I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this:
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.
It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have.
A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement).
I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film.
Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
> If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it?
I still don't know.
"Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators. (Aside from Ender's Game, there are some good episodes of SG:SG1 that touch on this topic. It is complex even for adults. The permissibility of violence in this situation is likely conditional on authority figures having turned a blind eye to the situation. The level of nuance here probably exceeds what I'd expect a child being bullied to be able to command. The other problem is that bullies don't always operate alone, and a fight one decides to pick might not be a fair one.)
But like I said, it's besides the point: to a degree, yeah, you should teach children to have a "thick skin". But "thick skin" only gets the child so far: it can fend off mild amounts of verbal abuse, but I do not think a child can be effectively taught to deal with repeated, long-term verbal abuse, social ostracization, and physical abuse, and to deal with the emotional consequences thereof. At that stage, bullying is a failure of adults to discipline, in so much as it is allowed to happen and moreso and in particular, to persist.
> self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators
While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong. Rather than try to expound that in more detail, I'll just reference a post by The Last Psychiatrist that does the job better than I could anyway:
"[W]hat kind of school doesn't want a kid to stand up to a bully, especially when they're doing it to help someone else? What kind of crazy school wants you to back down-- and get someone else to protect you? What kind of school indoctrinates kids that power is only possessed by a) bad people; b) the state?
> While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong.
Just to be clear: I don't agree with it. All I'm saying is that child-me understood that it wouldn't be a valid defense after the fact, i.e., that there would be consequences. That, of course, affects one's decision making.
That article is very real, though. (But … and I get this gist from other comments on the thread: that article's example is a mild bully. But yeah, that's how public schools react, and how they inadvertently teach.)
I certainly hope nobody's talking about going full enders game. I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response. Not being afraid to take a punch or get a black eye.
If someone's talking about a real psychopath willing to break bones or with a weapon, the only real responses to run and any martial arts with class will teach you as much.
Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth. Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
> I think most people are talking about giving as good as you get and proportionate response.
The goal is change, i.e., to end the violence. That's the same motivation as Ender. (I shouldn't imply Enders-game levels of violence, sorry, I meant more the metaphor the book sets up: Ender ends the conflict, which is a mirror to his larger role in the plot.) My point is that, had I engaged in violence — I never did, but do I regret that decision? how should I advise a youth? IDK… — I'm not fighting to win that fight, I'm fighting to win all fights.
(And, as I said in the original comment, I think the question of what the child should do is itself wrong. By the time a child is thinking whether violence will or won't solve the problem, the alleged adults in the room have already failed the child. It should never have gotten that far to begin with.)
A number of commenters in this thread also seem to have the popular media trope of a bully as their impression, which is a fair bit watered down. As the paper states,
> poor outcomes throughout the life span, including mental, physical and socioeconomic difficulties.
"Throughout the life span". It has permanent, enduring effects, and I don't know that pixels on a screen capture the mental anguish bullies leave in their wake.
> Thick skin is just quiet suffering unless it is backed up with real confidence and an actual sense of self-worth.
That's a good way of putting it. Unfortunately, I think the years it takes to acquire that mean you're not going to have it until after it's too late. (Or more realistically, I think bullying set back a child acquiring that sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)
> Unless you're an award-winning actor, a boy can still tell if they're getting to you.
Of course I would. I feel as though this is a false dichotomy. It isn't either/or. I wish I got the help that I needed and that adults took it more seriously - not going into detail, but I ended up almost dying because of it.
The study literally says that you should ALSO help the victim build resilience, it never says that we should stop preventing bullies from bullying. You are creating a strawman here.
I would take it 1 step farther, if you're not teaching your children how to deal with bullies themselves then you're harming them for life.
There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
You sound like you have never met a real bully. Just because a kid is mean and tough doesn't mean they're a bully.
Actual bullies have a very keen sense of how the victim might fight back and what it would cost them. And they go ahead with the bullying - breaking down a person, because they can - because they know the victim can't effectively fight back.
> There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
And the next step isn't to start arguing about what does, and doesn't, constitute a bully.
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The way my mother tells it, I started crying when I got into the car after school and wouldn't tell her what was going on. After the 3rd day in a row she got very insistent, I finally told her and she never left that parking lot before having it cleared up with the school. They removed me from her class and put me in another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker (whom I adored).
You're mistaken if you think my argument is that there aren't situations in which the parent MUST step in.
