbal abuse, especially the ongoing, toxic kind, deserves a punch in the face) and plays into the bully’s hands. What it does, is make the administration’s job easier. Less paperwork, less nuance, and everyone can go back to being lazy asses who don’t have to make the hard choices and pay attention to what is going on.
Can “good” parents have “bad” kids? I doubt it.
Wow. Of course good parents can have bad kids. The same way bad parents can have good kids. Parents are huge influences on us to be sure, but our actions and personalities do not spring, fully formed, from our parents’ actions and personalities. Sure, I think most people would agree that good parents are more likely to have good kids, and bad parents more likely to have bad kids, but it’s FAR from universal. Jeez. Not everything is the parents’ fault all the time. Everything from innate personality tendencies to peer influence to other role models affects kids’ development and behavior, and sometimes these things can go amiss even when the parents are great.
BTW, I cannot wait for my twentieth reunion. I’m a successful lawyer, partnered to a woman I love dearly, raising awesome, beautiful children, politically active, on the board of a charity — from nothing. From two alcoholic parents on the wrong side of the tracks, I went to a top-ten law school and made for myself just exactly the life I want. And I’ll smile and hand out cards and revel in the jealousy of middle-aged men who started with much more and amounted to much less.
I have to echo the earlier sentiment recommending self-defense classes. Any good martial arts school is good…and I’m not trying to be circular, but you should definitely show up and check a place out to make sure it’s not run by sadists or fakes. Wherever you and/or your child go, make sure the atmosphere makes you comfortable and your instructor makes you confident (not afraid to answer questions, and answers them satisfactorily). Hopefully, you can find a good place with a style and people that you enjoy.
It’s not just about learning how to fight, either. There are arts like Aikido that are almost purely defense. My school has a kids class for the Aikido, and the kids do very well. Even if they never get in a fight, it gives them discipline, respect, balance, social interaction, and something everyone will need eventually: how to fall without hurting yourself. Someone who has the confidence of training will probably get in fewer fights just because of the way they carry themselves. Our students are also taught how to avoid situations that lead to fights, and if it gets to that point, how to end the fight quickly and escape with only the necessary amount of violence.
This isn’t a solution to the problem; bullying still needs to be addressed on its own. But it’s still something I recommend, because it helps, and has so many other benefits.
The problem I have with encouraging physical violence as a defense against bullying isn’t really that violence is wrong, it’s that sometimes it’s ineffective and it can easily turn into victim blaming.
Maybe it’s is different with the type of bullying that commonly happens among girls, but when I was bullied, physical retaliation was expected, even welcomed. Because then it meant the bully could beat me up with impunity. I wasn’t an effective fighter - I was smaller, weaker, and unable to pose a real threat to the people who were picking fights with me.
I worry that it’s not all that great a leap from “violence is the only language bullies understand” to “if you can’t fight back, you deserve what you get.”
Thomas - Whereabouts do you practice? Cause I had about the same background and am pursuing a legal career with much the same underlying motivation.
I concur on the martial arts recommendation. My oldest is in Kempo and its great. We put him in almost 2 years ago because he was bored and acting out in his pre-K (he’s ridiculously intelligent, but no kindergarten that we could afford would take a 4 year old–his pre-K was good, but he was too advanced for it–he’s in kindergarten now). The Kempo really helped him with self discipline, self esteem (he’s small for his age–takes after his dad), balance, social skills, etc. He’s one of the youngest in his group, but he’s doing very well (about to test for purple belt). The dojo is also great. The director is good with the kids, the instructors are wonderful, and they heavily emphasize respect and how to avoid fights. Plus, it’s good exercise.
I will admit that self defense from bullies wasn’t the first thing we thought of when we enrolled him, but it certainly does make me feel better to know that he will be able to defend himself if it should come to that. At least a lot better than I ever did.
Does anyone have any data or anecdotal evidence for this behavior being more present in public schools than in private ones?
the matthew show, I can only offer my own experience, which is that private schools aren’t necessarily an improvement. I used to get bullied in elementary and middle school in suburban Detroit, mainly because (I think) I was the smallest boy in my class, thanks to starting school a year earlier than everyone else. Then, when my family moved to Florida, I was admitted to the best (academically speaking) high school in the state. There the bullying continued, though this time it was probably because my parents were about as solidly middle class as you could get, while my classmates were all sons of Tampa’s Elite - judges and doctors, mostly. And of course, that mattered when it came time for the administrators to sort through the assorted bullying incidents.
But when I left that school after a year and a half and attended a public high school instead, it all stopped. I always attributed that to the fact that I was of the same (or higher) social class as most of the student population, and that I had caught up to my classmates in terms of physical size.
This is probably not what you were looking for, exactly, but it’s all I got.
I’ve seen a lot of “I’ve been bullied” stories. Not so many on the “I’m a bully” side. I wonder if more of us have been bullies than we remember.
I definitely was. I’m ashamed of it now, but didn’t care then, because, as long as there was someone lower than me on the social pecking order, I could survive. How crappy I was.
I should see if I can find my victims and apologize.
Re: Bullying culture in the workplace.
A colleague of mine keeps trying to buffalo me on various decisions.
Most recently, our customer asked if there was any value in using Firefox instead of IE on the production network. I did research for about 3 days on the update cycle, types of vulnerabilities sported by either browser, memory usage, interesting plugins, etc., and then after all of this basic scholarship I submitted a report.
This colleague chuckled and said “No way are we recommending that faggy hippy open source bullshit.”
So, just to be clear, he identifies one software package with heterosexuality and conservativism, and the other with homosexuality and liberalism, and that’s basically his decision.
I showed my research and he actually tried to physically intimidate me by standing over me, with his crotch about six inches from my face (not that THAT’S gay or anything), elbows back and up like whoa. I guess that’s how security consultants roll wherever he’s from.
I get the feeling he’s not going to last very long with this company.
In any case, while this huge hunk of stupid could probably stomp my ass in a fight (he’s very proud of telling us about his golden gloves career, and I haven’t been in a fight since I left the Navy), I can still stand up to him. That’s what kids need to learn: that when you are getting your ass kicked, you STILL stand up to them. As long as you do that they don’t win, and it’s important that they don’t win. Your pride is inconsequential; not letting the assholes win is all that matters.
King understood this. I wish more people did.
I have to say Ive heard several non parents here say “they learn it from there parents.” In my experience, that is not always true. They learn it from the culture in general, and the school culture in particular.
Sometimes, good parents *do* have bad kids. I’ve seen it. Hell, my ex husband was a bad kid and grew up to be a bad adult. His mother raised 6 other perfectly normal kids. According to her, he was “born broken.” It happens.
UIP, I’m in the New York area. You can email me at t525881 (at) verizon (dot) net
I had to ignore this post; too emotional…
One day my 9 year old daughter was in the back row of a large group as they gave a musical performance for the entire elementary school. I and some other parents were waiting by the cafeteria doors and could see the kids singing. It was the end of the day and the kids were all tired.
So I’m watching and all of a sudden, 2 larger girls one row ahead locked their hands, and as hard as they could, swung their 2 arms right into Mary’s midsection, knocking the wind out of her as they picked her right up off of the floor! I thought they had to have ruptured her abdomen; she started screaming and crying immediately.
I said to one of the parents, “OMG, they just sucker-punched my kid!” and ran to her. As I did so, one of the girls, who had been a guest at my home, looked at me and I yelled loudly at her, “Why did you do that? You can’t do that, Morgan! You can’t do that!”
Upshot? Morgan’s mother called here (she wasn’t at the performance) to check on Mary, hear what I had seen, and apologized for her child’s behavior.
The principal, however, spoke with the superintendant and had me banned from the schoolgrounds FOR THE REST OF THE SCHOOL YEAR.
True fucking story.
My non-violent suggestion is the one I constantly fantasized about using when I was a child — go to school with a recorder! Tape everytthing they say to you! With the advent of such tiny recording devices as we have now, it’s hard to see how anyone would catch you doing it.
But there are places, such as Maryland, where that is actually *against the law.* It infuriates me that in my home state, if my son is being bullied, he cannot carry a recorder into school to tape his bullies because he needs their *permission* to record them. Bullshit, I say. If a recording is being used to collect information about criminal or violent activity against oneself, there should be no need to get permission to make the recording.
If you have a recording (and they’re legal in your state), and the school will do nothing, press criminal charges against the bullies and sue the school.
And if there’s one thing I absolutely despise it’s the passive, worthless, piece-of-shit advice to ‘just ignore it, it’ll go away.’
I never thought about it before, but I was lucky that my dad s a victim of bullying too. He not only believed me; he told me the best defense is to pick up a stick and attack the ringleader (it was a gang of kids from a different school). He warned me that I’d probably get beat up too, but that was already going to happen anyway, so make them pay for it dearly. I took to walking home from school with a stick and had to use it a couple times. The bullying did stop.
A neighborhood mom noticed the stick and asked me about it. I told her the truth and she believed me and approved of me defending myself.
I have to wonder if certain other countries have the same problem with bullying - and it is HUGE, as we can see just from the anecdotes here! I’m talking about the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands in particular, because the cultures are so different than the seemingly bully-prone Anglo-American ones.
I surmise that, while parents teach their kids to be bullies, by example if nothing else, and schools are complicit in that teachers and administrators do nothing to help, and in some cases actively join in the bullying - so much of the roots of bullying are inherent in our culture. Countries and cultures that are less capitalistic, less driven, and more affiliative, probably have much less of a problem with bullying.
Finally, the prestige of the teaching profession is very low, and while there are many excellent and dedicated teachers, I wonder how many of the “problem” teachers are those who chose the career as a fallback, and don’t really like kids, or their jobs.
I was both. I was a psychological bully in elementary school to one girl in particular, but then I realized the error in my ways and stopped… I suddenly “wasn’t funny anymore” and got kicked out of the cool crowd. Fast forward to middle school, I was a pariah. Rampant sexual harassment struck many a girl there and didn’t miss me. I eventually got spit on, and my germaphobic mother had me homeschooled through jr. high. Went back to H.S., s*** hit the fan… I was morally, culturally, intellectually and fashion-wise on a completely different plane, and I suffered for it, damn did I ever suffer. I spent my lunch hour/pre-class time in the bathroom, under the bleachers, behind the school many a day. Spent half of jr. year in homeschool because during the summer I told my mother that I wished that “something would happen to me” so I wouldn’t have to return. H.S. did give me a golden opportunity, though — the opportunity to apologize to the girl I bullied in elementary when I saw her again, with no outside prompting or pressure.
I was also bullied, both emotionally and physically, in school. I was bound and determined this would not happen to my son. I know the cost.
We got lucky. He attended a school with two *very* key differences - a zero tolerance on bullying and violence policy the administration took *very* seriously, and a “peer mediation” of conflicts and interpersonal issues. The kids policed themselves and each other. No one wanted to be dragged up in assembly on Friday morning and called out in front of everyone for being a bully.
It just was not tolerated by the administration, or the kids. This probably eliminated more than 90% of what would normally have gone on. As for the remaining few incidents, no one was subjected to ongoing bullying. At the first hint of a problem both the administration and the peer mediation team stepped in.
AIUI, you need cooperation from the police and prosecutors to get criminal charges applied. Do try, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you can’t actually get it done in many areas. Civil suits can still be effective.
