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Today's Topic: Bullying
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I assume all of you have seen the video of Casey Heynes: an Australian kid who got sick of being bullied. If you have not yet seen it, I found a nice blog that adds a personal element to what Casey and other people who are bullied experience.
Here.
When I was young, I don't recall ever really being bullied. In elementary school, there were some big kids who would chase me around. If they caught me, they would just hold me and that was it. No big deal, but I didn't like it.
I recall another time when I felt like I was being bullied so, like a crazed monkey, I jumped on the kid when he turned around, grabbed a huge chunk of hair on his head and tried to pull it all out. He started to cry and we got in trouble, but he never picked on me again.
I didn't have any problems in middle school and very few problems in high school.
I remember one of the few black kids at my high school saying hello and patting me on the back after he had been eating cheetos. I didn't know he had gotten that cheesy crap all over the back of my shirt until my friend pointed it out. I was angry, but didn't plan on doing anything about it, until my friend said to me, "Look what he did!? Are you just going to take that!?"
After my friend managed to get my blood pumping, I walked over to the kid and pushed him. I was surprised when he flew through the air and landed on the ground. I was shocked and didn't know what to do, except to pick up his can of pop that had dropped out of his hand when he landed.
He wanted to fight me, but we never did. I went to class and he never bothered me again. I think he told people that I attacked him, because he was black.
Feel free to share your stories about bullying.
Here.
When I was young, I don't recall ever really being bullied. In elementary school, there were some big kids who would chase me around. If they caught me, they would just hold me and that was it. No big deal, but I didn't like it.
I recall another time when I felt like I was being bullied so, like a crazed monkey, I jumped on the kid when he turned around, grabbed a huge chunk of hair on his head and tried to pull it all out. He started to cry and we got in trouble, but he never picked on me again.
I didn't have any problems in middle school and very few problems in high school.
I remember one of the few black kids at my high school saying hello and patting me on the back after he had been eating cheetos. I didn't know he had gotten that cheesy crap all over the back of my shirt until my friend pointed it out. I was angry, but didn't plan on doing anything about it, until my friend said to me, "Look what he did!? Are you just going to take that!?"
After my friend managed to get my blood pumping, I walked over to the kid and pushed him. I was surprised when he flew through the air and landed on the ground. I was shocked and didn't know what to do, except to pick up his can of pop that had dropped out of his hand when he landed.
He wanted to fight me, but we never did. I went to class and he never bothered me again. I think he told people that I attacked him, because he was black.
Feel free to share your stories about bullying.
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That guys anecdote is valid, I guess, but the times we live in today are completely and utterly different.
I was never severely bullied in school, but I was the butt of some jokes and in my group of friends I was always the one that ate the most shit from everyone else. It was tough.
I feel for kids that are/were severely bullied and I did my part to, when I was in any position of popularity in high school, never bully anyone. I just didn't have it in me.
I just can't justify Heynes response, if only from a standpoint of safety. That kid looked mighty fucked up afterwards. He probably had the wind knocked out of him and has a few bone bruises to show for it. He also will leave Heynes alone, more likely than not.
But if Heynes dropped that kid a little more angrily, maybe with a little more force, you have a situation where that kid's neck is broken. He drops that kid on his head and you have a situation where the kid is brain damaged.
The way litigation works, you've then got a situation on your hands where Heynes family is being sued to pay for this kid's medical bills. Nobody wins in that situation, and Heynes has lost a lot more than self-confidence because he "stood up" to this bully.
It's a double-edged sword. While I can't say that Heynes should've sat there and took it, I also can't cheer him on because of where that could've gone.
2) If 1 does not work, appropriate force should be used. If you are actually being physically assaulted by someone, you do what it takes to make them stop.