Yeah, that sounds like a situation where you needed someone else to stand up for you, and I think that's a lot more common.
If you can get out of it on your own toughness alone, it probably wasn't bullying. It's part of the definition of bullying that it's one-sided, that the victim has no good ways to fight back.
If they DO have a way to fight back, it's called conflict, not bullying. It's of course possible that one side in a conflict is a big jerk, a wannabe thug, etc.
One of the big conclusions from bullying research is that treating bullying as if it was conflict (e.g. teaching kids "negotiation strategies") makes things actively worse.
I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B.
Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.
I don't have a clear answer but definitely they should know you have their back, it certainly makes it easier if the child knows you'll support them in it (even when they perhaps did the wrong thing).
Outside of that, they need to be taught that buttholes exist and dealing with them is a fact of life. They shouldn't start things, but they definitely should end them. That was the metric for us while in school, especially if we got into "fisticuffs".
I think for you it's important to understand that school and teachers can't be trusted. I'm not saying teachers suck, but shitty teachers exist. My middle brother once had a teacher take a dislike to him because he corrected her in class. I once had a teacher that would make me stand out in the hall behind the coats on the coat rack. My mother showed up at the school for both, I was pulled from that class and put into another class with a teacher named Mrs Parker, whom I absolutely adored. I still remember the song we would sing at the beginning of class (about parking cars).
My point is that if your child is having an issue with a teacher, don't assume it's the child, my experience is that it very often wasn't. You build trust with your children by SHOWING them that you're there for them. Of course, that doesn't mean every poor interaction with a teacher is the teachers fault. We were dirt poor so I suspect that had something to do with it as well.
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Anyways, none of that is really concrete, I don't know that concrete advice really applies to a question like that. Imo, kids learn what you teach them even if you don't know you're teaching them, and there is no such thing as a single glorifying lesson, it's a slow march over time, exactly as you would do to build trust with someone.
I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level?
Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they absolutely knew who they had a physical edge on, and were absolutely willing to do nothing but escalate.
We don't need to "teach children to deal with bullying" we need god damn physical security around and within schools, and a panopticon of surveillance to make sure that justice happens swiftly and accurately.
I knew one kid who stood up to the bully and then was jumped by the whole gang after school. They used steel pipes to break a leg and knock out teeth. Of course there were no "witnesses" as "snitches get stitches" in that old neighborhood.
Now... i was also heavily bullied at school and at some point my solution was to show everyone of the "gang" (not in the US sense... more a clique of 13 - 15 year old wannabe-gansters) that i am total psycho. I waited for weeks until i got the chance to grab the main bully alone and unprepared, surprised him, beat him heavily while keeping total silent while doing so only to tell him afterwards in a somewhat calm way that it could be weeks, months or years, but i would GET him if he continues to harass me.
Worked for me, never had any problems with his clique afterwards.
Teaching children to deal with physical bullying includes self defense lessons and also involves teaching them not to be passive if they witness physical bullying.
Maybe the bully is the biggest kid in class but it won't matter if every kid knows how to defend themselves and also every kid will team up to pull them off of someone.
And then the bully, because for some reason they're still in the school - because you seem to think its "going too far" to enforce the rules in anyway other then mob justice - cries about how it's unfair, and then jumps one of the kids at the bus stop after school.
This is a stupid idea that doesn't scale, and continues the cycle of victimization: the victim gets to take on all the risk of physical retaliation. Maybe the next punch kills someone? It's impossible to know. Now they get to be on trial for murder while everyone declares they "just don't see how little <bully> could have deserved this".
An 80 lb kid who "knows how to defend himself" against one weighting 150 still loses the fight. The benefit of defending oneself is mostly that the bully often moves on to easier pickings after pummeling the one who fought back.
Yet some school cultures are entrenched, and extend from the broader community. If people are taught from everywhere else that bearing witness is dangerous then groups of bullies will have free reign. Changing that culture can be like pushing a rock up hill.
Solutions may have to be drastic, like electronic surveillance or sending troublemakers to different schools.
A panopticon of surveillance? That’s absurd. Anyway, a lot of bullying actually happens online these days. It can be much more effective than physical bullying.
Why is surveilling schools with cameras absurd? A societal panopticon is, but visual surveillance of an entire school, surrounding streets and buses? That's already happening, it's just not coordinated. We've pushed the responsibility onto kids with cellphones, so school authorities can pretend they "don't know" what's going on.