I’m with Ms. Kate on this. I faced bullying in middle school, and it didn’t stop until I hurt someone. School admin told my dad that they couldn’t do anything and I should learn to protect myself. My dad took the leash off, and I protected myself. School admin called my dad in for a conference about my hostile behavior; he told them “what did you expect?”
My daughter faced bullying in grade school. The school refused to act. I told her, with my wifes reluctant support, to wait until class was underway and to take the biggest book she had and swat the girl in the face with it. Then tell the school to call me. The bullying stopped.
Bullying is a terrible thing to experience. The shame one feels is sickening. And the only answer appears to be violence.
This is in such stark contrast to what we tell school kids they should be doing that it scares me. But schools won’t protect kids from bullying. In many cases they support the bully.
What else can we expect people to do?
Ms. Kate said it best: “Administrators have to set policies, create boundaries, and enforce rules. They also need to construct an appropriate learning environment that restricts the ways in which bully cultures form and promotes a safe learning environment for kids to grow in.” Would that school admin would take this advice. When they don’t, they leave it up to people like me. They don’t like how that turns out.
BTW, said daughter is now happily married and expecting her first child, at age 30!
My bully was one of those odd situations where the relationship was one of friendship half the time, and psychological torment the other half. There was no physical abuse to speak of, but man, she had a talent for sniffing out my weak points and using them against me. I remember us being dragged into the principal’s office and my bully being chastised about “harcelement” (harassment), which pretty much put an end to it. We attended the same schools from then on, and though I had steadfastly avoided her, we ran into each other one day in Grade 11 or so and wound up talking like old friends for about two hours. She casually mentioned “Yeah, I was kind of a bitch back then.” Years later, when we were both in university, we ran into each other again and she wound up apologizing for how she had treated me. It’s funny how these things work out.
…Then, of course, there was the bitch in Grade 4 who decided she hated me for the most arbitrary of reasons and recruited several of her friends in her campaign to break my spirit. She pretty much succeeded, as when the opportunity to transfer schools to participate in a full-time enrichment program arose, I jumped at it.
In all fairness, I, too, participated in the scorn of those even lower on the social ladder than I was, which I regret to this day; it’s hardly satisfactory to write it off as a survival tactic, though that’s what it felt like at the time. Nor do I bear any real scars from my bullying. In fact, around my preteen years, I developed a sharp tongue and started striking back; my “sense of humour” helped make me enough friends to form a buffer against my would-be antagonists.
As for parental intervention, I realize I have a lingering bitterness that my parents knew what was going on and failed to (as I recall) express the appropriate degree of concern. My father recently fed me a line about kids having to learn at some point to fend for themselves, and that sheltering me wouldn’t have helped me, but I fail to find that argument persuasive.
My bully was one of those odd situations where the relationship was one of friendship half the time, and psychological torment the other half. There was no physical abuse to speak of, but man, she had a talent for sniffing out my weak points and using them against me. I remember us being dragged into the principal’s office and my bully being chastised about “harcelement” (harassment), which pretty much put an end to it. We attended the same schools from then on, and though I had steadfastly avoided her, we ran into each other one day in Grade 11 or so and wound up talking like old friends for about two hours. She casually mentioned “Yeah, I was kind of a bitch back then.” Years later, when we were both in university, we ran into each other again and she wound up apologizing for how she had treated me. It’s funny how these things work out.
…Then, of course, there was the bitch in Grade 4 who decided she hated me for the most arbitrary of reasons and recruited several of her friends in her campaign to break my spirit. She pretty much succeeded, as when the opportunity to transfer schools to participate in a full-time enrichment program arose, I jumped at it.
In all fairness, I, too, participated in the scorn of those even lower on the social ladder than I was, which I regret to this day; it’s hardly satisfactory to write it off as a survival tactic, though that’s what it felt like at the time. Nor do I bear any real scars from my bullying. In fact, around my preteen years, I developed a sharp tongue and started striking back; my “sense of humour” helped make me enough friends to form a buffer against my would-be antagonists.
As for parental intervention, I realize I have a lingering bitterness that my parents knew what was going on and failed to (as I recall) express the appropriate degree of concern. My father recently fed me a line about kids having to learn at some point to fend for themselves, and that sheltering me wouldn’t have helped me, but I fail to find that argument persuasive.
Well, Louise, welcom to the tiny-minded world of the New England Town. Lemme guess - the principal and superintendant have been in their jobs for a lonnnnng time? Meaning in a tight labor market for administrators that they are likely incompetent and unwilling to be shown to be less than perfect and totally in control. Hence their “kill the messenger” behavior.
I saw a whole lot of that go on when my husband taught school - “blame teachers, parents, students” and expect all to cover for extreme lapses of administrative prowess and lacking support structure.
To the commenter above who was asking where all the bullies are:
They post on WND and LGF
I was bullied through middle school, not physically, but verbally. It was relentless. I was really smart and had zero fashion sense, which meant I got it all the time.
Luckily I went to a really, really cool high school where bullying just did not occur. There wasn’t a pecking order. So I didn’t have to wait until college to realize that people could be sincerely nice to me.
My boyfriend was physically bullied through elementary and middle school (he went to a small Catholic school, where you were trapped forever with your small class). He learned to fight — that was the only option he had.
I was talking to my boyfriend about bullying once, and told him that if I ever have a daughter, my only defense for her will be to teach her how to dress and groom in a conforming manner. The smart, nice, quiet girls who were also pretty were left alone. Being pretty, or at least acceptably conforming, is a girl’s only option to get through middle school unharmed.
He thought this was kind of shallow, or just giving in. But frankly it’s the same as how he learned to fight. It’s your only option. You do what you have to do to survive.
I had teachers who absolutely tormented me. It still enrages me that people who teach 12-year-olds can do things to them that adults would NEVER be expected to tolerate.
Total word here. I had a health teacher who tormented me. She replaced another teacher mid-year and for some reason hated my guts. One time, another girl copied off my test, had the same exact answers and got an A while I got a C. Still can’t figure out why the woman despised me so much. She made the girl who was one of my chief tormentors her pet, so maybe that had something to do with it.
That girl, who was the daughter of one of the most respected duos of principal and teacher in the school system, definitely knew how to bully and manipulate adults. But she ended up dropping out of school. ha!
Another bully ended up joining some cult and cutting off contact with her family. double ha.
I hope that teacher got fired at some point.
And Dorothy, your points 1 and 2 well describe my experience in middle school.
Hahaha! That’s hilarious.
I do appreciate TinaH’s self-reflection on this issue, though. It’s easy to have a selective memory and remember the cruelties inflicted upon ourselves but not those we inflicted on others.
Which is not to say that “we’re all bullies.” There is a gradient of bullying behavior and some people are worse than others in that sense.
In regards to do kids who are bullied become bullies? I know anecdote is not evidence, but I was a bullied kid that became a bully. I was still getting bullied by the popular kids. But I became one of those misanthropic punk kids. We teamed up against the weaker of the popular kids and some of the other nerds who were even more outcast than we were. Sort of like in “Mean Girls” when you realize the alterna-chic and her best gay are also mean girls. I feel totally guilty about it to this day. In someways I think my bullying was even worse than the worst bullies because I should have been empathetic.
183 comments so far– this topic hits a big, angry nerve.
I was pretty seriously bullied through Elementary School and Junior High School. I honestly can barely remember a lot of specific incidents clearly - some kind of psychological defense mechanism, I guess. I do remember that kids used to try to make me cry or spazz out, and over time I taught myself not to. Since reaching adulthood, I’ve only been able to actually cry real tears once, when I found out a friend of mine had been sexually assaulted. Other than that one incident, I can’t cry, and in a way that strikes me as unhealthy.
I was in Grade 9 when Columbine happened. the bullying suddenly stopped. A friend of mine almost got kicked out of school for having a fake “hit list”, but his ploy worked, the kids whose names were on it were terrified of us. I didn’t occur to me until much later how horrifying it is that I was excited and pleased when Columbine happened, but that’s where I was at.
I found out recently that 2 kids who bullied me the worst in junior high school are in an absolutely atrocious rap band, which made my day.
My apologies if someone already brought this up, long thread…I read most of it but not all.
I think there are some class issues to bullying also. I was talking to my mom about getting terribly bullied in middle school but not at all in grade school. For years I thought that was standard because younger kids just aren’t as mean as tweens. But as noted on this thread alot of people experience bullying in grade school. My mom thinks it’s because my grade school was in a neighborhood where we were all lower middle class to poor kids. But my middle school included kids from many different financial situations. I remember part of how I made it through middle school was to keep my friendships with the poor boys I grew up with. They turned into rough necks who weren’t necessarily bullies but also weren’t afraid to get in a fight if provoked and came to my defenses on more than one occasion.
Bullying happens in both public and private schools. In fact I will argue its rewarded more in many private schools and worse things happen, because the bullies parents are often big donors.
I was a target of extremely severe bullying since I was five until I was 14.
I am writing this largely because I am a trans woman, and I would like to break a common myth, because it is related directly to how kids are bullied in school and how they are targeted. This deals directly with the myth of a normal childhood for trans people and concepts of privilege that are often assumed, especially with regards to trans women. If a trans person in general is defensive, it is because many had to deal with the worst part of society throughout much of their life.
Young transkids and queer kids are often targeted. Why? Because our natural behavior is often very different from norms imposed upon children, and enforced by those who are bullies. I will be flat out in saying my life in both grammar school and middle school, was a constant of physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse and harassment. I knew I was different since I was very young (but I did not quite figure out my gender identity until I was 10 or 11). I was a very queer kid, in many ways typical of many who do end up transitioning. I always wondered why I had to endure so much abuse though for who I was.
Those who were in charge rarely punished the bullies, thankfully they rarely punished me either. But because I was bullied at school, I was bullied at home as well, and endured physical abuse from my parents. Their solution, just take the bullying and it will eventually stop, while at the same time punishing me for the incidents. The truth was I could barely go outside until I was 14 without fear of one of my neighbors cornering me and enduring potentially hours of abuse and often torture. I was a very shy and timid kid to begin with, but the relentless abuse put me constantly on edge.
Middle school was by far the worst, their were numerous occasions I was tortured by other children, and instances of humiliating sexual abuse as well. By then I knew my gender identity issues, but refused to talk about them for fear of even worse treatment.
You wonder why trans people end up being closeted into adulthood and often suffer from depression and anxiety, bullying a big reason why. Some assimilate better then others as a way closeting themselves, and do not face bullying. I never did fully assimilate because quite simply I could not escape who I was, but without question I did remain closeted in different ways. I was always seen as queer when I was a child and never could escape that. I tried to hide who I was, but I didn’t know how. I was socially isolated, but without question continuously suffering.
My gender variant behavior did not change in high school, in fact I was able to come out a bit more. What happened is the environment I was in had a no tolerance policy for bullying and identified potential targets of bullies early on. I could go on, but I went to high school during the right time and in the right place to avoid much of the pain of earlier in my youth, and found a surprisingly welcoming environment considering I was very queer. I still had fear, but I was able to be myself a bit more.
I figured out why I was bullied eventually, but I could not stop being myself. It did not make a ton of sense, because the truth is in many cases the targets of bullying are just being themselves, but often by being themselves, be it queer, smart, poor, or just a little weird, these kids end up with scars that never quite go away.