There were periods of time where it was more or less a daily occurrence. The worst day was in sixth grade, some time in April. Some kids were playing Crack the Whip, which was against the rules at our school, but me and one friend were watching them anyway. All of a sudden, some kid pointed at us and yelled "they're gonna steal our shoes" and then a bunch of kids, maybe six or seven of them, came over and started shoving us around and pushed us into the dirt. A yard duty came over and broke up the crack the whip game, but didn't do or say anything about the bullying. Me and my friend ran away.
After running away, we went over to the edge of the schoolyard by a wooden fence. A few minutes later, we noticed different group of kids, maybe ten or twelve of them, all wandering towards us.
One thing that's important about this story is that I was born pretty severely pigeon-toed. By sixth grade it had mostly gone away, with the help of braces, but all the other kids in my grade school knew about it.
Well, this second group of kids, they were all walking towards us with their toes pointed inwards, mocking me. We started to walk away but we couldn't really get anywhere because the fence was behind us. I don't really remember everything that happened because I spent most of the incident with my face pressed up against the fence.
At some point we slipped away and ran towards the yard duty. She must have seen us from her vantage point. All she did is point to the basketball court and say "Go over there. They won't bother you over there."
We went over there, I remember being kind of dazed from the whole situation, and the next thing I know there's a basketball hitting the side of my face. It was a third, smaller group of kids, maybe 3 or 4 or 5 of them, not sure, who decided that they wanted a piece of us too.
While getting kicked around by that third group of kids, the bell rang and we went inside. We were visibly bruised up and dirty, so our teacher asked us what had happened, and we told him. He excused us to go to the bathroom to get washed up. Some of the kids in the second group were in the same class as us, and he kept them there after class, but as far as I could tell, no other disciplinary action was ever taken.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Of course, I say this if what I read is true.
I largely agree with you. he was suplexed onto concrete. That could have been terribad.
I don't expect a kid of that age to be able to make that kind of calculus in the moment, though. We train police how to take down somebody without seriously injuring them; I don't think we should have to teach similar techniques to children.
This is part of the reason (though clearly not the only reason) that adults absolutely need to intervene with bullying. The idea that "it toughens you up" is bullshit. Even if a kid ends up tough enough to deal with it, you're still inviting the potential for somebody to get seriously hurt.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I can't understand how someone would say "You should let other people punch you in the face, because if you react you might hurt them."
Doesn't even parse.
It hasn't seemed to me that responding violently to bullies ends the bullying, it's more likely to accelerate it. But I can easily see why you would resort to violence since it's usually one guy versus many, and if school is still like I remember it you get little to no assistance from anyone - either young or adult - to improve your situation.
i was bullied in a very real, very scary way. it was emotional and also very, very physical. it happened in high school. it wasn't because i was nerdy or introverted; it was because i was white. i went to an almost entirely black high school with a smidgen of asian and hispanic kids, and then me. so i had to fight, well, just about every day. sometimes one kid, face to face, sometimes half a dozen kids, with no warning, and sometimes with bare hands, sometimes with backpacks full of text books.
so when i hear about someone who got made fun of a lot, i empathize with the emotional element of their abuse, and i do feel bad. or i try my hardest to feel bad. but there's absolutely a point that i can't control where i wonder "well, what did they REALLY do to you?" and i know that's callous. it's not the proper way to regard the suffering of others, so i try to work on it. but now, eight or so years later, i still kind of feel that way.
so, all that said- no, i don't get the kind of rabid schadenfreude in this case that i've seen a lot of bullying victims express on the internet. it kind of stupefies me that one could have experienced such brutal, inhumane treatment- especially at the hands of those who are, ostensibly, themselves children... which makes it even worse IMO- and gone on to go 'good, vicious little shit got what he deserved!'
i fought back when i was bullied- a lot of social dynamics led to me shying away from going to authorities (not the least of which was the then-softness on school assaults). so i fought back pretty much from day one. while i can cop to moments of satisfaction when i would win the fights, i definitely don't get that kind of 'yeah, fuck the bullies, knock their teeth out!' general sense of revelry i see in this case.
like, i know that bullying- especially, IMO, in cases like mine with physical violence- leads to a complex stew of emotions and residual bitterness. i get that. but i would legitimately implore anyone who cheered or laughed at that kid crashing violently into the concrete from five and a half feet in the air to stop and do some introspection.
