[HN Gopher] Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces inci...
___________________________________________________________________
Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in
primary schools
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-11-16 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| Sakos wrote:
| > The results from the UK trial of 13% reduction in bullying are
| less compelling than those from earlier studies in other European
| countries. However, the U.K. trial took place during the COVID-19
| pandemic, which involved major classroom disruption for pupils
| and considerably higher levels of absenteeism, and researchers
| believe this may have affected the results.
|
| 1) 13% just doesn't seem like a lot to me
|
| 2) I wonder what those other studies showed.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the bigger question, since it apparently involves
| reported bullying incidents rather than teacher-observed ones,
| is whether the change in policy results in underreporting or
| overreporting of bullying. Plausibly it could be a lot more
| than a 13% fall if kids feel much more incentivised to report
| it, or a negligible effect if there's a 13% chance of it not
| being reported because bullied kids don't want to get their
| bystander classmates into trouble...
| normanthreep wrote:
| well this is excellent news for the people of hn, the largest
| community of childhood bullying survivors on the internet
|
| it's never too late
| matt3210 wrote:
| would we be on HN if we were the popular kids in school?
| dijit wrote:
| There are a _lot_ of tech-bros, who were definitely not the
| nerds in school and are in tech mostly because of money and
| prestige.
| tamimio wrote:
| I was never bullied and was the popular kid, and honestly, I
| don't like the concept that all these 'nerds' you see nowadays
| were bullied back in school and it's why they became nerds, in
| fact, I never heard of school bullying outside of the US
| schools, or generally North Americans ones. Maybe movies
| contributed to that, or reinforced such a phenomenon?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Grew up in Germany in the 80/90s, we had plenty of bullying.
| viraptor wrote:
| Nah, it's common everywhere. Kids can be cruel and some will
| be given the opportunity of access to someone not fitting in.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 1. 4chan is much larger than HN ;)
|
| 2. People here like to act like it didn't happen to them. If
| you didn't see it, it still happened. Nerds are hated in
| America because life imitates the shitty art of John Hughes et
| al.
| pupppet wrote:
| Dang who would have thought teachers looking the other way and
| pretending it wasn't happening wasn't an effective deterrent for
| future bullying.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It's even better when the teachers are the ones doing the
| bullying.
| switch007 wrote:
| I remember being bullied by the science teacher for not
| wanting to sit next to the cigarette she was burning to
| demonstrate something I can't recall lol. In the late 90s.
| She hated me after that
| 77pt77 wrote:
| You're in luck!
|
| That's really common!
| drewcoo wrote:
| That's their job, isn't it?
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Don't forget punishing the kids who fight because of zero
| tolerance rules.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| _1984_ (1948), a book written by an author who hadn 't had the
| happiest* boarding school experience, can be read as a story in
| which we skip the fast-forward (part I) to get to the story-
| within-a-story (part II) which asks a cliffhanger question:
|
| > _deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-
| questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and
| brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and
| all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards.
| This motive really consists..._
|
| which is answered by O'Brien (in part III):
|
| > _...How does a man assert his power over another, Winston? "
| Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said._
|
| * _Such, Such Were the Joys_ (1952)
| djoldman wrote:
| https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys
| javajosh wrote:
| Love the book but I always thought this needed a little bit
| more explanation. It seems in our world people seek power for
| many reasons and only a small minority seek it simply to make
| people suffer. For example, people seek power to increase their
| own safety and pleasure. The suffering of others is incidental
| to their goals. In addition, since suffering is universal and
| requires no human actor to inflict. It seems rather like a huge
| waste of effort. I think it's better to read O'Brien's
| statement as something more specific to the world of 1984 and
| Big brother rather than something general that applies to all
| power seeking. We don't really learn that much about the
| workings of the inner party and the kind of propaganda that
| they are subjected to or subject each other to, and this might
| be evidence of what that looks like.
| tw202411161608 wrote:
| > It seems in our world people seek power for many reasons
| and only a small minority seek it simply to make people
| suffer.