Simone De Beauvior in the Ethics of Ambiguity best explained the abuses of children on other children as children emulating and enforcing the society of adults in an exaggerated form. She was a school teacher, and to tell you the truth she was very tapped into the problems of bullying in schools and how adults often just reinforce and reward the bullies because they are in fact enforcing some social construct of adulthood, and social constructs which are ultimately harmful because they are based on a false construct of normalcy. Simone’s work is often ignored by teachers and administrators, even though it should be required reading with regards to bullies. She directly addresses the root of the problem, and honestly puts forth the best explanation of why it exists.
The myth that I, or any other trans woman in any way was privileged growing up just because of my birth sex…really needs to die. Trans kids suffer, and the only reason why trans women tend to be a bit more defensive at times, is because the societal cost of who we are results in defensiveness. Gender variance has severe consequences in terms of bullying. Its not male conditioning and privilege that made us this way, or the fact that we feel that our voice is any more important. Rather it is the fact that we have been struggling with this since we were very young, and some of us had a very high price to pay just because of who we were. We know what its like to be bullied, we know the systems of abuse. So when we finally claim our identities as our own, and begin to break free of the fear and begin to accept who we are and what needs to be done, it makes us a little defensive when someone discredits our core identity. We have to live in a society that has enforced upon us, in the worst ways possible, the consequences of being different.
Trans people, especially trans women, have suffered from bullying. We know the enforcement mechanisms of the patriarchy and how it is reinforced from childhood on. Why? Because many of us could not escape the abusive behavior of those bullies that in a way act as childhood enforcers of these societal constructs. I was in no way privileged in my youth, and I am not defensive because of male socialization. Bullying and the fear it brings was part of this struggle one must endure if they cannot hide gender variant behaviors. I am not sure how anyone can call that privilege, like any oppressed group, some of us deal with the mechanisms of oppression since a very young age, and in some cases in the worst ways possible.
As it stated in this article, bullying and sexual harassment and intimidation often go hand in hand. People make these assumptions of ideal childhoods, when often the case is oppression is often rooted in childhood. Those who are queer, be it because of sexual orientation or gender identity, often find bullying and harassment to be prominent part of their past.
“I had the crazy mom who took kids to court.”
Word; having crazy parents is such a help. In junior high, there was a group of girls bullying my sister; the ringleader would call our house and threaten her.
One time, my father grabbed the phone from my sister and growled, “Listen up, you little bitch. If you call this house ONE MORE TIME, I’m gonna reach right through this phone and rip yer fuckin’ lungs out.”
No more phone calls after that.
I have to chime in and say that I don’t begrudge anyone self defense. I am a person who buries pain deep inside, but I’ve lashed out a few times in my life when provoked enough by bullying, and it’s worked most of the time. I don’t think that’s brutality. That’s self defense.
Right in one, Ms Kate. Not once did the principal check on my daughter; she was too worried about getting my vocal ass off of the school property- can’t have this sort of thing going on in front of all of the other parents! (and boy, were they shocked)
Once outside and waiting at the end of the parking lot with glaring principal standing arms crossed, I was able to flag down a friend who retrieved my daughter and walked her to me. Once I made sure Mary was okay and just badly shook up, I immediately went to the town office/police station, where the secretary got the one police officer on duty to meet with me.
I gave a full report, as did my daughter, and he went to the school. As soon as I got the letter from the principal, I went to the police chief- he assured me that if she called, he would have to come to the school, but she had no legal authority to forbid me the school. It was 2 weeks’ before the end of school, so we decided to have my husband fetch our kids to be on the safe side.
Come September, she set up a meeting in front of the middle school teacher and allowed as how I could come back to the elementary school. And I got a snotty letter later detailing our meeting and stating that she expected more appropriate behavior from me in the future.
I fucking hate this woman, as do other parents- she terrifies many. Would you believe she was voted Principal of the Year in Maine within the past decade??
Yes, the same way that victims of abuse often go on to become abusers themselves.
I don’t think t his is true. Women don’t as a general rule do this; women are taught to punish themselves, not others. Men are taught to blame others and act accordingly.
Louise,
You might consider sending that principal an equally snotty letter, from your lawyer on your lawyer’s letterhead if you can manage it, that basically parrots her words back, and inform her that YOU expect better behavior from HER this year. Furthermore, you fully expect and demand that she will deal with all incidents of student harrasment or bullying in a prompt and appropriate manner, by which to say NOT attacking the parent of the harrassed and/or abused student, while failing to address the abuse at all. Remind her that your taxed pay her salary, and as her boss, you WILL hold her accountable for her failure to deal with bullying in any meaningful way.
Fight nasty letter with nasty letter, I say. The principal is herself a bully, and someone needs to call her on it.
Bast
Thanks, Bast… but it’s been a few years now. I wimped and backed down for the sake of my youngest autistic daughter, who was in kindergarten at the time- didn’t want any backflap to befall HER.
Adult bullying SUCKS.
I think it varies from school to school, but the notion that it doesn’t happen in private schools is pure horseshit. The administration at my junior high basically took the view that no children as elite and heavily scheduled as we were would ever have time to do déclassé things like bullying, drugs, drinking or sex. When bullying and cliquishness happened it was all brushed off as not real, not important, because Our Kids Don’t Do Stuff Like That (even when they do). Also, where you stood in the academic pecking order determined, to some extent, whether any adult in authority would defend you from other kids’ bullying. Kids with mediocre grades were “bad” and therefore not as important.
Like many of the above commenters, I was emotionally bullied all through grammar and high school. Those years taught me several things:
1) to be terrified or suspicious of people/constant and near-crippling social anxiety;
2) to apologize constantly and profusely, especially for demonstrating any intelligence;
3) that you are alone, because the people who are supposed to protect you won’t.
My worst experience was in the 4th grade, at the hands of a teacher who hated me. I came to her crying after lunch because the same kids were being the same kind of cruel, and just as the rest of the class was filing back into their seats she rolled her eyes and said “Let’s all cry like her! Waah, waah waaah!” And the whole class joined in what remains the most humiliating experience of my life.
I didn’t tell my parents. By then I had been conditioned to think such incidents were my fault.
I guess this cloud kind of has a silver lining, because when my brother (who is much younger) started to complain about bullying (from classmates and eventually from the same 4th grade teacher) and our parents started on the “Ignore them and they’ll go away track” I flew off the handle. I finally told them that line was a crock of sh*t and it hadn’t done me a d*mn bit of good and the next year he transferred to the public middle school where life was, if not perfect, substantially better.
Reading this thread was very painful but very cathartic. And I hope Billy gets justice.
Louise,
Perhaps you should write those who awarded her principal of the year and detail her actions and her communications in writing.
Copy to the major regional paper, of course.
Classic example of “you pointed out a problem and that makes you disrespectful because you are accusing somebody of not doing their job” attitude of pseudosmall and small town new england. Never mind that there is a problem and it isn’t being taken care of … easier to kill the messenger than erode a perfect personality cult.
Like I said before, with the noted and documented shortage of administrators in the region, anybody who has been in a single position (particularly the superintendent) for more than five years is truly suspect.
Oh, and I started carrying - overtly - in HS when it became clear that no one was going to protect me, that my “friends” would all look the other way when I was harrassed, because they were so embarrassed to be around the school pariah (I was ugly, my mother dressed me funny until I started dressing myself protoGoth at which point I became marginally scary, four-eyes, short, nerdy, with a stammer, and my family were poor weird religious freaks from outside the state, no family and associates locally to back me up) and even the guy who wanted to date me - as he admitted after we were graduated - would pretend he didn’t see *his own fucking friends* harassing me in the caf or hallways. (He never did understand why I wasn’t interested in getting together with him after, that it was as the song says, ‘a little too late to do the right thing now’.)
So I started letting it be known that I was carrying illegal knives of all kinds, instead of carrying them secretly (for sharpening my pencils). I also took an 18″ steel ruler from the art room, and kept it with me at all times. I slashed a guy feeling me up, with it on the stairs, and after that they kept out of touching distance.
And strangely enough they never reported me, and I grew more and more lawless and anarchic, while outwardly conforming. I had followed all the rules, I had been a good girl, and the reward was to be hunted and terrorized. (I got really good at disappearing, in plain sight, too, to the point where I can’t always stop, even when it scares people - I don’t mean to go ninja on them, I just tried so hard to be inaudible and make no sudden, attention-getting moves for too long.)
Yeah, no intention of ever going to reunions, either.
Historical reference for the record: in Little Women, Amy is bullied so badly by her classmates and the schoolmaster together that her mother pulls her out of class, so it’s not a Product Of Modern Times, either.
Lest
Ginmar, I do think it can partially be true - my parents were young and had themselves been abused, neglected, and exploited. They were decent people, but they really didn’t know how to parent without extremes because that was their skill set.
I think the same may be true of SOME of those who bully - their tactics are learned behavior. I know kids who had to be pulled aside and taught different by their peers because they had bully parents and bully older siblings and just didn’t know any better until they realized they couldn’t make friends that way.
Christy,
Thank you for opening up. I don’t think I’d ever assumed transwomen I knew had easier childhoods (the woman I knew best had so much in common with me), but I had never thought about how many transpeople would have been gender nonconformists at young ages, and thus targets.
Ismone
So, do no teachers read this blog? Let’s hear from them. (I guess they might be at work.)
Future teacher chiming in (now back from work):
I don’t see a lot of bullying going on in the large downtown high schools where I’ve been placed this year. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen—and there are other forms of violence, notably gang fights—but I’ve not actually witnessed a bullying incident. My friends who were placed in smaller schools have witnessed bullying.
This jives with my own youthful experience. In a small elementary/junior high school in a small, homogenous town, I was bullied like hell—emotionally, sexually, and occasionally physically. When I moved into a large high school in an ethnically diverse suburb, the bullying stopped. No one else seemed to get bullied either. The difference was a certain safety in numbers. There were also a lot of adults paying close attention to our well-being.
At any rate, I take the possibility of bullying seriously. I don’t want to be one of the teachers, like those in my grade school, who refused to believe me. So far all I’ve done is had a serious discussion with one boy about how he shouldn’t call his female friend a “bitch,” but at least it’s a start.
Reading this thread has been eye-opening. I think I mostly repress a lot of stuff from junior high and high school, but now that I think about it, it goes a long way to explain why I can be downright neurotic at times with disbelieving I’m attractive. Being told day in and day out that you are ugly takes its toll. Weirdly, the things that kids singled me out for in junior high and high school are things that I’ve come to appreciate are physical assets. Like my hair—I got teased daily about my hair. It’s really thick and unruly, which adults consider very sexy, but was a constant point of harassment. I just have a lot of hair. The kids called me Cousin It and would sing the Addams Family song at me.
I’m reminded of “The Mill on the Floss”, actually. Maggie’s unruly, thick hair draws nastiness and comments and Eliot is using it as a symbol of this sexuality that a rational society would enjoy but Victorian England had nothing but contempt for. I have to wonder if that was really what was going on, on a subconscious level. After all, other outward signs of sexual ripening were considered fair game for abuse, so why not hair?
