The kids couldn’t actually physically damage me since I was so much bigger. They did cause a lot of psychological harm. I had a very negative predisposition towards anyone that I met. I just assumed everyone would be hostile towards me and would want to make fun of me. I still struggle with this mindset and I am in my thirties. I will usually be very shut off from people I do not know.

There were a couple of times that I did stand up for myself. Each time the bullying completely stopped.

I thought I was being the better person by not fighting back but that was not true. I was being harmless. That harmlessness invited more violence.

This I have to disagree with. Some of them I believe have a terrible home life and are handing down the abuse to whomever is a weak target.

You may be right in other cases though, and that had never occurred to me. Lack of respect and self control may stem from neglect or lack of parenting rather than abuse.

Sweetie, that's a cope. Bullying is a choice. It's this kind of pro-crime, pro-rape thinking that lets all the bad things happen to people. It's always a choice. Plenty of people happen to go through much worse things without hurting other people. Like for example, the victims of the bullies. So it's clear that there's no inherent reason for the bullies to do it, they just want to.

The violence rate of east Asians who were spanked at home hard by their parents is likely astronomically lower than Americans who weren't spanked.

It's not about being spanked, it's about why you were spanked. Be just.

I was picked on a fair bit in school. The nature of "zero-tolerance" meant that fights were quick. I recall one day just being shoved into a a door threshold unexpectedly. I had had it at that point from this person, so I took my heaviest book out of my bag and slammed him in the head with it as he was already walking away triumphantly. Looking back, he could have been seriously injured. Many people witnesses and laughed at him.

He never bothered me again.

But how can you know someone will leave you alone or just escalate things?

Most US public schools and low-rate private schools are like this. If your children are in an ultra-competitive public or private school however, the bullies are tossed out, the schools confident in the 100% ironclad certainty there is another family literally grateful for the opportunity to place their child in the new opening within 24 hours. The student body goes through cycles of forgetting this until a new bully is expelled, then the bullying simmers down to much more subtle forms.

In the ultra-competitive private boarding schools, the kind of over the top physical bullying you hear about in public schools is nearly non-existent because they will expel on far lower thresholds for bullying.

But yes, if your children are in US public school or you are a child in a US public school, generally speaking fighting back regardless of the zero tolerance consequences tends to stop the bullying better than going through toothless school policies. Bullies tend to prefer soft targets over porcupines. If you are being bullied and choose to fight back though, then go in at a location with adults to intervene quickly nearby expecting to get hurt and lose (in the sense the bully has the physical upper hand), but never defeated (in the sense you and the bully have to be separated before you stop). If it is a group doing the bullying, go for the leader.

The US public school systems' bullying problem won't stop until the bullies' parents know that they have a no-recourse, no-litigation-overturning consequence to bullying that sees their precious no-fault snowflake expelled to "lower class" schooling if they run out their options.

We both were arrested and charged, and I was told to my face by a judge that “there is no such thing as self-defense in schools.” Which is not only a bald-faced lie, it’s unconstitutional. You have a right to be secure in your person, and a right to self-defense, well established by the Supreme Court in case law and described in the Declaration of Independence.

I also didn’t get bullied again at that school after that incident. Self-defense is not just a right, it’s an imperative.

I've seen some of this in our local schools: meetings held with the head teacher to "hear both sides" when one side is a bully asserting their right to bully the other side.

> kids in an actual martial art

I had this idea, based on my experience as a kid, but never actually got around to enrolling them. They're in college now and so I guess it wasn't necessary.

This is endemic in modern culture. The need to treat two opposing opinions as equally valid and balance them against each other as if there's some sane middle-ground to be found. There's no middle-ground between slavery and non-slavery. Or between the earth is flat and science.

Exactly my experience as well. Fighting back is the only thing that ever made the bullying stop. I fought back once in the locker room against a boy two years and two feet older and taller than me, basically lost the fight immediately, but because I fought and wouldn't submit, everybody else stopped the fight and after that day I was never bullied in school again.

The reason I never fought back sooner is because I was scared of the rules even more than the bullies. The "Zero tolerance" rules made clear that if I fought back I would be just as bad as the bullies, and in just as much trouble (except I'd actually be in more trouble, because my parents would be livid at me for getting suspended while the bullies' parents wouldn't give a shit.) "Zero tolerance" means zero due process. It's the school administrators essentially siding with bullies by default because it makes the paperwork easier. Absolutely immoral. It should be their responsibility to figure out who actually started the fight and punish the perpetrator but not the victim.

In the end I didn't get in trouble after all, because locker room fights were beyond the eyes of adults and nobody ratted anybody out. I resent the teachers and the administration the most, for making me afraid to stick up for myself. The kids who bullied me were psychos or broken people, and I find it easy to forgive them. But the administration did harm to me by being lazy bureaucrats.

So I'd say 4 is a good age to start, if you need to find a good gym I'd recommend going over to old.reddit.com/r/bjj and asking for advice on there, you'll probably get some good advice.

Also it makes wrestling with the kids way more fun when they try and practice their BJJ at the same time.

So what's the ceiling on that? What if they escalate back? What if I can't win physically?

Is head-injury risking brain damage to my opponent going too far? Do I bring weapons? Bats? Knives? This sounds like a losing escalation path really, guns are pretty readily available and a half-dozen rounds to the chest sounds like it would be a nice permanent solution to most bullying problems.

Is that going too far?

The number of people in this entire comment section who don't see "escalate the violence" as having some very obvious negative outcomes is incredible. It's all "boys will be boys" style rhetorical crap, where they pretend that there's a magic set of limiting rules and that somehow teenagers throwing punches isn't in fact gambling on serious injury and death.

Oh and the best part: the victim doesn't want to be there. The victim wants the problem to stop. The victim, is the one who in violent escalation gets held to account for going "too far" in response.

The "real world" doesn't work this way, it's not even remotely similar. In the real world in most US states if someone assaults you in public you actually can legally draw a weapon and kill them in response, but at the very least the authorities will descend and the assaulter's life as though know it - if caught - is quite thoroughly over. School's are the only place where everyone knows the identity of the perpetrators and theirs witnesses galore and the authority says "nah, the victim should handle it - but you know, not too much".