The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
Another Way Schools Are Failing Our Kids
Posts
It was pretty sweet really. Most fights were broken up pretty quickly, I only remember one during my tenure there that got really bad. Kid got faceplanted into the floor.
Probably, but I'm 28 now and the last time anyone came after me was in junior high. I think the fact that I'm six foot tall and work out regularly discourages anyone from thinking I'm an easy target, even if I actually AM an easy target.
Once you have the name of being fun to bully around, it's too late. You can act all mature about it, shrug it off, not play the victim, but that won't stop the bullies being immature about it. Until someone with authority shows them proper consequences for their actions, they won't stop no matter what you do. This can go on for loving years. So yes, you can be the victim justifiably for so long.
If you can fault anything. It's the high school culture of cliques and needing or wanting to fit in. Ladder theory is born there. I think it's a sick consequence of our western culture of competition and grading on a single scale.
Well, it's been pretty much the same in all the martial arts I've tried out. Ju-Jitsu, Vale Tudo, Muay Thai and Judo. Judo is probably the best, as you said, as you aren't punching and kicking them. I just weird out when it comes to it. I'm pretty sure it's just a personal thing. I find it absolutely abhorrent to even consider hitting them.
Which brings me to the point I was planning to make earlier, and what you said. Taking martial arts does wonders for your confidence in such situations, from what I've heard. Even if you aren't very good at them, taking a martial art for a while does teach pretty useful techniques, especially against opponents of greater strength/size. Knowing that you might know some tricks that the bully doesn't should give a small confidence boost, even if they wouldn't really matter a lot in a fight. Said confidence might help to disarm the situation without resolving to fighting.
What the fuck?
In other words: everyone else.
There will always be others looking to victimize their fellow man. The amount of scams that are prevelant in todays society is testament enough. How do you plan on dealing with them? Hoping others will fight your battles? Praying that the victimizers will have a change of heart? Pleading for authorities to intervene?
Those are all well and good, expeically the last - being the most viable option after schooling ages. But when those options fail, you are the only one left to defend your life.
It is Billy's life and he is the only one who can choose how he wants to live it. The only people able to affect change in his situation are most likely those directly involved, which I consider consists of Billy, his parents, his friends, the School Authorities, the vicitimizers, and any witnesses to the victimization. So far, everyone on that list has been ineffective in stopping Billy from being a victim (not counting the filed law suits as I dont believe we were provided with an outcome).
Is it to be everyone's fault, but Billy? Or is it everyone's fault, including Billy?
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
t Nova_C: well yes, but wouldn't it be nice to better yourself if a fighting situation ever happens again? I don't mean to go fearmongering, but you never know when some loon in the pub/in the alley decides to pick a fight with you/harass those around you.
I'd have to disagree with the fault being a western cultural dilemma. The same thing happens in foreign countries. Hell, half the bullies I encountered thought they'd pick on me because I was foreign.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
He's a child, for one thing, and for another you simply cannot reasonably expect some people to win some battles without outside assistance. If the cavalry doesn't show, you don't get to turn it back around on the victim and say, Well, you should've tried harder!
You are a terrible, terrible man.
:rotate:
Let me spell this out for you. Blaming the victim of a crime does not make the perpetrator any less guilty. And yes, I view these acts as crimes. Telling the victim of an attack that they should have fought back against their attackers, instead of reassuring them that it won't happen again, does far more psychological harm than the actual act itself.
I agree the clique thing isn't purely western, but I just wonder how rampant bullying is in countries that have a more accepting and peer-loving culture. Maybe Thailand or Tibet?
Our media likes to exaggerate so we might not have a good basis for comparison unless someone can find some statistics (I failed).
Even then some incidents are going to be hard to stop but that doesn't mean you just give up, it is part of the job to try. One of the major problems I have seen myself is that you just don't have access to information about what happens during breaks between classes as a teacher, even when trying to keep your ear to the ground and spend as much time as possible in the corridors or outside you still only catch bits and pieces. You do have something of a calming influence when you are out there especially if you are a bit unpredictable in where you might show up and make sure there are no areas that are never supervised.
Sadly there are schools that will try their damnest to sweep things like this under the rug, even when it goes as far as in the article. Trying to deny or downplay what they know in order to get around taking action that reveal to the public that there exists peer abuse on their school, even going so far as to convince themselves that this is really not a big deal, that the student getting abuse is really at fault.