It was critical not to have a sexual body. I remember girls mocking me for being a bit of an early developer, curves-wise. (Ironic too that as an adult, I’m not considered especially curvy.) I think, in retrospect, that the main issue was that it intimidated boys. Once the guys started to grow and were taller than the girls, the social punishments for having a womanly body slowed and stopped. I remember one girl who wasn’t, I’m sorry to say, very pretty at all. But during the years when the girls were ahead of the boys developmentally, she was a huge bully and one of the popular girls, because she was short and not intimidating and could flatter male insecurities, which is a lifelong skill, to be sure. I remember seeing her flirt and demure for junior high boys, and both being sickened at the way she was inflating these little kids’ egos and impressed with thinking she seemed more adult than she was. Because again, sucking up to men is a very adult skill that does a lot of women a lot of good until they get past an age where they can use their looks for this purpose.
Ironically, it was critical to be considered sexually attractive while simultaneously the little girl body was prized. Not having the attention of boys was social disaster. But to be sexually attractive, you conversely had to not be sexual looking.
In this, kids are just reflecting our popular culture, where women’s bodies are both sexualized non-stop, but also airbrushed, sliced up, dieted, and shaved to remove all threatening evidence of a genuine sexuality with its corollary appetites.
I wonder if the work of Alice Miller might not be relevant here, especially WRT the tendency of those in power to side with the bullies, and also WRT the endemic nature of bullying in our culture.
The truisms about cycles of violence and people learning abusive behavior from their abusive home lives don’t go far enough. Like ginmar says, there’s no epidemic of abused women taking out their frustrations on weaker targets. (I imagine that if there were, we’d be hearing all about it, what with the international repository for hypocritical misogyny that is the mass media).
But I think that, for people to change from being the victims of abuse to being its perpetrators, some additional steps need to be taken. Somehow, you have to distance yourself from victimhood, whether by identifying with your abuser (”It made me stronger/taught me to be a man,” that sort of thing), forgetting what it was really like (”Just ignore it and it will go away”) or blaming the victim (”You must have done something to provoke them/Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?”).
Any variation from gender norms does seem to be a common excuse for bullies. That’s why I think bullying has something to do with masculinity and/or patriarchy. But not completely–the one openly gay kid at my high school never got bullied because he was SO open about it and so unashamed that there was almost no point for the bullies. Being gay wasn’t a weak spot for him–you couldn’t call him a “fag” and expect it to hurt, because he’d just say “Yeah, I am, and you’re a dick” or something. It helped that he was an athlete, though.
How to handle it? For the individual kid who’s having trouble, violence does work for handling physical bullying, in my experience, but it doesn’t work for verbal bullying because then it makes the victim look like the bully to authorities. They’re “only words,” after all. So I’d recommend learning how to say “fuck you” in a firm, assured tone of voice–out of the hearing of teachers because, again, they’ll punish the victim–and walk away. Or “screw you,” to be safer.
But of course the individual kid has little power anyway. The administrators and teachers are the real authorities, and I second everyone who has said that the best thing they can do is intervene swiftly and severely. And do NOT tie the punishment to the victims’ complaints. Punish the bully whether the victim complains or not, even if the victim tries to excuse it.
Tangentially, jumping off of Christy’s comment that she wasn’t privileged in her youth because she was bullied: I think we have to be aware that bullying and privilege are often orthogonal to each other. The boy Billy in the article has male privilege, but because he “fails” at being a male–fails the test of strength and dominance and aggression–he gets bullied. Rich kids get bullied. Boys get bullied, sometimes by girls. Straight kids get bullied. Etc. The bullies are not always privileged but can come from broken homes or situations where they’re neglected. Not to excuse them, because there is no excuse.
Re: gender non-conformity.
I think that this is one of the biggest reasons I was harassed (verbal sexual harassment) from junior high on up. I am cicsgendered and heterosexual, so I can only imagine how much it might be for a young queer person. I was big (developing early sure as hell didn’t help — I was fully grown by the end of fifth grade), not quiet or self-effacing, wouldn’t ever wear a skirt (really, like once a year), really smart, and was a huge jock — like was on the football team in junior high kind of a huge jock.
Between the fact that I was not a girly-girl, and how early I could be viewed as a sexual being (one with breasts and hips, and who bled from the crotch every month — how dare I be female in public), I was a prime target for harassers. And because I was not doing the female thing and disappearing (manifested as being thin as can be, not speaking, bleaching hair, removing body hair regularly, avoiding physical activity and so on), I was public property.
The other reason, which has been mentioned above, is economics. Now, it’s not that my family has a poor background — we’re working to middle class, depending on how you measure it (mom comes from a working class family and is a housewife, dad from a middle/professional class family and owns a small business, and my family has never been short on money, but that’s cause my mom actually abides by the middle class value of thrift, not cause there’s tons of it laying around). It’s just that I grew up on the north shore of Long Island, where lots of people have lots of money. So, especially when I was in elementary and middle school, we were less well off by comparison. Hand-me-downs and sneakers that weren’t brand name were verboten, and that’s most of what I wore (lots of older female relatives=lots of hand-me-downs), so I was too. (Sometimes parents and educators think that having school uniforms will solve this problem. I’ve always figured it won’t, because there will always be distinctions between shoes and jewelery and accessories and hair styles that will distinguish socio-economic status.)
Also, I just didn’t get it. I had never experienced mean kids until then, and just didn’t get it. I didn’t have an innate understanding of class distinctions that some of my classmates did, and this puzzled me for a very long time. Same with the gender thing. It will be interesting in a few years, when I go to my high school reunion — and I do plan to go. Cause now I have the words and the theories and the scholarship to back me up.
Being gay wasn’t a weak spot for him–you couldn’t call him a “fag” and expect it to hurt, because he’d just say “Yeah, I am, and you’re a dick” or something. It helped that he was an athlete, though.
My kids and their friends know that there is nothing wrong with being gay - it is natural and normal. Since early grade school, they have completely confounded hate-programmed kids who sling that at them with “well, I don’t know if I am yet, but was that supposed to be an insult” behavior. Somehow, five or six kids shaking their heads and saying “nothing wrong with being gay” really sucks the wind out of kids who want to make that some sort of demeaning insult.
My favorite:
Random older kid, yelling: FAGGOT! FAGGOT!
#2 son to #1 Son: Hey! Wow! A new type of Pokemon!
(pokemon say their names and that’s all they can say)
My daughter was targeted in junior high after she was outed.
This extended to physical assaults, including pushing her down the stairs.
The day I found out about this, I was in the vice principal’s office. Imagine 250 lbs of truck-driving mama bear with a teacher husband who knows all the laws and rules of Arkansas.
We made it clear that we considered this an infringement on her bodily integrity, an attack driven by homophobia and religiously-based (pagan in the Bible Belt).
Within a day, the worst of it–attacks and thefts–had stopped. The petty shit: cliques and snubs and such, that never does stop.
I was bullied in middle school when i moved to a new school & they had co-ed gym classes; the boys were allowed to sexually harass & intimidate, belittle , etc… despite the teacher stepping in, they got around it. It was so awful i made my mom write me note to get me out of gym for the 2 years i was there under a bullshit asthma excuse. It didnt stop it completely & of course made me a target in of itself…there were times in those two years where i actually lay in bed & tried to break my fingers or toes silently, so sick at heart , sad, depressed, lonely & terrified i was at the preospct of another day at that school…you never knew what kind of humiliation & harm the next day held. and of course i couldnt talk to anyone, becuase again, they blame you …the disappointment, the blame…is all pointed at the victim.
It petered out, minus some few instances, in high school, but i still am easily intimidated & have a hard time with adult bullies. I usually stand up for myself , its now my default, but when youre afraid of losing a job in a scarce market..you end up swallowing too much shit, & that makes me physically sick.
when my nephew was in grade school & physically bullied by a gang of boys, i told him exactly what to do– hit the ringleader before he hits you, next time, & told him exactly where. it worked.
my niece had a guy who was sexually harassing her & feeling her up…she hit him with her hockey stick. problems solved. i am still proud of her.
in a better culture, this wouldnt be the solution; but in the one we have, you have to protect yourself. both physically & emotionally; my years of being bullied & having to disappear inside myself,make myself hidden, lose my self-worth…took it’s toll in painful & lasting ways…pretty much crippled me.
so some physical punishment (nothing too harmful or lasting) meted out to protect yourself is a positive.
I was bullied in junior school by my - female cliche time! - so-called friends. Read Atwood’s Cat’s Eye - it’s nearly my story. All my parents would say was the standard ‘ignore it’. It got so bad that I ended up playing truant from school to avoid it. When I was found out, my headteacher decided to ‘resolve’ the issue by having me and The Bully say ’sorry’ to each other (at 9, that *I* had to say sorry was the worst injustice of all). The stupid, wimpy, clueless, spineless fuck.
I learned how to deal with bullies by myself soon after. I lost my temper, shouted, screamed ay my ‘friends’, told them we weren’t friends anymore, walked away and went and found a new friend. Soon after I found my voice and learned to shred anyone who tried to belittle me easily - make or female. It was always easy, because for the most part, I found the bullies in my school were the dumbshits, the belligerently stupid. I was quiet, sensitive and intelligent. I used my intelligence to sharpen my insults and my senstivity to learn to spot the potential aggressor’s weakness and use them against them.
Boys were sometimes troublesome, but rarely as much as my own sexm and could also easily be made to back off by almost symbolic acts of phsyical violence. It’s their language as bullies, and it’s only fair we speak it back to them from time to time. I learned this at ten when from desperation I punched a wannabe male bully who was trying to physically pin me down, in the face. Right in the nose, in fact. He cried, threatened to tell on me (to which I replied, fine, do it, I’ll tell them what you did to ME) and he never bothered me ever again.
The only way to beat bullies is to reduce their sense of pleasure and power at attacking others for pleasure and power. Cow them either verbally, physically or via the law and make them scared of the consequences of their bullying and they’ll stop it. Nothing else works because nothing else recognises the pleasure they get from bullying or that the see nothing inherently wring in what they do and never will. It’s the only tactic I’ve ever seen work in schools. This namby-pamby ‘let’s taaaaaaalk about it’ counselling crap even the smallest kids recognise for the cop-out it is. They learn how to please the adult while continuing with their behaviours as before.
Anyway, I never came across a single adult who had anything remotely constructive to say about resolving bullying when I was a child. Not one. This is because they all refused to see the world of children for the brutal place it is and applied adult ideas and values to it - ideas child bullies have no truck with. When my nephew - a small, thin, quiet, intelligent boy ie a natural target for the thuggish - started to be phsyically bullied at school, I gave him the advice someone should have given me - hurt the thing that starts on you back. I told him that if he was hit, to hit back, as hard as he could. if he was kicked - to kick back harder. He was confused. Teacher says hitting/kicking is wrong! Hitting/kicking is wrong, I explained, when you start it. Hitting back is called self-defence and self-defence is not wrong - it is necessary. He came home the next day triumphant - the usual bully boy had pursued him across the playground and thumped him and my nephew had remembered my advice and kicked him as hard as he could, in the shins, right back. The bully gawped, stared, whimpered and fucked-off, never to torment my nephew ever again and perhaps to think twice about targeting other children who were smaller and weaker-looking than himself. My nephew was never bothered by a school bully again. We sent him to martial arts classes for his own confidence and physical protection. He’s now a very lovely, still quiet, still non-aggressive 18 year-old art student who has barely been bothered by bullies since that first incident at his first school.
Btw, very little bullying went on at my high school because out headteacher believed that victims weren;t to blame, bullies were of bad character rather than poor innocent dears ‘acting out’ and made sure that they recieved the harshest punishments. Bullying was in consequence very rare at my high school. It’s endemic in schools now, of course, despite ‘anti-bullying codes’ (ie. useless talky, non-punishment, non-judgemental crap methods of approaching it) being de rigeur.