|
| Are you sure? Your assessment is probably specific to
| regional experience; I'd probably have agreed with you at
| another point in my life. It's not something I was familiar
| with before living here, and it's not the same kind of
| (hierarchical/organizational/bureaucratic) power alluded to
| in the quoted passage, but in Austin I'm acutely aware that a
| not-insignificant subset of "normal" people here seem to be
| driven to seek enough power in whatever position they occupy
| that will allow them to make others miserable. I see it in
| people here who are nasty to me for no reason, and I see it
| in people here who are nice to me but nasty to others for no
| reason.
|
| It's a shame that "the cruelty is the point" is so tightly
| bound to politics, because it captures in a few words a
| perfect description of the phenomenon.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > By making him suffer
|
| Nietzsche had written extensively about this way before.
|
| Nowadays we know that humans (and other animals) bully because
| they derive immense health benefits from being the aggressor.
|
| Those benefits are trivial to detect many decades after the
| fact.
|
| Until those benefits are offset by a hefty price to pay,
| nothing will change.
| hiatus wrote:
| > Nowadays we know that humans (and other animals) bully
| because they derive immense health benefits from being the
| aggressor
|
| Which health benefits are those?
| iwontberude wrote:
| I assume by poisoning those around you with cortisol, one
| becomes (comparitively speaking) less of a fuck up. It's
| the Tanya Harding ('s boyfriend) approach to success.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I believe the keyword here is "assert". As people have free
| will, you can either motivate/entice/lead them or you can
| demotivate/punish/control them or a combination of the two.
|
| "Assert" implies O'Brien has already chosen the punitive route.
| In other words, O'Brien is not revealing some deep secret of
| human power dynamics. Instead, O'Brien is giving a self
| congratulatory self justifying explanation for his wrong doing.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Instead, O'Brien is giving a self congratulatory self
| justifying explanation for his wrong doing.
|
| It is at the minimum of very different kind of self-
| justification than what you'd usually expect from a villain.
|
| When Winston answers with the the expected "for your own
| good" narrative, O'Brien rejects it and punishes him for it:
|
| > The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
| interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
| power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only
| power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
| presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
| past, in that we know what we are doing.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I've been thinking a little about this subject lately. It seems
| like bullying is a thing that serves the function of exacting the
| repressed violent desires of the social body. Who is selected for
| bullying is determined not primarily by the bully, but by the
| social group as a whole. To me this helps explain why it's such a
| ubiquitous behavior; it's a mechanism for a social group to act
| outside of its norms in the enforcement of its norms. To be
| clear, I think it's terrible, just interesting to think about
| this way.
| echelon wrote:
| Bullies lower the fitness of targets to elevate their own
| standing. It's neanderthal-level social darwinism.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| Neanderthal aren't around anymore, so I'd say it's Sapien-
| level social darwinism.
| dijit wrote:
| Everyone except africans has some non-trivial amount of
| Neanderthal DNA in them.
|
| According to popular science that is.
|
| https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-
| an...).
| bokoharambe wrote:
| I love that you point out that bullying is social and its
| relation to the ordinary enforcement of social norms. And I
| think this points more broadly to the function of social
| violence as a whole: much of it is regulatory and follows from
| repressive logics that exist in less overt forms. In other
| words can't have a notion like that of sex without also having
| sexism and gendered violence.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Interesting. You've almost framed it in Gerardian terms:
|
| Students all want the same thing: status, popularity, etc. Not
| everyone can these things though. Their scarcity is their
| value. The competition over this finite resource creates
| conflict and hostility. This pent up hostility has to be
| channeled to avoid chaos. A scapegoat is informally agreed
| upon: the oddball, the misfit, the outcast. These people are
| all the more obvious due to the extreme herding that happens in
| schools. The bully acts as the "executioner" of this
| "sacrifice". The boundaries of group unity are enforced, the
| shared complicity enforcing cohesion, and group identity and
| control are upheld.
|
| I remember from my school days how much hostility was directed
| toward people who wouldn't or couldn't "fit in". I even
| internalized those feelings. "Why won't he/she just act
| normal?"