In a law abiding, civilized society, if someone hits you, you can defend yourself. The law, being the teachers are seldom the course of action and for the most part make things a lot worse.
The best course of action is to simply stand up to the person who's causing you problems by telling them first to leave you alone and if they don't comply, defend yourself.
So, uh... bullies suck.
It's a question of proportional response. If a bully puts one of your friends in the hospital you don't put one of his in the morgue.
Even in Chicago.
I agree with Feral that you can't expect a kid to show proper restraint and it falls on adults to manage these situations.
That's why its such a fucked up situation that it should never be left in the kids' hands. The failure of adult intervention is the biggest crime here, really.
I never said he should let that kid punch him in the face, I'm just saying the response of "fuck yeah" is totally missing the point.
Then when I hit middle-school I knocked out a kid during the first week of 5th grade because I was the new kid (new school, new state) and he tormented me every day for that first week. However that action got me labeled as needing "Adaptive Behavior" classes and being given Ritalin for the next 4 years.
In 8th grade (again, new state, new school) there was a kid with a Neapolitan complex (he was short and was mean to everyone). My step-dad had given me his BDU blouse that he wore through Desert Shield/Storm and I was very proud of it. Little shit called me a well-fare recipient (among other things) so I boxed his ears.
I will say that I did do some bullying behavior, but I never targeted a single person, and it was only 2 acts during my senior year in high-school, both done to a different random freshman.
I always felt bad about what I did my senior but I also felt justified in my previous actions.
Generally speaking, extricating yourself from the situation and calling the cops is probably a better solution than getting into a drag out fight with some guy in the street.
That teachers do not deal with bullying as they should is the problem. But you should at least give them the opportunity to fail so that afterwards you have a clear conscious (and a better self-defense case if it comes to it).
He didn't say that.
Depends on how effective you are, I guess.
In lieu of actual authoritative action, in grade school, I was told (by the principal) that I was free to fight back without being disciplined. And I tried it, at first. It didn't really work. I was younger than my bullies (at that time) by 3 or 4 years, I was alone, I was out of shape. I got my ass kicked. On the rare occasions that I actually managed to hurt somebody, all they did was come back with more kids next time.
Later on, in junior high and high school, fighting back absolutely did work. But by that time, the bullying incidents were rarer, there were fewer aggressors, the age differential didn't matter nearly as much, and I was in better physical shape and had more fighting experience.
I don't think that's the right answer though. All an eye for an eye does is make the whole world blind.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Its important to note the general abject failure of teaching staff in Australian schools to deal with bullying in anything approaching an effective manner. Its not all their fault; they're often hamstrung by legal restrictions on what they can do to kids and further constrained by sue-happy parents and State education departments that won't back them up when dealing with troublesome kids. Telling a teacher is not a solution here, and I can say that from experience.
At some point, especially when the system fails to protect, victims need to stand up for themselves or they will continue to be victims.
Look at it through the filter of being an adult. If I'm minding my own business and some jackwad and his friends decide to pick a fight with me, I am within my rights to fight back, even to the point of seriously injuring those attacking me.
This wasn't a one-on-one thing; there were literally a half-dozen kids involved in this assault sitting in the wings and egging on the bully, any one of which could have jumped in and contributed to the violence had Casey allowed that little shit to continue beating on him.
What if this were a female student, and instead of picking a fight, the bully and his friends wanted to rape her? Why would she be any more justified in defending herself than Casey was?
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
As I said in my last post, all this did was intice the bullies to come back with more kids. That way they could grab me and hold me down while kicking and stomping on me.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I agree with the general idea that hey, it really sucks that children are hurting each other, and that the bully is probably in a pretty fucked up social/family situation too, and that it's terrible that this kind of thing gets put on blast on youtube, but...