The one thing that helped me more than anything, when I was a miserable, awkward, friendless teenager, was the one day I spent at school with a cousin of mine. She went to a huge urban magnet school for gifted kids that was the polar opposite of my small, isolated, homogenous suburban high school. (Has anyone ever seen the documentary “Go Tigers!”, about Massillon, Ohio and its deranged high-school football culture, which has reached such a level of blind obsession that everyone in town openly admits that they’ll only vote to fund the school if it wins the playoffs? My hometown is one of Massillon’s football rivals, except we never won so we never got any funding.)
I was completely dumbfounded by what I saw that day. My cousin was a preppie/jock type, but she had artsy friends, nerdy friends, punk friends, friends of different races and backgrounds. Everyone seemed to get along and seemed happy to be there. It bore no resemblance to my experience of high school.
Now, I’m sure my cousin’s school had its own problems and its own share of bullying and pettiness. My point is that it meant a lot to see that there was a world outside the little pocket universe where I was getting kicked around. I had similar feelings a few years later when I went on college visits. I met people who were pretty much exactly like me, only they didn’t get treated like shit for it. Amazing!
In retrospect, I don’t feel a lot of rancor about having been bullied (and, later, ostracized; the worst bullying took place in middle school, and by high school I was so low on the pecking order that people just ignored me). If nothing else, it taught me the valuable lesson that a lot of people will do horrible things to other people just because they can, which has gone a long way toward explaining the last eight years of American government. I’m just sorry I wasted so much time thinking those kids’ opinions were valid or even important, and not understanding that it wasn’t a normal way to live.
Incidentally, in my experience the bullies were usually kids about midway up the social ladder. Their status was in constant jeopardy, so they picked on the kids beneath them to keep from falling behind. The most popular kids usually didn’t need to dirty their hands by dealing with the pariahs directly. Incidentally, I’ve encountered very few adults who think that they were popular or powerful in school. Everyone thinks they were a loser, even people who were clearly part of the popular set, because everyone spent those years feeling weird and threatened.
*so some physical punishment (nothing too harmful or lasting) meted out to protect yourself is a positive
I meant, as a kid.
as an adult, when someone comes at me full-tilt bullying, i have to restrain myself or my face goes entirely devil red & i will get just as nast back to them …& then not be able to cool off for a few hours, at least, & i cant afford to lose my cool.
A bit of my story I forgot to mention - in grade four, after screaming at some bullies to shut the fuck up when they were calling me names (which ones in particular, I forget) - I was forced into an “anger management course”, the bullies recieved no consequences. Some people just need to take “asshole management” courses.
I was bullied sporadically throughout school - the worst times were early on in high school - and while I developed strategies for dealing with the bullies, they weren’t necessarily good strategies.
Hitting back wouldn’t have done a lot of good, I don’t think.
What I needed, more than anything else was for the adults in my life, my parents and my teachers, to tell me clearly and feelingly that what was happening to me was not my fault.
There’s an open day/oral history day at my old school next month. It’s been over 20 years since I left: I’m thinking I have - almost - the courage to go back and actually record my real memories.
I was bullied sporadically throughout school - the worst times were early on in high school - and while I developed strategies for dealing with the bullies, they weren’t necessarily good strategies.
Hitting back wouldn’t have done a lot of good, I don’t think.
What I needed, more than anything else was for the adults in my life, my parents and my teachers, to tell me clearly and feelingly that what was happening to me was not my fault.
There’s an open day/oral history day at my old school next month. It’s been over 20 years since I left: I’m thinking I have - almost - the courage to go back and actually record my real memories.
Reading this thread has been eye-opening. I think I mostly repress a lot of stuff from junior high and high school, but now that I think about it, it goes a long way to explain why I can be downright neurotic at times with disbelieving I’m attractive.
Lord, yes. Once, when I was in middle school, my mother said to me, “I wish I could get my hands on whatever little asshole told you you were ugly.” She missed the point, of course. It wasn’t just one little asshole: the entire school treated me as ugly, gross, and unacceptable. And how could an entire school be wrong about something?
I had the opposite of the early-boobs problem; I was a late bloomer. I didn’t get my period until high school, and I never developed much in the way of breasts and hips. I guess the good part about being basically sexless until my late teens was that I never learned how to flirt and suck up to boys; I wasn’t curvy and “hot,” but neither was I petite and non-intimidating, so there was no point to learning how to play that game. I’m still baffled, and slightly in awe, when I see how easily and automatically some women do it.
I’ve noticed a lot of feminist women say they were either very early or very late bloomers sexually. Is it just because most women think they matured weirdly, the same way most people think they were uncool in high school, or does having an offbeat experience of developing into a woman make one hyper-aware of women’s issues?
We had Conflict Resolution classes in my elementary school (this would be circa 1992). We were taught about “I messages.” When someone did something mean, you were supposed to say “I feel bad when you do that mean thing.”
Of course every child in my class saw through this immediately, and to my knowledge, none of us used the “I messages,” except ironically. It makes me wonder, though — did the adults at my school really think that kids do cruel things to each other because they don’t know it hurts? Really? What a waste of time and resources.
I forgot the Cat’s Eye stuff. I remember, actually, being 11, when some of my “friends” would pick on me by stealing my pencil in class and passing it around while I flailed around trying to get it. (Stupid, but kid stuff IS stupid. I took to bringing about six pencils to class every day.) When I came too close to catching it, the ringleader of the group would grab my arm and twist it behind my back until it hurt so much that I begged her to stop. I remember once trying to retaliate — the only person I could successfully retaliate against was my oldest friend, someone who’d been close with me since we were 3. I twisted her arm, and they spent the rest of class time completely awful and out of line it was for me to do that. They were so insistent that I actually bought their bullshit about how it was okay for them to do it to me but not for me to do it to them, for a while anyway, and then I gave up and asked to be moved to a different set of desks in the classroom. They then started picking on the next lowest in the pecking order.
I still fucking hate that ringleader chick, and I still wonder why the teacher never noticed that there was a LOT of physical activity going on in the back in the room.
The day I found out about this, I was in the vice principal’s office. Imagine 250 lbs of truck-driving mama bear with a teacher husband who knows all the laws and rules of Arkansas.
Angela, I love you!
I really wonder how a kid can come home with so much damage and nothing gets done. If a kid came home from daycare with the damage that poor kid in the NYT article has, you better believe that there would be an investigation of all the care givers and kids in the program.
Maybe that is what is to be done - call child welfare and get them to investigate?? Is that possible?
This is what’s so stunning– what are these people thinking? Some parents with especially sheltered or foreign upbringings can probably be forgiven for being that naive or not knowing any better. But what about everyone else? Why do education professionals come across as so clueless?The best I can think of is just that lots of adults are searching for the solution that is the easiest for them to deal with. Telling the kids to ignore it absolves the adult of responsibility. Telling them to calmly explain to the other child that their behavior is hurtful puts the onus on the victim, rather than the perpetrator and the authority figures. But it’s easier for me to impute cluelessness to them, rather than malice or laziness.
School buses are the worst, they are fucking EVIL. All my worst abuse took place on the bus.
My first day of kindergarten, I got on the bus. I ended up sitting with a much older boy, because it was the only available seat. He informed me that he was the king of the bus, and that I had to do everything he said. It was all downhill from there.
When I was probably 10 or so, I was sitting on the bus, by myself (like I always did). I sneezed. I noticed that a little snot had gotten on the back of the seat, but I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t have a tissue and I didn’t want to wipe it off with my hand, so I left it there. Someone else noticed, and my own personal hell began (and lasted until I moved to a different school district). From that day forward, I was known as “Booger-Picker” (no, it doesn’t make any sense) and taunted endlessly. Because I fucking sneezed.
I was sat on because I wouldn’t move when the bullies demanded I did. They broke my glasses pushing me up against the window. Once I hit puberty at the age of 11, it turned sexual.
If you have kids, seriously consider not putting them on the bus (if possible, I am not insensitive to economic concerns - as noted, my poor ass was riding the bus)
Actually, that is part of bullying… bullies often ignore the reality of their actions, and don’t have any empathy.
Sometimes, sure, I bet that you can find out that this kid or that one thought it was just playful, or rough housing, and didn’t mean any harm. Sure, sometimes you might guilt a few kids out of participating in group bullying.
But most of the time? No.
About the only good thing I see that doing is, if a bullying victim has said something like that, it should completely remove the “but I was just playing!” defense. At that point, a protest that it was just playing/teasing/rough housing should go out the window, and cruel and unusual punishment applied.
(Okay, just kidding about the cruel and unusual… but only barely. I think schools should come down on clear cut cases of bullying like the proverbial ton of bricks, if only to emphasize how totally unacceptable it is.)
Ah, that is a good point. That was definitely not how my classmates and I interpreted the lesson, though.
remember those sociopath stats? somewhere between 2-4% of the pop? well, sociopaths are by-and-large born sociopathic… so if you want to handle bullying correctly, youre going to have to come to terms with the fact that a certain number of kids are sociopathic, ie, they dont have too much or any empathy & they enjoy making people suffer.
He has tried to step in when this happens and has often been told by the girl, “it’s fine, I don’t want your help.” I think there is a fear of beeing tormented more if the girl “allows” a teacher to help her.
Or, fear of how the administration will respond.
My absolute worse experience came around when my home room teacher in high school tried to protect me from the bullies. I had been beaten up in the mud before home room–she got me cleaned up and reported the incident to administrators over my protests.
By the end of the next period I had two administrators screaming at me about how I needed to alter my behavior to stop inciting the bullies, how if it happened again, it would be cause for expulsion, and multiple required sessions with the school counselor in which the proper answer to how I was going to change my situation was “I will alter my behavior so not to aggravate or annoy [the primary bully].”
I grew up in a family with a dad in the Air Force, i.e. we moved a lot, *always* in the middle of the school year. So, I went through grammar school and jr. high always being “the new kid”. Add in gay, braces and glasses and you get the idea.
8th grade, 1974: some dude makes it his life’s mission to torment me. He succeeds, ’til one day in art class he threw some clay at me, which hit my glasses and caused the metal frames to push down in to my nose. It hurt!
I walked over to him, pushed him against the wall and started to strangle him, I mean, I was going to choke the life out of him. I’ll never forget as long as I live the look of panic in his eyes–but I kept tightening the pressure. I was finally pulled off of him by other students and a totally freaked-out teacher. I was never bullied after that at that school.
What I remember most from that is the cold fury, how my mind went blank. I simply wanted to annihilate him, erase him from existence and I would have too without the intervention. 99% of the time, I’m an introverted bookworm/music fanatic, but I just snapped that day.
I want to second everyone who has stated that “advice” from adults such as “ignore it”, “turn the other cheek”, or “you need to be friends with everyone” does not work. One particular White catholic kid really enjoyed tormenting me with racist epithets and beatings until I got so fed up one day after school that I started to stone him with every rock I could find in the schoolyard. Though I was told I risked being suspended and my parents were furious that I “was in a fight”, thankfully the principal had a clue. She has known about this kid and tried to put a stop to it to no avail. Now that his parents were complaining, her reply was simply that if their son had not been assaulting me that this stoning would not have happened and that if his behavior persisted, he would be expelled. From that point on, all bullying in that Catholic school stopped.