|
| I'm not fully sold on Gerard, but his theories are kind of
| mesmerizing in their pat explanation of group dynamics.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Who is selected for bullying is determined not primarily by
| the bully, but by the social group as a whole.
|
| I disagree. I think that the person who is bullied is primarily
| selected by the bully, and the only influence that others have
| is that the bullied person doesn't have enough (or large
| enough) others around them in order to defend them. Others may
| then pile in once the target has been selected, but it's not in
| any way a collective decision.
|
| You could just as well say that society chooses the people who
| get mugged, or the people whose houses are burglarized, or the
| people who are raped or murdered. I'm sure you could come up
| with some neo-Freudian way to convince somebody that makes
| sense, but it doesn't make sense. It's generalization to the
| point of uselessness if not complete absurdity.
|
| I was bullied as a child. I was picked because I was an easy,
| bookish target without many friends, and definitely without
| tough friends. The bullying ended when I hurt a bully in a way
| that everyone found out about, and that state was maintained
| when I made a group of friends who would have defended me if a
| bully had approached me. The cause of all of this was obvious,
| not subtle or mysterious.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| The social group's norms are those the bully aims to appeal
| to, either because they directly believe in them or because
| they want others' approval. The person who's easy to target
| is often easy to target precisely because they're excluded
| from friendships that would protect them. The group has no
| mind; it can't explicitly decide something. The decision is
| structurally embedded in the group, and goes beyond any
| individual, including the bully that takes the action.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > influence that others have is that the bullied person
| doesn't have enough (or large enough) others around them in
| order to defend them
|
| Yes, this is how the crowd selects the target. It's implicit
| in the fact that the crowd has indicated they won't defend
| the target
|
| "Having no friends" is a signal that the herd isn't going to
| do anything to help you
| akira2501 wrote:
| Game theory of bullying. Which works right up until you realize
| a lot of bullies have mental health issues and are probably not
| going to produce identical "rationalized" results to someone
| who isn't.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| What I said doesn't assume the bully is some kind of rational
| actor playing a game. They're more like an organ in the
| social body.
| akira2501 wrote:
| A social body relies on signals. If the signals are not
| predictable then you're facing the exact same problem.
| You've also opened the door on a single bad signal
| infecting the social body and pushing towards outcomes that
| would not occur if that single influence was not otherwise
| present.
|
| If you're going to rely on this dynamic, then you're going
| to have this consideration.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Children in schools that implemented the program were 13% less
| likely to report being bullied
|
| And of course the goal is to prevent bullying from being reported
| so this is an absolute win for educators.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Is that what that means? Less reporting, not less bullying?
| alexpotato wrote:
| Many years ago, one of the popular news shows (Dateline or 20/20,
| I can never remember which) did a special on bullying.
|
| They showed one elementary school where the entire organization
| (teachers, students, staff etc) implemented some kind of holistic
| approach to bullying that actually worked. They even interviewed
| a group of kids where they said "Oh yeah, Tom used to be the
| bully and we were all afraid of him but now we're all best
| friends".
|
| I don't remember the exact plan implemented but it struck me as
| both simple and common sense with excellent outcomes.
|
| Despite much searching on IMDB, Twitter, Google and even using
| LLMs, I have yet to find the exact episode. Now that I have kids
| of my own, I'm even more interested in finding it. Any
| suggestions from the HN crowd?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Were they using KiVa perhaps? It's the Finnish anti-bullying
| program which seems to be applied worldwide quite successfully.
|
| https://www.kivaprogram.net/
| nicoty wrote:
| Fumny you mention that, guess what the article is about.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > we were all afraid of him but now we're all best friends
|
| All without addressing the underlying problem that made people
| afraid of Tom in the first place?
|
| > with excellent outcomes.
|
| Apparently excellent short term outcomes. The real question is
| does this actually solve the long term problem and is it
| possible that the strategies used to create this outcome
| actually aggravate long term outcomes?
| timst4 wrote:
| OLWEUS most likely
| ninalanyon wrote:
| This is how bullying has been dealt with in Norway for decades.