Honestly I think the only shot that kid has at this point is to start over somewhere else, it sucks that he would be the one forced to move and not the abusers but the administration at his current school doesn't seem all that competent.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
There's not really much of a solution other then principals and teachers taking a moral stand and putting an end to bullying. That's not to say that bullying can be killed off entirely but the fact that so many schools don't do anything about it really doesn't help matters.
And what happens if it does happen again? I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your post. I simply pose this hypothetical applied to your stated conclusion, which I bolded.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
If there are no disciplinary consequences for beating up an unpopular kid, he's got just about no recourse. Sure, he maybe could have acted differently so he wouldn't be so thoroughly disliked. Hell, it's obviously his fault that he's not class president, so he should man up and get to work on that.
I was relatively lucky, I guess- I took a lot of verbal abuse, but the few times anything got physical, it was me that escalated it to violence. Eventually I just kinda learned to ignore the opinions of morons, and was a lot happier for it. Either it stopped being sporting, or my antagonists grew up a little bit, because I don't think I had any problems at all once I was a senior in high school.
On that note, I might kinda agree with Wawkin on the point of female abuse- it might be better (if the victim) can ignore the abuse, rather that retaliate, as long as it's just words. Of course any authority figure should step in if they notice something or are tipped off, it shouldn't be permitted, and it's a terrible thing in general. I'm just not sure that there's a whole lot of advantage in paying any attention at all to a popular kid calling you names or spreading rumors. I'm no expert, though, so feel totally free to correct me.
I'll write about it later.
And after all that, did people at our school stop bullying the remaining three of us? Nah, after about two weeks of leaving us alone, it all started up again.
It really does just sort of speak to the sad state of affairs, though, and I second the motion that something needs to be done in a codified and ideally nationwide manner, though really it would have to be a national state-wide implementation or however you want to word it. I don't know. Blargh. e_e
Also on the female peer abuse thing, yeah again I think that there's no method for the girls to retaliate directly but that isn't really what I was asking you to answer. It's sort of appalling in its own right that your mind went as far as, "Yeah, she can't [fist]fight those problems, so she's without recourse."
Again. Education and putting a backbone in school administrations. The girl shouldn't have to ignore it, and until we somehow can cobble together the funding to address the issues with the abusers, maybe instead it's more practical to aid the abused? It shouldn't come down to schools practically forcing the children to leave, and not giving them assistance in the process (fiscal or otherwise).
Billy goes home and all the authorities comfort him after the latest bully attack. Is telling him 'try to stick up more for yourself' really worse than telling him 'everything will be alright, it won't happen again', and having that turn out to be a lie?
At this point, Billy or any kid in a similar situation has to have figured out that they are on their own. If the people who are suppose to help haven't, and he can't help himself, what recourse does he really have?
I can't shake the feeling that after so many people, who are suppose to be trustworthy and looking out for you, consistently lie to you that you end up losing faith in all people.
I think a little honesty, on the part of the authorities involved and the parents, could go a long way.
Not necessarily 'fight back cuz you're on your own'.
More focusing on what the kid can expect to see, how to diffuse a situation, maybe enrolling him in martial arts for confidence as well as the means to defend himself or telling him to hang around his friends when in the halls. Who can really say what is going to fix the problem? The only thing I'm sure of is if the problem is continually ignored and everyone just 'hopes' and 'wishes' for it to go away, then nothing will change and Billy's life will continue to be miserable.
And when it comes down to it, everyone is ultimately responsible for how they choose to advance through life. If he is willing to accept his fate (maybe the article helped him, a little publicity?), then how can I, so far removed and in no way directly or indirectly affected, begin to care?
And if you think that is being unfair, then I pose another question for those of you that are of that opinion:
How many homeless have you helped in the last year? There isn't a single bum on the street that won't blame their circumstances on someone/thing else, painting themselves as the victim. Who knows, maybe everything just went wrong all at once and screwed them over. But if they are a bum on the street, then somewhere along the line, they gave up. They stopped caring about what happens to them. Is it really your responsiblity to step in and care for them?
edit: sorry about the tangent
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
Beyond that, the boys-will-be-boys attitude needs to be taken behind the shed and shot, along with the extremes of the man-up! attitude you and some others espouse (only the extremes, it's fine to promote confidence and self-reliance to a point). Honestly though, that is a solution that only goes to a point -- this is the 21st century. Advances in communication should be moving us closer as a community. People should not have to be tough as steel on their lonesome -- especially if it does not come naturally to them, or that very position is uncomfortable for them -- because there are now more ways than ever to connect with a community and social safety net.