Unfortunately, the cycle repeated itself when I entered a public junior high school on the upper east side of NYC with a good academic reputation. In that case, not only was being the smallest and a Chinese kid an issue, but also many teachers simply could not be bothered to deal with the extensive bullying situation. After attempting to deal with it with school authorities as my parents were foreign-born and did not understand the dynamics of American school culture*, the bullying was only settled when I and two other similarly bullied friends had at it in an after-school fight in 8th grade where we surprisingly cleaned the bullies’ clocks.
This triumph along with the news I managed to gain admission to a public urban magnet school and thus, would not have to deal with as much physical violence in high school was a relief. This would prove to be an illusion that would be sadly shattered. Though physical violence ceased, I started to experience the wonders of being verbally bullied and taunted for not conforming to that high school’s culture of having stupendously high grades, SATs, mountains of extracurriculars/outside achievements, and admission to Ivy level colleges/universities with large scholarships/financial aid grants. Parents were of no help in this situation as they blamed me for bring this upon myself by not performing as well as my peers.
Fortunately, there was some karmic payback as many of those formerly high achieving students who got admitted to Ivy-level colleges were the same ones whining to me about being jobless for three years after the dot-com bust during my last high school reunion while I was gainfully employed and financially independent. This did upset them as they probably thought “How could an academic screwup like that who graduated from a “lower-level college”** do far better than us?!!”
* My parents are still having a hard time dealing with the fact that being the smartest kid in the class would garner hatred to the point of physical violence in many American schools. In China/Taiwan of their childhood/adolescence, being the class genius usually made you the most admired/popular kid.
**My public urban high school’s culture was so screwed up that any college/university other than HYP, or other schools of similar prestige were considered “lower-level”. Part of this was fostered by teachers and administrators who heaped attention on the top 10-15% of the class while ignoring everyone else.
I went to an elementary and middle school where bullying simply was not tolerated. As in, if you bullied someone else, no one would talk to you. It just wasn’t cool and didn’t happen. I’m not really sure how it worked but I was very happy. Probably had a lot to do with the conflict resolution stuff we did. If the teachers saw anyone fighting, physical or not, they got pulled out of the playground and had to sit down and talk to whomever they were fighting with. So you’d see kids as young as kindergarten solving their problems with talking. And then then classes were small and the kids were friendly. Anyway, the point is that it was an amazing environment. I seriously never had a bullying issue there, not once. I think once we had someone try to tease a friend in my class, a kid with Aspergers, and the entire class stood up for him. It was a good time.
But it also meant when I went to high school, I was totally unprepared for how vicious other people could be. I mean, I know students outside my school probably weren’t as nice but I did not expect the level of nastiness that went on, especially in my all girls catholic school. I actually became extremely depressed and suicidal. My dad did the whole ‘you just need to try to fit in, maybe wear skirts more often and try to like their kind of music’ thing, which I just couldn’t do.
I was lucky, my mom spotted how messed up I was and got me in therapy. When I finally told her and my therapist the whole story of my bullying experience, my mom was PISSED, particularly since some of it had come from my school administration. Unfortunately, my school can’t be legally forced to do anything. But I’ve gone ahead and talked to as many of the friendly teachers as I could and gone into the counseling center to update their resources for the bullied.
But in the case of my school, it seems less victim blaming and more that the administration is trying to deny that bullying happens at their school at all. Seriously, I’ve been told it doesn’t happen at my school.
Thank god I’m almost out, only two more months!
/rambling rant
What I am, and have been doing throughout this thread, is asking if anyone has a better idea than ignore it or use violence. I genuinly would like to hear other ideas so that I can have a better plan when my own children face this.
If I hear about anything close to the same shit that happened to me happening to my son, I will be IN the office of the administrators demanding a stop to it, and if that doesn’t bring an end to it, filing reports with the police and pursuing civil claims against the bullies, their parents, and the school district.
The victim ignoring it does not stop it, but only creates guilt and hopelessness in the victim as it continues (as the victim wonders time and time again how she or he is causing it to continue). I also plan to place my son in a martial arts form that focuses on self-defense, probably around 4-5 years of age. (We have a local dojo you buy a family membership in and take all the classes you want–we’ll be going there.)
I remember hearing about the girl who successfully fought a civil suit against her school for permitting the bullies to continue to make her life miserable and I envied her greatly.
but I did not expect the level of nastiness that went on, especially in my all girls catholic school
Ha. It was an all-girls Catholic high school where I had the two administrators in my face, blaming me for my bullying.
One particular teacher did this….except he placed most of the blame on the bullying incidents on us rather than the bullies. In effect, this was seen by us bullied as another punishment for being victims while the bullies sat back and enjoyed this effective teacher cop-out of actually finding out who was responsible for the bullying and actually holding THEM accountable.
Though I forget his name, I never forgot his face or the weaseling excuses he made when I happened to spot him a few years later when he happened to be visiting my high school. Basically, he was so afraid of having to deal with any controversy or conflict that he would rather punish the bullied and effectively convey to the bullies that they got away with it. He was also so clueless when I clearly stated my disgust at his unwillingness to stop the bullying and hold the bullies accountable that he didn’t understand as he thought what he did “worked”.
That is deplorable. I hope they get enough to send him to a private school.
That is absolutely deplorable. I hope they get enough money to send him to a decent private school.
This was similar to my experience. In a school like that, you have to contend with the fact that a lot of administrators, teachers, and parents think that kids who get good marks are good people and therefore won’t do bad things, or that the hazing is beneficial because “all it does” is provide an “incentive” to do schoolwork and/or develop a thicker skin. It was acceptable, in my school, for kids to snicker and loudly whisper “stupid” whenever someone without social clout gave an incorrect answer in class.
Ms. Kate, my mum and dad were old hands at child raising—I was the youngest of five living children, and that was out of a total of 12. Mum endured seven miscarriages or stillbirths. I had a great many health problems, and those didn’t lessen till I was in my teens. What did matter, though, was the fact that I was much smaller than my contemporaries. They didn’t feel any compunction about attacking me physically when I was half their size. Oh,yeah, and my family was ill in general besides. White trash, you know. That’s just what happens. My mum, my da, my sisters and my brothers—-they spent months upon months in a TB sanitorium, not like rich white people would have to deal with that.
Am I bitter?
White trash and all, you figure it out. Let ‘em die, say the rich white people. My whole family’s been nailed by TB but for me, and with me, it’s been the whole twelve weeks early thing. I was born at 24 weeks. I spent 15 weeks in hospital. Nobody paid my hospital bills. And then I went to Iraq.
I genuinly would like to hear other ideas so that I can have a better plan when my own children face this.
My brother was bullied in Jr. High and it was covered up by Vice-Principal until a teacher told Mother Avenger about it.
She responded by pulling my brother out of school, and wouldn’t let him go back until she was assured that Brother Avenger wouldn’t be in harms’ way when he returned.
That’s what I would do if bullying wasn’t handled properly by the school my child was attending.
Definitely a lot of that. What made things more absurd was the school culture was such that kids whose achievements would objectively be considered good or outstanding would also be considered “stupid” for having marks less than 91%/100 or SATs lower than 1300 (pre-1995). What was more ironic was that there was not as much of a class component as one would think at such a public magnet as most kids at the time were eligible for reduced/free school lunches under the NYC school system and later, sizable financial aid/grants/college scholarships.*
It was more of a Darwinian environment where cutthroat academic competitiveness among the student body was highly encouraged….to the point that some students would literally have emotional meltdowns from receiving a “poor grade” of 95% in a report card full of 99% grades. Heck, I knew one sophomore who ended up with a serious stomach ulcer from all of this.
* While this atmosphere was so demanding and stressful that it was good preparation for college life, it is an experience I would only recommend to adolescents who are able to thrive or at least cope in a cutthroat environment without expecting much handholding from teachers or the administration. It is a reason why an uncle opted to send his daughter to a private prep school instead.
Ophelia… the buses are so bad. Hugs…
I drive my younger autistic child back and forth every day; older kid likes riding the morning bus because she can gab with some friends about anime cartoons, but I also pick her up in the afternoon. So 3 trips from home to the schools every day.
Schedule permitting, husband tags along and we make it a family event like having meals together- just part of our daily routine to talk and connect.
exholt, I averaged 89.9 for my 4 years of high school (disastrous year of geometry with my only D, 2 C’s and finally a B)- kicked myself for YEARS that I missed the 90% mark!
I was bullied by the queen bee clique in junior high to the point of crying every night and dreading waking up in the morning. Then my (also outsider/bullied) older sister introduced me to punk rock, and that was that. It’s hard for (non-physical) bullies to get a hold of you when you honestly don’t give the slightest fluttering fuck what they think of you, and additionally think that they’re the ones who are so uncool as to be beneath your notice. (Which is different than actually caring what they think and trying to ignore them.) I think I was just lucky, though, to be honest; the punk rock scene in my home town during the early to mid 1980s was a vibrant, strong culture that gave all kinds of outsiders a home. I hope those kinds of family-like subcultures still exist for creative, different kids.
When they had kids, my older sister and brother in law emphasized to their two sons all through their lives, from toddler-age on, that being different was the way to be cool, and that people who made fun of them for being different were the lame ones. They backed this up by teaching both boys how to fight like one hundred angry badgers. My older nephew turned out to be a state champion wrestler, but would wear these outfits to school that were just insanely hilarious-looking. My sister asked him one time (as he headed out the door in slippers, plaid flannel pants, an old-man long coat and a furry earflaps-hat with tons of punk band buttons all over it) “Don’t people make fun of you?” and he replied earnestly, “Oh no, only my friends make fun of me!”
So, early indoctrination that different=cool, conformity=lame, plus teaching physical defense, worked for my sister’s kids. I intend to follow the same recipe with my kids and hopefully it will work as well as it has for them. Of course, no one knows. I just hope my kids don’t have to go through the same self-doubt and sadness that I (and my older sister) did.
Bullying has a lot of later byproducts, some of which are extremely dangerous. Someone who is bullied may realize what’s going on and find refuge with other “weirdos” and creative people and find solace in knowledge, something a bully never pursues. However, it’s equally as likely that the low self-esteem caused by bullying will cause the victim to lose all faith in humanity and himself become violent and withdrawn, believing that no one is on his side. Just look at these crazy white boys who end up shooting up their schools. They were all social outcasts who want revenge on people who belittled them, and by the point that they’ve snapped, they don’t care if the revenge hits some innocent bystanders, because to him they’re ALL in on it.
And then you’ve got the bullies themselves, who grow up to be insufferable pricks who bring up their past indiscretions at friendly gatherings and have a good laugh about it (I have a female acquaintance who does this exact thing: “Yeah, I was a huge bully in elementary school. That’s just who I am.” Matter-of-factly, with no remorse!)