What's the kid supposed to do? I mean, kids who get bullied are put in a pretty impossible situation: the social environment they are forced spend the majority of their day in is hostile to them and every supervisory mechanism that's supposed to protect him from junk like this has failed. Without knowing anything about his background really, this stuff doesn't happen as a result of isolated incidents. The other kid didn't say something to him once and get dropped on his head over it.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
This is simply terrible advice for a child going through these kind of stressful events. It leads to a child going from feeling helpless to even more helpless when the help that is requested is insufficient.
As for situations as an adult, most times, you can't simply just say "hold on a second while I call the cops" after someone threw a punch.
Please, if you're a parent, don't do this. Instill your child with confidence and tell them that you are behind them 100%.
I don't understand why there's so much focus on Heynes and so little focus on the school system.
I don't accept "Feral, we already know that schools suck at stopping bullies!" as a justification.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
From a self-defense perspective proper restraint is doing what you need to do to exit the situation. You seem to be thinking of this as some sort of punitive action.
Frankly, the kid should thank his fucking stars that he got away with a broken tibia (what I've heard), and not a bullet to the gut, which is where this shit ends up way too often.
I will absolutely cheer Casey on. The adults in his life failed him, and he basically had two options left to him: let it happen for two more years until he graduated, or take a stand now and drop the fucker on the floor (literally as it turned out).
That's obfuscation of the worst sort. Yes, the school system failed, but that sure as hell did no good to Casey Haynes at that moment in time.
"Hey, the school has yet to protect me from bullies, and I am being confronted with physical violence. I know, let's run away and tell the school authorities so they can continue to not protect me from bullying!"
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
This is what my dad tried to do.
Yet my attempts to fight back failed because I was young, clumsy, and chubby.
Was I going to go back to my dad and say, "Hey dad, I'm a fat little faggot, and your advice didn't work?"
No, but it didn't stop me from thinking that maybe I deserved to get tossed around because I was young, clumsy, and chubby.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Am I misreading that?
Sorry, but his response was "proportional." A gang of kids hanging around while their buddy punches the poor kid in the face? He did what he needed to stop it, and left. Gang assault is frequently deadly. The poor kid tried not to escalate the situation until he was being punched in the face.
Granted, he's not a hero. He's just a kid that did what he needed to do to keep himself safe, and his actions shouldn't be looked on as something to aspire to. I laud him for that.
edit- I guess I am misreading that, but nevertheless. Point stands. Even past childhood.
When bullying becomes physical, its assault, and should be treated as such. There's no reason to use a different term just because it happens on school property.
Curiously, the bullying dropped off in proportion to the definition and size of the muscle I gained.
Unfortunately I have discovered that the bullies far from the playground in the adult world I have inhabited for quite some time do not need to lay a hand on one to do great harm through their cruelty.
That problem, it would seem, is not so easily defeated with a bodyslam...
But it is not impossible for us to do better in both cases.
Love it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Um, no. Did I once say that Casey should have stuck around and beat the shit out of that kid? THAT would be punitive. There is a difference between defending oneself and curbstomping someone whom you have already injured to the point of not being able to/wanting to fight anymore.
Casey partook in the former, and in that I will support him and any other bullied child who is forced to resort to the same. To do anything else would be to blame the victim, or worse, to throw one's hands in the air and say, "It's the government's fault; they should really do something about that!" without actually having to burden oneself with enacting a realistic solution.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
like, i am not sitting in the white house today by any means but if my high school life were relocated to today i probably wouldn't get a high school diploma.
A public school is staffed and supervised by government employees who are expressly responsible for keeping the children there safe. Yes, they really should do something about that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Amen
Yes. This.
These are the kinds of things that should be applauded.
But they obviously didn't. Why should we trust them to do anything differently in the future?
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
What on earth do you imagine they are justifying?
That is amazing. I admire the father's conviction, and I'm ashamed to say that I don't think I could do the same thing to my children.