So, I guess along with the attitude of boys-will-be-boys being put to rest, I'd like to see less parents stressing the ... oh, wait, this is the point I've made already!
Cram the fucking stupid, sexist, backwards, bigoted "man up" bullshit. Not everyone can be Rambo, as was said previously; aside from the fact it may be more natural to teach some boys how to make use of a social network instead of being culturally taught to reject it, it would be doing a great service to culture at large because then those boys who fall outside the "norms" will be less liable to be beat up.
I mean, imagine that -- if we cut out a lot of the hypermasculine bullshit that gets fed young boys, not only would they 1) be less likely to lash out violently or in other 'masculine' fashion, they would also 2) be more accepting of deviation from that hypermasculine routine, and the boys who are by virtue of personality less into that ideal and 2a) as a necessary corollary, less equipped to defend themselves from it, and of course, 3) we would just lose a lot of stupid bullshit and open up the gender roles on both sides.
So. I guess, in a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that fuck parents that think that being a boy means being Rambo.
Also, ARWHUAHUSGHUSUGDHUDG CHILDHOOD
I think a little effort on the part of those people could go even further.
Who are you even talking to now? Everybody else - as I've been reading them at least - isn't saying that we need to hope that the bullies will just change on their own. They're all saying that we need to fundamentally change the way bullying is dealt with by most schools. They're saying that the people with the power need to wield it for the benefit of the students who, for one reason or another, cannot bring enough personal power to bear against their abusers.
The hell?
Anyway, nobody says you, wawkin, have to care. Nobody says that you, wawkin, have to go down there and help the poor guy with his problems. Nobody says that you, wawkin, need involve yourself in any way, shape, or form in this particular story of abuse. The point you seem to be missing is that this school (in particular, and all schools in general) needs to step up and empower the powerless and make the bullies face real and significant consequences.
That's kind of a strawman, isn't it? Call me crazy but I tend to think that it's a pretty uncontroversial claim that schools are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their students while those students are on school grounds and/or attending school-affiliated events. Now, it might be the case that as human beings we're all responsible for one-another too, but that's a pretty controversial claim to make.
I was seven years old when someone attacked me with a bag full of books. I never even saw the assailant. I was walking home after school, still on the soccer field and then blam. Walked home swallowing blood.
There's also the times of being set upon by six guys.
How do you stop yourself from being a victim when your attackers are either anonymous like in the first case, or vastly outnumber you like in the second. I had no allies to help - my first friend was another kid from church who didn't even go to my school. I had, literally, no friends at school until I was 14 years old.
And then I was abandoned by the authority when the one time I asked for help I was punished for it. Somebody has to help these kids because even if they try to fight back the odds are stacked against them to a ridiculous degree.
Funnily enough I used to keep getting bullied in middle school and frequent trips to the administration building didn't do shit.
One day one of the bastards came at me trying to steal my Pokemon cards so I stabbed him with a pencil. He went rolling around on the ground clutching his leg screaming. Fortunately for me, I was with my friends and all of them backed me up saying it was in self-defense.
No one ever bothered me again.
This strikes me as an incredible problem within the system. I'd like to know how the principals, deans or whoever deals the punishment rationalizes giving it to the victim.
Getting outnumbered is a problem. About the best thing that can be done in such a situation is to run away, or failing that, try to get to a public place where they wouldn't dare to cause a scene. If the teachers and such don't really intervene, this probably wouldn't help as much. Still, I'd expect some people to step in if they saw six guys pummeling some unlucky sod in front of everyone.
Finally got the Godwin.
I wonder what would happen if the system didn't congratulate a school for having no reports of bullying, but actually congratualted the school for having the most reported bullying incidents.
If a school has 100 reports and a school has 10 reports, then the school with 100 reports gets more money set aside to just stop bullying and nothing else.
(roughly, the school system here is set up as following: you have 3 levels: high, medium and low. High and medium were in one location, then there was one location for Low that was for people who still fancied a job behind a desk/wanted to move on to medium at some point. And then there was the location for Low that was for people who fancied a job in a factory/welding/fixing cars/etc. This is about the last location, there were exactly five girls on a population of about 600 students.)