Its a tough one, grades 3-8 I was definitely a bully. Looking back on it I think it was because I had a stutter as a young child. Being made fun of was very hurtful so I turned that hurt and anger into hurting others. The stutter went away around 5th or 6th grade but I stayed the same guy until right before high school. Not quite sure what more the school could have done, therapy was mandated for me, both 1 on 1 and with the therapist and my victim, tons of learning, workshop type stuff, working with my parents and administrators and still it did not stop. Some of the kids would call in an older brother to “sort me out” but I knew no one over 14 or 15 let alone over 18 could touch me as the adults faced legal ramifications and the 14 or 15 year olds would catch a lot of flak for beating a 10 or 12 year old. I was also covered by my academic accomplishments, not all bullies are blockheads and I consistently scored in the 99th percentile in all state tests and was among the students in our first “gifted and talented” program that was so important to many of the parents. I think thats why the administration of this very liberal school system tried to save me rather than send me to juvenile hall. I woke up late in 8th grade after getting into a fight with 2 other boys, sending one to hospital and I realized how idiotic and dangerous what I was doing was. Not a whole lot could have been I don’t think, I know there are more tools available now than the mid-80’s but its a tough situation. High school may be a bit different.
A thousand times WORD on the school bus issue. Had a pair of twin boys a couple of years older than me who were the scourge of my bus from my 4th grade year through my 9th, when they finally got driver’s licenses. Six years of HELL, I tell you.
I don’t care how inconvenient it is, if I hear a peep about trouble on the school bus, I’m driving my son in from there on out.
My wife is pregnant. And I plan on getting my kid self defense lessons when it’s old enough.
If you are thinking about doing this, the best taught martial arts in the US tend to be boxing and wrestling. They are very effective arts, even though they don’t sound as good as Karate, Tae Kwon Do, etc. If you insist on going with something different, there are many good threads on sherdog.net talking about which arts might be appropriate or not for children. Judo is often cited as a good alternative to wrestling. If you look at a Karate/TKD/whatever school and your kid can be a black belt by age 14, they’re teaching something nearly worthless.
My observation is that a number of my classmates either burned out in their early twenties or had little emotional meltdowns when they realised that the line the administration had been feeding them (basically, that having gone to this school would be their ticket to whatever they wanted) was bullshit. Virtually nobody outside our city had heard of our school or knew how to “properly” evaluate their hard-earned 90s.
(Wow–over 200 comments and not a single troll! That’s probably a record!)
We had Conflict Resolution classes in my elementary school (this would be circa 1992). We were taught about “I messages.” When someone did something mean, you were supposed to say “I feel bad when you do that mean thing.”
Well, the initial “I message” is only the first step: the other person’s response is critical. And this technique is useful for handling teasing not bullying.
When someone says something that hurts your feelings, you tell them so, as calmly as possible without escalating into hurting them back. Then, one of two things will happen:
1) The person apologizes, doesn’t call you that nickname/whatever again, and you both go on your merry way.
2) The person doesn’t give a shit whether you’re hurt and continues to “tease” you the exact same way (or even escalates the “teasing”). At this point, you have identified the person as a bully, and you stay the hell away from them.
The biggest help we gave our daughter for dealing with emotional bullies was “It’s them–there’s nothing wrong with you.” We carefully explained that bullies just enjoy hurting people and they will always find something to use against you, no matter what you do or say: they are broken, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t end the bullying, but it has really helped stave off the emotional damage (that I endured): we make sure she doesn’t internalize any of the negative messages bullies use against her. One school year, it took counseling to break that cycle, but she’s been handling it OK since then.
So far, we’ve been lucky that she’s only had to deal with temporary bullies: they have all moved on to someone else. I’m not sure what to do about a truly dedicated bully who won’t let her walk away, and I honestly hope I don’t have to find out. And if she ever ends up dealing with a physical bully, there would be police and lawyers involved.
Sorry, an addendum to my previous comment. This wikipedia article talks about the things you should look out for when joining a MA club: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDojo.
the matthew show, YIKES!! My dad was a bullying twin!!
First day, senior year of HS, trigonometry/calculus class. The teacher is meeting us all, when he comes to my name. Stops and stares at me, asks who my father was. I told him- then Mr P preceeds to tell me and the class how my dad and his older brother used to bully Mr P as a kid behind the school!!
I got A’s/ B’s and enjoyed the class, but GAWD was I nervous for the first few weeks…
Dorothy, put your child in martial arts. You don’t have to use it on people. It’s enough for word to get around. Even now I keep my broken boards in the office from my belt tests. When someone is being nasty on the phone or in my office, I take one and play with it. I remember breaking it. Your attitude comes through and people back off. When someone has a problem with me, they usually try to deal with me through underlings because direct confrontation does not work out well for them.
I should add that both our kids are blackbelts - no bullying in middle school yet, and we make it very clear that they can’t ever use their skills to bully others - even each other.
It’s truly mind-boggling that whenever bullying comes up these days, the responsibility is always on the victim to “toughen up” or “ignore it”—but never on the one doing the bullying to be held accountable or act civilized.
Same goes for the recreational harassment that happens online and the reprehensible individuals who think that sort of behavior is “funny.”
It’s truly mind-boggling that whenever bullying comes up these days, the responsibility is always on the victim to “toughen up” or “ignore it”—but never on the one doing the bullying to be held accountable or act civilized.
Same goes for the recreational harassment that happens online and the reprehensible individuals who think that sort of behavior is “funny.”
People believe REASONING with their 2 year old in the middle of the grocery store makes sense. People believe a lot of shit-stupid stuff.
There are even organizations that specialize in bullying.
Not proud of this:
on the topic of bullying:
I specifically went to my 10 yr. h.s. reunion to bitch out a man who barked at me (and more (also called me “cow” when I became anorexic (WTF?))all through middle school, to the end of h.s., oh, wait… then I had a class with him at college. Poor dear dropped the class (he was starting crap up, again, freshman or sophomore year) we shared, and some guy friends offered to “handle” him. (But, I was already making plans to do so, myself- probably just engage in some emotional scarring/bitch-slapping) So, yeah… um, I had some severe emotional scarring.
But, it made me stronger. I was all ready to confront him in college, then reunion (maybe just a slap to the face, and grab of the shoulders)- and the asshole ended up dropping that class, and not attending reunion. I asked a former classmate at reunion about the Mr. Brian Hosek, and said that I wanted to punch his face in.
I was informed that he was a police officer in the suburban area we grew up in, now, and has four kids. Poor wife.
So, not to sound so smug: but, I guess that’s what happens to assholes that go around bullying others. They will one day become a victim, themselves.
Of course: one cannot do anything to a cop: that’s called assault.
I guess all I really want to say is: bullying is nothing new, it sucks, and the people that engage in it are nothing more than losers, who grow up to be NOTHING.
oh, and on the topic of teaching one’s children to be black belts:
you know who is going to get sued in a situation like that, don’t you? I knew that if I ever fought back for the emotional damage: I’d be shoved off to the alternative school, at best. I did confide in a school counselor, as it had become unbearable (which is ridiculous, considering I was almost out of school) my senior year, and she said we could go to trial over this. Never happened.
As a school social worker, I know that schools now have “zero-tolerance” bullying policies. I just can’t help but be doubtful as to their effectiveness.
“So, early indoctrination that different=cool, conformity=lame, plus teaching physical defense, worked for my sister’s kids. I intend to follow the same recipe with my kids and hopefully it will work as well as it has for them. Of course, no one knows. I just hope my kids don’t have to go through the same self-doubt and sadness that I (and my older sister) did.
”
YES! They will get teased BUT they will know that it’s people who want to conform who are failures. I’m afraid for the kids who are taught conformity as camouflage because they will expect their own parents to blame them if the defense fails. And they will develop the conformists’ mindset of fear.
And for those advocating nonviolence… When you undergo a daily course of physical and/or sexual assault– and I was afraid of being raped at school, the boys were so bad– fighting back not only changes the bullies mentality, it changes your own world.
The bullies learn that sometimes it is dangerous to bully. And it may change, permanently, not only how they treat you, but other people. I saw it happen, although there could have been other factors, too.
And I learned that I could gain some control over my own life. I didn’t have to be in fear every moment. Which creates some mental space to handle the rest of the crap life throws at you.
Those of us who say, “hit back, hit hard, take them by surprise and teach them fear” TRIED everything else. Staying in groups (bullies cut you out of the herd and your friends melt away lest they become targets); talking to adults; trying to hide; trying to ignore them; walking a different route so as not to encounter them(they will seek out your new route).
We aren’t advocating responding to verbal abuse with violence; only protecting bodily integrity.
We live in a bully society, just as it is a rape society.
But it isn’t the victims of other children who are usually adult bullies. In case you haven’t noticed, victims become rebels, punk rockers, progressives, feminists. Bullies BELIEVE in hierarchy– look for them in management, churches, and the Republican party. I befriended other victims as a child, and as an adult, I verbally challenged a bully boss, in public, and won, more than once. Even when I got laid off, I won, because she had to do it as a big lay off where generous severance packages were given. If I hadn’t fought back as a kid, could I have as an adult?
Elinor,
Only emotional meltdowns I’ve observed were while they were still in the pressure-cooker high school environment.
However, several high school classmates were whining to me at my high school’s 100th anniversary a few years back about being unemployed for three years after the dot-com bust despite graduating from Ivy-level universities such as MIT, Cornell, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, etc with degrees in engineering, computer science, etc.
What was worse was they had to chutzpah to become upset with me after they found I was not only still gainfully employed, but was also financially independent and had no large debts hanging over my head due to substantial scholarships and not feeling the need to adopt spendthrift habits of the upper/upper-middle class classmates at the Ivy-level institutions. Heck, observing such spendthrift habits among my upper/upper-middle class co-workers at one job where they felt the need to replace their electronics, computers, and furniture for the latest and greatest every 3-6 months was more than enough for me not to follow them….especially when they kept whining to me about their financial troubles while calling me “cheap” for not conforming to their spendthrift lifestyle. Did I mention these were mostly dudes and thus, not the popular stereotype of women who overspend in the malls?
As for the name recognition, I would not be surprised that some classmates still list it on their resume. I’ve found that people as far away as California, Taiwan, and Mainland China have heard of my school. In a couple of interview situations for work/grad school admissions, there was either an enthusiastic response due to the stereotype we were all super-bright* or a subtle eyeroll to denote the somewhat truthful stereotype of excessive overachievement and mercenary attitudes towards grades. Thankfully, most who felt the latter were usually disabused of that negative stereotype within 5 minutes as I have demonstrated interest in many areas….not only the stereotypical “practical” ones for career such as engineering/computer science or business.
* This stereotype is certainly not true from observation of many classmates. Then again, I’ve met plenty of idiots who were graduates of Ivy-level universities who were canned for goofing off/incompetence in the workplace.
I was informed that he was a police officer in the suburban area we grew up in, now, and has four kids.
I am sure he’s still a bully — now he has a badge, gun and taser to back him up.
YES! They will get teased BUT they will know that it’s people who want to conform who are failures. I’m afraid for the kids who are taught conformity as camouflage because they will expect their own parents to blame them if the defense fails. And they will develop the conformists’ mindset of fear.
Be careful, though, of conflating outcast punk rock hipsterism with nonconformity. There are rules in that clique as well, they’re just written by different people. Espouse the wrong cause and you’ll be outgroup before the last chord of (insert 2-minute punk song here).
I asked my parents to change to another school when I was 14. I wasn’t being bullied - I felt very lonely and I was going through several teenage crises at once. A doctor told me I was on the brink of depression, maybe even in it.