| Nice to see the UK might be trying to catch up.
| matt3210 wrote:
| I hate to be this guy, but being bullied in school is a direct
| cause of my success in software (and my failure in relationships
| I guess). I retreated to academics because I was unpopular. I was
| unpopular in school now I am popular professionally (All the
| LinkedIn recruiters love me).
|
| I don't mean to say bullying is good but I personally am thankful
| to my high school bully for keeping me focused on computers
| (Thanks Fred, I owe you a beer next time we run into each other).
| nkrisc wrote:
| Not trying to discount your personal experience, but I do feel
| I ought to point out that you don't actually know what would
| have happened if you hadn't been bullied.
|
| It's good to be satisfied with where your life has taken you,
| but that's because you can't actually change what's happened
| and you can't know how it might have gone otherwise.
| elashri wrote:
| Another possible interpretation is that your personal
| experience (which is valid and I respect) is considered
| survival bias [1]. As another commenter said we don't know if
| this would happen if you did not get bullied. And what happens
| to others who got bullied? We can't draw anything from that.
| Does bullied people usually tend to more successful
| professionally later is a different and big question that needs
| some data to support.
|
| Maybe there are many more people who got bullied and got
| negative effects of their self-worth and confidence which lead
| to them struggle in one way or another professionally and
| socially. Maybe there isn't that many too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
| OliveMate wrote:
| I hate to be that other guy, and I in no way way want to
| override your own experiences but... I'm sure my experiences
| with being bullied have actively hindered me in my life, even
| 20+ years on. Particularly dealing with confrontation, this
| constant feeling of 'otherness' around others, and frequent
| nightmares about people I used to know.
|
| Again, the other reply about not really knowing how you'd turn
| out applies to me, but it's hard not to think about it.
| dijit wrote:
| I always found it really frustrating that a "zero tolerance"
| policy to bullying seemed to disproportionately affect people who
| eventually fight back.
|
| I would guess it's a combination of "nobody sees the first hit"
| (since your attention is elsewhere, of course) and that bullies
| get quite good at testing boundaries and thus know how to avoid
| detection.
|
| But, really, it's truly frustrating that as I child I was bullied
| relentlessly, and when I finally took my parents advice and stood
| my ground, I was expelled from school (due to zero tolerance).
| Those bullies continued to torment some other kids, of course.
|
| This is far from an uncommon situation, over the years I've heard
| many more scenarios like this.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| That sucks, sorry that happened to you.
|
| How did you stand your ground?
| dijit wrote:
| One of them ripped a necklace off of me, then spat on me.
|
| I should add that this was after the day before when they had
| caught me walking home and pushed me into the local pond
| (during winter) and that the necklace was given to me by my
| great grandfather that had died very recently (and the bully
| knew that). In hindsight, I shouldn't have been wearing it.
|
| So I punched him in the face, he reeled a little and his
| friends went to work on me before a teacher stepped in- as
| they were the other side of the play-ground and needed to
| close the distance.
|
| Unfortunately all they'd seen was me hitting the bully.
|
| So, expelled.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Got it, thanks for sharing.
|
| Overly harsh consequences are only fair if detection of the
| responsible/initiating party is foolproof.
| Loughla wrote:
| I was also expelled for fighting back. This was how I learned
| that documentation is important in life.
|
| When I got the paperwork saying I was out, my parents sent back
| all the correspondence with the school, the dates the bully
| bothered me, and the responses (or lack thereof) from the
| school. I was reinstated and the bully went to another
| district.
|
| Bullying in my day was at least bearable because it was
| confined to times when I was physically near the bully. Kids
| today have it so much worse with social media. It's genuinely
| terrifying. I don't wonder why many teens are anxious.
| Everything they do is documented.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Bullying in my day was at least bearable because it was
| confined to times when I was physically near the bully. Kids
| today have it so much worse with social media.
|
| I don't get it. Anything a bully can do to you over social
| media, they can also do to you without using the internet at
| all. Anything they needed to be near you to do, they still
| need to be near you to do.