It’s traditional for a father to teach his son that he should defend himself. He may lose the fight, but respect is gained. And, you’d be surprised, many bullies are actually cowards and will fold early.
There are many novels directed at young people that show how to behave in these situations. It’s not clear that anyone reads them anymore.
It’s important to work these things out early in life, before the “events” get too serious. Refer to the Wikipedia article on “The Dozens”.
(I have no idea how mothers traditionally taught their daughters to stand up to bullies, but I’m sure they did.)
You should learn about bullying from science, not from out of fashion novels. Try out your intervention in a dozen randomly selected schools, try a different one (or do nothing) in the others.
This has in fact been done, and nothing resembling your approach, what one might call the "Manhood YouTube channel" approach, has done well at all.
You propose people, other people, should do a specific thing. That's an intervention you're proposing.
Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread the book that is school bullying 101, "Bullying in school: what we know and what we can do", Dan Olweus, 1991. It contains the results of the first large scale intervention studies on preventing bullying in schools.
> A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were
I say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot.
Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.
I'd go so far as to suspect that anyone calling this victim blaming is a bully themselves and is attempting to make people at large less resilient to bullying by advocating positions that don't promote resiliency and self control in these kinds of situations.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't.
My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong.
One of my favorite lines:
> Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
Do you think that if bullies were stopped when young, they might be able to turn into adults that don't bully?
Regardless, as others have said here, I have way more avenues for dealing with bullies as an adult, including but not limited to getting my own lawyers.
This is a good point. Policing bullying in school (when young) may work if one can catch it in the act but this bully behavior never stops in adulthood, it starts taking different forms. Being aware of bullies and not being affected by their actions helps but they will only find a different target.
I think the point the OP is trying to make isn't to police bullies, but to figure out the influences on the child to be a bully, and to correct for that, so that the kid doesn't bully in the first place.
Actually, sex education is an excellent metaphor here. Teenage pregnancy happens when you assume by not addressing how teen pregnancy happens, teenagers won't fuck. However, teenage pregnancy goes down when you give access to safe sex, robust sex education, and effectively take away the forbidden fruit of fucking.
Similarly, teaching kids how bullying functions and a robust environment that prevents the causal factors of bullying can cut down on the actual bullying behavior.
- property manager put a lock on the door 3 days before I had to be out, went in and removed a few of my animals. Took the bitch to court, to this day I'm not sure if she was unaware that there are laws on the books in my state SPECIFICALLY to deal with that exact situation.
- VP got pissed off at me and told my manager to write me up. I refused to sign the document, immediately quit, and she was fired roughly 8 months later. 10 months later that same manager contacted me wanting to hire me (I refused).
I could go on, but I won't. If you've never dealt with a malevolent person who actively wanted to take advantage of you in over 30 years, congratulations. But that sure as shit isn't normal.
This presupposes that bullying is always explained by something environmental or that it's learned behavior. But what if bullying is just fun for some people? What if human beings have differing innate levels of aggression, empathy, and tolerance? What if some people see bullying and feel a little pit in their stomach -- fear, disgust, anger -- and what if others simply don't?
"The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make here. If some people find bullying fun, they should be taught why it isn't fun for others and dealt with if they continue. I mean I'm sure rapist think that their rape is fun or empowering or something, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed.
I agree with you. The point is just that it suggests a different set of interventions. If you keep digging for the "root cause" when the root cause is, "he likes it," then you're going to waste a lot of time getting nothing done.
If you're going to make a claim like "'the blank slate' conception of the world continues to mislead us", it wouldn't hurt to have more than a series of what-ifs.
"Nature vs. nurture" is in the public conception a live debate, but it really isn't. The data are in. If you're genuinely interested, Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a great overview of the argument for the layman.
Nah, that's too glib. The people at one extreme end of the spectrum might accurately be called sociopaths, but lots of more ordinary people fall to the right of center on the "enjoys bullying" bell curve.
No, this is true. Statistically, we know many serial killers are actually victims of brain trauma as children (usually through being violently beaten) and we know traumatic brain injury can cause aggression. In fact there's a predictive relationship between childhood trauma and juvenile psychopathy. [0]
0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29598432/ " Results indicate that psychopathy is significantly correlated with childhood trauma. For the Missouri data, trauma significantly predicted psychopathy scores for both boys and girls."