The next years, especially the first one, were a dream. I read a lot, I got quite good grades, I was fat - it seems I was a likely target for bullying, right? Yet I was liked and respected and I responded with all the warmth I could. Kids who were influential almost never used their power for nastiness. (I soon had my share of influence, by the way.) There was always somebody cooler who was also good and sure enough of themselves to set an example. Usually people were called upon it if a joke went too far. I made many very good friends, with the incredible intensity that can happen in these years, and twenty years later I keep quite a few of them. Just an example that I know will resonate with many of you: in the last exam of the so commonly dreaded physical education class, despite my enormous akwardness, I was able to jump over all the hurdles and people cheered. Had I failed, I’m sure nobody would have laughed.
These threads make me so sad. Is my classmates’ and my story so rare? Bullying is not, should not be a fact of life during these years. Why is it that so many people have suffered totally irrelevant and damaging agonies when they could have been much more happily occupied? Bonding is vital and difficult for teenagers. Yes, there were subtle dynamics and more than a snag in this rosy but real picture; yes, I took relationships so seriously and passionately that I got into trouble many times and was very hurt. I still had and have to learn a lot about power, jealousy and other unsavoury traits, in myself and others. But bullying wouldn’t have been educative in this respect, just crushing. When I read accounts such as these, what strikes me is the pointlessness and futility of all this cruelty. Life can be hard enough even if you don’t suffer it.
Anyway. To offer something constructive that has already been hinted at: as a preventive measure, I think that parents should persuade their children to tell them at the first sign of bullying. They should make it very clear beforehand that they will take any complaint seriously and they will try to help their child to the utmost (even if they actually feel powerless when it happens). Teenagers can be very secretive. The only silver lining that I see in this horrifying story of the Fayetteville boy is that he is backed up by his parents. In the short and long run, that should help him to put this nightmare in perspective. I’m sorry that it hasn’t been the case of many commenters here.
Also, if parents see that their child is popular, why not encourage her/him to use that popularity in a good way?
This all reminded me so much of a post I read at Stephanie Klein’s blog awhile back that I went and found it. Someone who bullied her at fat camp found her blog and sent a fawning email, none of the bullying stuff mentioned. Interesting read:
http://stephanieklein.blogs.com/greek_tragedy/2007/09/fellow-fat-camp.html
And lots of friends dressed exactly the same as him who will swear up and down that the alleged criminal started it, and that he only has six broken ribs because he resisted arrest.
And now he’s raising four more bullies, too. What a heartwarming story. Sigh.
Oh, I forgot. Eric in #160 wonders why the NYT hasn’t mentioned any names other than Billy’s. I didn’t expect to read them, since newspapers (at least the serious ones) in my country never print minors’ names, but I was waiting for an interview with the bullies or their parents. Or classmates. Or something that told that Billy was punched by real people, not a floating anonymous cloud. It felt like sexual crimes: the focus is on the victim.
Ailurophile in #170 asks her/himself about other countries. I’ve often wondered about it too. I’m a Spaniard. It’s difficult to compare, since I haven’t lived in the US. But I’ve read zillions of terrible stories like today’s from your country and there seems to be an atmosphere of fatality about it. I mean, statistically it is irrelevant, and hurt people will tend to write about it, but none of the commenters in this long thread has simply said ‘I wasn’t bullied nor a bully,’ like I did. Every American that I have known shudders when they talk about school. Years ago, I was astonished when I started learning a weird vocabulary about queen bees, popularity contests and other concepts that I found bewildering, like all the social pressure to be paired up so young.
There certainly is bullying and violence in our schools. Lately there is a lot of talk about the subject. A kid commited suicide two years ago and it was a national shock (not that he was the only one, of course). People demonstrated in the streets of the town, I guess as a sign of mourning and solidarity with the family. But I’d say that you could find a huge number of people like me, for whom school was a period of learning and/or getting to know people, not only to suffer them. I also suspect that bullying is more frowned upon here, among adult and young people. Along the gunpowder barrel that insecure teenagers can be there is also an easygoing attitude. I think that many teenagers would say that laughing at somebody else just because they’re different is for small children. These ones would do it so openly that they’d probably be corrected. As a contrast: once an American friend told me oh so naturally that his friend had been teased at high school for being German, you know, as if it couldn’t be otherwise. I couldn’t understand it then and I can’t now. Nor, I’d bet, could a Spanish teenager.
On the other hand, we have quite a few social changes going on. One of them is alcohol - many teenagers drink wildly in a way that was never done before. Racial relations are getting different because of immigration. And of course there are cruel people and sociopaths everywhere. Yet I think that the general attitude about bullying is more censorious here, if that is an answer.
From what I’ve heard from several older cousins who did attend American private schools…the bullying could be just as bad or worse than what public schools could offer….with the admins being far more protective of the bullies if they come from wealthy well-connected families the schools hope to cultivate a donor relationship with….
I have heard from my mother that while she never witnessed or experienced physical bullying, it probably went on…especially those who were deemed inadequate academically or socially…and it was highly encouraged by the teachers/most parents from the socio-economic elite as a way to goad all students to exert their greatest efforts to excel in those areas.
Though she was not academically inclined, her family’s socio-economic background and the fact she was friends with several popular students probably insulated her from any bullying experiences.
My father’s experience, on the other hand, is hard to relate as the Chinese Civil War disrupted his education from junior high school until he somehow managed to gain admission to one of only three universities in existence in early ’50s Taiwan without having attended high school. Whatever probable incessant bullying he experienced was in everyday life as a refugee where everyone was out for themselves during a time of economic scarcity and social upheaval.
you people are so whiney! suck it up! dont you realize in mexico, they hunt down emo kids like pokemons and beat them all? i swear, spoiled americans.
you think im joking? permalink! http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/27/antiemo-pogroms-spre.html
@Halfmad
That blog post was so interesting. A couple of years ago I got an e-mail from a girl from high school. She had never directly bullied me, but she was a hanger-on of the mean girl clique that did bully me. Her e-mail said “I’ll never forget how you treated me so kindly when my so called ‘friends’ were so nasty to me.”
The funny thing is that I never remember saying a single nice thing to her. I didn’t hate her as much as the others because even at 15 I realized that the popular clique hanger-ons were just trying to save their own skin. But apparently at some point I must have been nice to her and it meant alot.
Rhus,
These threads make me so sad. Is my classmates’ and my story so rare?
Sounds like a completely different planet than the one I spent my teenage years on. Can we switch?
@ the matthew show March 27, 2008 at 2:34 pm: Things are different now than they used to be, or at least I’m assuming so, since I no longer frequent the punk scene or any scene (other than the one in my own living room. And the only one stage-diving off the couch is my dog.)
The punk scene that I grew up in was about as eclectic and anti-conformity as possible, with basically no rules of dress, politics, or social skills. It certainly wasn’t “hip” to be punk at that time; punks at that time were viewed by straight folk with universal fear and loathing. And we liked it like that.
I realize that the punk scene of my early adulthood is long dead, which is why I expressed hope that there was some other similarly family-like and creative subculture that nurtures smart and creative young outsiders these days. I don’t know if there is, but I hope so.
Rumblelizard,
There may well be. I’m so unplugged from the teen scene these days I have absolutely no idea of the options available. But I find that even among adults who consider themselves nonconformist, there are still ingroup/outgroup dynamics at play. Of course, I used to work in book & music stores, where snobbery rules, so maybe my scale is tilted a bit.
I’m coming to this topic rather late with my story, but here it is.
When I was in 6th grade, a friend of mine lived withing walking distance of the school. I was going to visit her after school, and so we took were still on campus after most of the kids had left on the busses. We were walking across the campus courtyard when a group of three boys confronted us and started harassing us and preventing us from leaving, in full view of the windows to the administration section. One of them finally worked up the courage and got a little physical, grabbed my friend’s skirt and yanked it up. I didn’t have any defense training, and my brother had always sheltered me from bullying behavior. I’m not sure what happened, I shoved him he shoved back. All I know is that it ended with me biting the hell out of his arm. Didn’t break the skin, he was wearing a denim jacket, but left a hell of a bruise.
Anyway, point of the story is that when the administrators (finally) came to see what all the fuss was about, I was considered to be most in the wrong, and they wanted to send me to juvy. After all, biting is unacceptable in a 6 year old, let alone a sixth grader! I was a sociopathic savage, too dangerous to be allowed around the other kids, even though I had no previous disciplinary issues, was on the honor roll, a favorite of the teachers, bright and articulate, one of those artsy kids in orchestra and extra art classes. Besides, I would have given him AIDS if I had broken the skin, didn’t I learn anything in health class? The message was, If some boy wants to push you down or yank up your skirt, you may defend yourself only in a civilized, ladylike manner. (Like my friend did…I jumped in, so she wasn’t even involved in the fight, and his two friends, I believe, ran away) So I’m sobbing in the vice principle’s office while she tells me how they’re going to lock me up like the criminal scum I was, when my dad comes blowing in the room. My parents backed me up one hundred percent, and so did my friends mom. Where were the adults when this group of boys were sexually assaulting their little girls? How exactly would they prefer I respond? I suppose I was supposed to start screaming or something. I wish someone had told me about kicking guys in the nads, but I had never really thought about hurting someone intentionally before that time, and I went with instinct.
So, no juvy for me, but he and I spent several uncomfortable saturdays in detention. Then I was put in a special extra class for troubled kids. He was not. After the heat of it died down, I apologized for biting him. But I told him if he ever grabbed someone like that again I would do something more civilized, but still quite socially unacceptable to him.
I can’t help but wonder, if my parents had somehow agreed with the school, would I really have gone to kiddy jail for that? The vice principle wanted to expell me and press charges. I also think it’s quite interesting that I ended up on the special ‘needs more attention’ list and he didn’t.
Also interesting is that while her mother took me aside to thank me for defending and helping her daugter, my friend just didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. ^_^
I know exactly what you mean. A year or so after I graduated, one of the kids who bullied me in high school died in a car accident. I laughed for about ten minutes straight when I found out, I was so happy.Then, of course, I hated him just a little bit more, for making me realize I had it in me to take joy in someone else’s death. Things got much better once I finished high school. (Things had been much worse in middle school.)
I’m in London at the moment. (First trip out of North America. Fascinating stuff.) I picked up a random free newspaper, and what did I find? I hadn’t heard of (extraordinarily depressing pictures warning) Sophie Lancaster before, but it’s all too damned relevant.
Ugh. A plague upon them all, y’know?
I saw that kid’s picture and read about those bullies and thought the same as everybody else — he is the poster boy for the punching bag George Bush has turned our country into. Sad. And we will be paying for George Bush and his mouth-breathing ilk for decades to come.
Many of us probably went through some form of bullying by other kids at school — some worse than others. Why the parents of these little wastes of DNA cannot see the evil their children bestow on others is beyond me.
I chose not to have children, but if I had, and someone had done to my child what they have done to this child, heads would roll.
As an educator, I have to say this is truly disturbing. I’ve seen it happen personally, but in my school, it’s really hard to tell who’s the bully and who’s the bullied, because they start taking on each other’s behavior in this weird dance of power. It’s almost like what’s happening in this country. Anyways, we try our best to deal with bullying, but you can’t believe the tons of loopholes we have to overcome to handle the bully effectively. Some just need a little counseling and a lot of love, but some need to be ripped from their current environment and brought somewhere where they’ve lost that power. Hmm.
Here is a great site to check out and also a sneak preview of May’s “People Who Care” page with a Christina Ricci interview about her work with RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network): http://nonprofitshoppingmall.com/people-who-care/christina-ricci
Go to the site and shop and a percent of your sale will go to RAINN!
Pass this on to everyone!!!