| nicksergeant wrote:
| There's twice as much surface area. Bullies can now do
| their thing 24/7 from behind the screen _and_ still
| physically torment.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Again, whatever they can do from behind a screen now,
| they could also do in your absence before.
| ab5tract wrote:
| No, they couldn't.
|
| Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have
| to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your
| peers?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Printers.
|
| If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create
| photoshopped images of you with?", why would you
| attribute that to social media?
| ben_w wrote:
| Even just as text, they can easily take your name and
| spread rumours speaking as if they were you.
|
| Even just as text, you can get dog-piled: we evolved to
| be social creatures, and for groups of 150-200; for most
| of us, if we're called names by that many people in quick
| succession, it breaks us. That's a small online mob, as
| these things go.
|
| But bullies these days also have effectively zero
| marginal cost cameras, so they can take as much video as
| it takes waiting for you to mess up, then do a Cardinal
| Richelieu -- "If you give me six lines written by the
| hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in
| them which will hang him."
|
| In my day, you could take up to about 24 pictures quickly
| before needing to take the film out and put new film in,
| and that would take a while to develop and actually cost
| money, so that just didn't happen (that I've heard of).
|
| But it's not just taking photos of things that actually
| happened and misrepresenting them, even one picture is
| enough to put your classmates into AI generated porn...
| which is, as you may expect, a thing that kids these days
| are getting into trouble for doing. In my day, such image
| manipulation was manual and expensive* and therefore
| reserved for celebrities, though I doubt that's any real
| relief to Sarah Michelle Gellar in one example I
| remember, nor to GWB and (today the relatives of) bin
| Laden in the other.
|
| * we had a single copy of Photoshop... donated to the art
| department, which had only one (old) Mac on which to run
| it. Hard to pirate that kind of software even if you knew
| how to use it, definitely couldn't get unsupervised
| access to that machine.
|
| But it's not just still images these days, a brief audio
| recording of your voice and that can also be synthesised.
| Dictaphones were just starting to get affordable in my
| last year of mandatory education, and we pranked a
| teacher by mixing their last lesson with new age
| relaxation music, burning a CD of that, printed a cover
| saying something about curing insomnia, and giving it to
| them as a "last day gift". Now everyone has a dictaphone
| in their pocket, now you can synthesise anyone's voice
| saying anything, make images of them appearing to do
| anything.
|
| But even just text, the internet made it a different
| world than when I was at school. The psychological impact
| of being told you, personally, are Officially Bad, that's
| something that sticks with us and hurts us even when it
| comes from a pattern of illuminated pixels on their
| Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism caused by
| someone on the other side of the planet who had no
| business talking to us in the first place; and that
| distant person can be incited to form part of a mob by a
| pattern of illuminated pixels on _their_ Mandatory
| Rectangular Communication Prism.
| exe34 wrote:
| it sounds like you just don't know what it's like to be
| bullied. it's not just about the verbal knowledge that
| tomorrow at school you'll be hit. it's the visceral anxiety
| that tomorrow at school you will be hit. without social
| media, you can try to block it out of your mind and pretend
| it's not happening. with social media, I assume, you are
| constantly reminded of what's happening, because now the
| bully can reach out to you and directly remind you.
|
| the reason I said assume there is because I went to school
| before social media - but my biggest bully was my dad, so
| it was impossible to completely escape the bullying. in
| fact I loved going to school, because those bullies I could
| handle. I gave them as much grief as I took. but the one at
| home I was stuck with, because he controlled all my
| movements and time with people outside school hours.
|
| I expect cyberbullying isn't very different, traumatically
| speaking.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Wow, expelled seems very harsh.
|
| I know when i was a kid we would get suspended for a few days
| if we had a fight. Banning a kid from that school for life seem
| pretty harsh.
| j45 wrote:
| Suspension or expulsion of the victim is far too common.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I've come to think zero tolerance policies are universally bad.
|
| Some tolerance and considering circumstances is actually the
| sensible way to handle most anything. But that sounds like
| being "soft on crime", and the PR side is usually more
| important than the actual problem.