Enjoying and causing the suffering of others, especially as a power thing (and what is bullying about if not power) is sociopathy, plain and simple no matter how you adjust your spectrum.
If "ordinary people" are on the right of centre of the bell curce, all you are arguing is that the culture you are in encourages sociopathic behavior.
After watching how my kids schools deal with this, I think the a big part of the solution is not just thinking about bullies or the bullied, but the rest of the kids in the middle that aren't bullies or the bullied.
The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool.
One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
I would say in an ideal world yes, but the fact is that in the real world a lot of generalizable anti-bullying messaging/curriculum can start from a good place but can easily be mis-construed or willfully and purposefully construed or in fact morph into such things like critical race theory, etc.
Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups".
In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully?
Why not both?
This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions.
The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied.
Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
I read somewhere that to be successful you need to focus on the environment people are in, as in instead of trying to figure out who the bullies are, you need to figure out why a certain environment leads to bullying behaviour.
I teach people how to protect themselves from emotional attacks. What I've seen is that most of us who attack others often believe we were attacked first.
So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).
So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
>Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me.
It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
Absolutely people try to make bullies not want to bully, from psychological counseling to suspending them from school. It sort of works, but any success is limited. Also bullies can attack outside the school premises.
This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression.
Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration.
If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time.
We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense.
This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this.
The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim.
The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight.
I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
> It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.
The year was 1990. The school was the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The leader of the group was Chris Cater. The resident assistant who was battered was Steve Dyker and this happened in front of South Hall, the dorm I lived in, although I wasn't there when that incident happened.
When Chris did this in front of witnesses he was expelled immediately although I did see him come back to sell drugs on campus a year later.
Before that incident the dean of students, Frank Etscorn, told me that it was just "my word against his" and that he could not press charges.
Chris was criminally minded and he certainly inspired a group of students into more criminal behavior than they would have done on their own. I don't believe that New Mexico Tech was much worse than other schools at this time, in fact around this time there were high profile incidents involving bullying and suicides of gay students at other schools.
I'm reticent to ask more questions given that you said receiving the newsletter was retraumatizing. But one of the people who witnessed the behavior you described should consider documenting it.
I'm not sure how getting to the root of the problem instead of treating the symptoms is "trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics." If the topics are more complex, let's address those complexities. I feel like when they say, "We should teach kids how to survive bullying better," they're the ones trying to apply feels-right reasoning to a complex situation. That's a short-term solution. If the real, long-term solution is medical intervention of some sort, then do that! But don't let the bullying continue and put all of the work on the victim of the bullying. Sure, we can help them be more resilient, as I said above. But the actual problem needs to be addressed no matter how hard or complex it is.
Bullying is enabled by a power imbalance. For those without the ability to rectify the power imbalance, teaching resilience both helps in the short-term and is a useful skill for the large fraction of the population who will one day end up in a job where there is a n abuse of a power imbalance, but they can't quit if they also want to eat.
As the parent of both a bully and a victim (two different kids), I can say that correcting the bullying behavior is not as easy as it might seem. Many (most?) bullies are charming and manipulative and most victims are not, so convincing those who have the ability to correct the power imbalance is quite challenging.
I could make a laundry list of examples just from my own direct experience, but I'll limit it to one:
(Pre COVID, as it does involve tech in the class room, which changed a lot in 2020).
We refused the school-issued Chromebook for my daughter and the administration agreed that she could do all of her work on paper. One of her teachers "didn't feel right singling her out" and "she is such a good kid" so without telling us gave our daughter the classroom Chromebook to do in-class assignments, which she used to cyber-bully a classmate to the point that the child left the school and the child's parents, who were previously friends with my wife, will no longer talk to us.
Studies show that roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths, and these people are over-represented among CEOs of corporations. From that we can assume there are rewards for psychopathic behavior, and this includes bullying. Starting in school, the bullies are often rewarded by established authority figures. Some of this is generational perpetuation: a generation ago some bullies became leaders and now they want the new generation of bullies to also become leaders, as they associate their own behavior with ideal leadership. Therefore, to end bullying would require a full-going social, cultural, and economic revolution. The entire generation-to-generation cycle would have be broken.
> These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience;
...
> These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age.
Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. I'm mean, I'm all for teaching kids resilience and self-reliance, but at some point, we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the bullies and why they want to bully other kids and stop trying to just fix the kids who get bullied.