Whenever there was a fight there (daily) it was often in the main hall during lunch break, everyone was there and when two guys were fighting everyone gathered around them, kept a circle open for them to fight in and started cheering. No one intervened, no matter what. Only when the teachers managed to get to the circle (as in: wading through waves and waves of upcoming welders, handymen, plumbers and truckers) and break them apart would everything return to normal. The place was practically dynamite, what with the different ethnicities and the fact that everyone was in their teens.
We went to classes there once per week because the location we were in was overcrowded, regardless of how much we hated each other we quickly realised that we had to stick together and not make a fuzz, because fuck if we wanted to end up in the day's arena match. :P Even the toughest guy in the class was a pussy compared to the average guy in that school, the only way we would survive was if we all banded together and never walk alone.
It was hilarious for me as I could see my bullies honestly afraid of someone else.
Typically, the victim is alone while the attacker(s) are in a group. So it's one person's word against the word of several others. My experience is there isn't even a hesitation. The lone person gets the shaft.
EDIT: The junior high I went to ended up being featured on an investigative report style news program about bullying. They had an interview with the principal (The successor to the one who gave me detention, it was a couple years after I graduated high school that I saw this) where the principal said they'd enacted new policies since replacing the old administration and that bullying no longer happened on school grounds. Cut to many clips of kids being beat up right in front of the building.
I always got pegged like that, or hitting back. The teacher would turn around to see me pushing somebody away from me, and thinks I was starting it. I had a record in every single school I went to because of shit like that. I didn't have a problem after middle school, but the two times I got in trouble in high school I received harsher punishment because "behavior problem - fighting, bullying" was on my record.
So I usually tried to find something humiliating from their past. A weak spot, something that they really did not have answers for. The fact is, normal people are rarely bullies. There is always something that turns someone into an asshole, a normal kid doesn't simply seek out targets like that. So, I'd ask around for their pasts, from people that knew them and such. Naturally I didn't rationalize it this eloquently when I was younger, I simply thought that they were making fun of me, and I needed to find something that I could use to make fun of them.
I once made an particularly asshole kid literally cry by cracking jokes about his dead mother (small town, it really wasn't hard to aquire this sort of knowledge). Another one I put silent after I had found out that he came from an alcoholic family, oh boy the jokes I got from that one. He didn't certainly fuck with me me after that.
That probably took it one step too far. I didn't get it then but I pretty much turned into them, only attacking them at what was a worse.
But back then, nothing was more awesome then make them taste their own medicine.
But I also can't deny the fact that seeing someone, who has bullied you or your friends for long time, weep, is an extremely satisfying feeling.
My gut reaction to girl bullying is that it's pretty insignificant after watching dudes get their teeth punched in. Boys that were bullied at my schools would have considered the 'relational aggression' that girls use to be a godsend. Past that, I do understand that it's different, but certain aspects of female bullying just can't be dealt with in any effective manner. You can punish taunting and, perhaps impractically, the rumormill. However, there's no real way to deal with something like the cold-shoulder treatment or exclusion. You can't force people to like somebody and any attempt to do so would likely end up with that person being hated even more. You can't just say, "You have to include Jessica in your social group." and everything is peachy-keen. You just can't censure girls for not being nice to everybody. Even simple declarations of dislike, "I don't like you, go away." Is that bullying? It's almost certainly hurtful to the person being told she's a loser, but the first girl also has a right to associate with whom she wants.
Unfortunately, it is usually one of the only effective means to get bullies to stop. Given the unwillingness of many administrators to intervene in aggressive behavior between students or to use the ham-fisted cudgel of justice and met out punishments to both aggressor and victim, there is little recourse for those who are bullied. If you're not high on the social ladder, you have to be an unappealing target. "I have no qualms about making fun of your dead mother and your pain" will do that for a person who isn't strong enough to physically intimidate somebody. What other options did he really have?
Emotional abuse is still considered abuse. Repeatedly calling someone a piece of shit eventually makes that person feel like a piece of shit. Emotional abuse is a useful tool that abusive spouses use to keep their wife loyal to them, even though the woman knows that he is bad for her. She doesn't feel worthy enough for a 'good' boyfriend or husband, because all of the reinforcement in her life is negative. I think this is what Oboro is talking about.
Now, does that mean I think something can be done about it? I'm not sure. You can't exactly force people to socialize with or like each other. It's also impossible to notice the effects of 'emotional bullying' since it doesn't leave one party with broken noses or spitting out blood.
I'm not saying we should ignore emotional bullies, I just don't know what, if anything, could actually be done about it.