| plasticchris wrote:
| The real problem is that school personnel don't want to deal
| with the parents of the actual problem kids, so they get away
| with it even under zero tolerance.
| martin-t wrote:
| That's because the narrative in the last decades has shifted
| towards tools, not actions and intentions being good or bad.
|
| In the past, it was normal and encouraged to use any tools
| available to you to defend yourself. Psychological abuse is
| still abuse and you have the right to defend yourself, the
| most natural, available and effective immediate defensive
| tool being violence.
|
| In recent years, violence has become a massive taboo. It's a
| tool that is universally labelled as bad no matter the
| circumstances. Instead, everyone is encouraged to portray a
| "good victim" by demonstrating helplessness and
| waiting/hoping for people in positions of power to help.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| In many schools it's not even about fighting back. The "zero
| tolerance" policy indiscriminately punishes both parties
| involved. It's painted as some kind of virtuous, positive thing
| by labeling it "zero tolerance". But it is just sheer laziness
| on the part of teachers, administrators, and the district. They
| basically wash their hands clean of investigating or
| understanding the situation, and of keeping classes safe for
| kids who aren't breaking the rules.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "Justice is expensive and uncomfortable, let's just use
| collective punishment on everyone in the immediate area."
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, you don't have to fight back in order to be punished
| under "zero tolerance." You just have to be _involved_ ,
| including as the victim. Kids get punished all the time for
| rolling up into a ball while the aggressor beats them.
| Puts wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, but most people who get bullied are a little
| "off", a little weird in some way that affects their
| likability. And this also affects the adults where even they
| judge the kid being bullied harder. For example if you are
| autistic and lack verbal skills, that's going to be seen as you
| lacking social skills. And obviously if someone got hit, who's
| most probable to have started it? Maybe the kid that "lacks
| social skills".
| joe5150 wrote:
| This is an incredibly popular opinion! Unless the "unpopular"
| part is that this is somehow fine or justifiable.
| Puts wrote:
| Well I think there are a lot of people out there who define
| bullying as "when a random person in a group is selected to
| be harassed". And if you ask them what they think about it
| they would say "It's horrible and totally unacceptable".
|
| But "disciplining" someone that is acting weird on the
| other hand is the right thing to do, that is not "bullying"
| to them. But for the person that becomes the subject of
| this it becomes, "you sit wrong", "you talk wrong", "you
| eat wrong", "your sense of humor is wrong" until it feels
| like you can't do anything right. Some people even think
| they can fix your "wrong" behavior by hitting you, and then
| it becomes physical bullying.
|
| A lot of people wanna believe that bullying is like the
| fist scenario because that is easier than actually having
| to start accepting people the way they are - even if they
| are a little "weird".
| dijit wrote:
| I couldn't possibly disagree more.
|
| Once you're boxed in as a bullied person, you will
| continue to be bullied.
|
| They're not "educating" you, and it's a little sick to
| suggest it.
| j45 wrote:
| You're right - it's far too common, and serves an objective of
| ultimately turning young people away from education, while not
| getting to learn what was possible for them and isn't heir
| lives.
|
| Maybe it's a feature of industrial education - enable creation
| of compliant adults where bullying is disproportionately
| allowed by tolerating it, and also build bullies to manage
| future compliant adults.
|
| Bullying is everywhere including in the ranks of teachers and
| leadership in a school. Those who play the game of bureaucracy
| (bureaucracy must survive at any costs) must concede to
| enabling a system of too often failing upwards while standing
| on the capable folks.
|
| Too many schools abdicate their responsibility and hide behind
| doing their job and turn it into a daycare of expecting
| children to figure it out on their own.
|
| Bullying too often is toxic parenting coming to school.
|
| Standing up for one's self in the right circumstance,
| especially when the leaders, institutions and experts in our
| lives, especially as children intentionally traumatizes
| children that the world is like this, and because it doesn't
| bother teachers or affect them it will only get so much
| attention.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Defending yourself is always the right move. When one of my
| sons was being bullied in elementary school, I taught him how
| to fight and encouraged him to do so. The bullying ended, but
| he was suspended. I confronted his principal and got her to
| admit that she would defend herself if someone was pummeling
| her. She didn't like this, and subsequently expelled my son,
| who later won honors awards after transferring to a different
| school.
| martin-t wrote:
| I absolutely agree with you but I can't avoid noticing an
| extremely common, yet pervasive irony.
|
| The rules of the school no doubt forbid physical violence and
| expect children to use a process set up by the system to
| defend themselves against bullying / being wronged. That
| system failed and because you rightfully saw your son's right
| to self defense more important than following the rules, you
| encouraged him to defend himself outsides the confines of the
| system and its rules.
|
| Later both you and your son were bullied / wronged by the
| principal. The rules of the state you live in ("laws") no
| doubt forbid physical violence / being wronged. That system
| failed...
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| If you look at institutions that are more concerned with
| punishing the type of people who will fight back than the
| bullies themselves, the motivations behind these sorts of
| policies make a lot more sense.
| martin-t wrote:
| > "nobody sees the first hit"
|
| This perpetuates the myth that "real" bullying is physical and
| that psychological abuse is not bullying. Most of the bullying
| i've seen was psychological and partially material (usually
| taking things from the target or damaging them).
|
| The only instances where i've seen physical bullying were in
| low grades where the children had not yet developed the mental
| capacity for creative verbal abuse or in higher grades where
| bullying was left unchecked for so long that the aggressors
| felt confident they could get away with it.
| newsclues wrote:
| A grade school tried to punish me for stopping someone from
| hitting me by grabbing their wrist.
|
| I said, to punish a nonviolent intervention would only
| incentivize future reactions would be violent, they had to
| think about their policy, because as I put it, "if grabbing
| their wrist for self defence was going to be punished the same
| as me punching them in the face" I'd settle for brutal violence
| in the hopes to persuade others not to hit me.
|
| Children vs principals with masters degrees in a logic debate
| and the kids win. Sad
| iwontberude wrote:
| Kiva also makes great cannabis edibles, definitely cuts down on
| adult bullying.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| School really is the problem. In its current form, it can not be
| sustained without radical reform.
|
| If you look at the suicide rate of children under 14 month-to-
| month, they only stop killing themselves when they're not forced
| to go to school (Summer and Winter vacation).
|
| Probably the only place in your entire life that you'll be
| subject to physical and emotional violence.
|
| Calls to "abolish the department of education" are going to get
| louder and louder.
| swayvil wrote:
| Put a gopro on every kid and teacher. Document everything.
| Problem solved.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Physical assault is a serious crime and calling it simply
| "bullying" is saying "boys will be boys".
|
| The "bullies" who beat me up in elementary school all went ahead
| to have careers in things like dealing kilos of meth and
| torturing people to death.
|
| Not hyperbole, btw.
| doubled112 wrote:
| That boys will be boys line is crap. I was a boy and somehow
| managed not to abuse people.
|
| One of my favourite stories is that my wife went to watch a
| court case and it was one of my childhood bullies. He was up
| for forcible confinement. She thought she recognized the name.
|
| I also read in the news (with great satisfaction) that his
| brother, who was part of the group, had been tasered and beat
| for resisting arrest.
|
| Sometimes you get what is coming to you. They're all trash and
| I think I turned out alright. In a weird way, I think it does
| build character and resilience.
| bdangubic wrote:
| boys will be boys term was invented by shitty parents who
| raised shitty boys
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the current prevalence of bullying in
| schools in the UK vs the USA? We have been considering moving
| from the Us to the UK but perceived higher likelihood of bullying
| for our mixed race kids is one concern holding us back. It's hard
| to know if we are exaggerating that concern or if it is
| warranted, it would seem hard to know the level of hostility of a
| school environment prior to moving there.
| rr808 wrote:
| Kinda feel the new generation needs a bit more bullying. I'm
| kinda shocked my kids have such a low bar, they have become super
| fragile. Some bullying I think made me a better person. Of course
| not too much
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