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I'm going to stuff you into a locker and spread rumors about you! [Bullying]
I N V I C T U S
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I'm going to be doing a very short speech about bullying in my group communications class later this week. I thought it might be interesting to get a bit of a sociological discussion going here about bullying and hazing in school.
I'm focusing mainly on the change in bullying prevalence and procedures in the transition from middle school (grades 6-8) to high school. Also, being a dude, I don't know a whole lot about the female side of things. I'd like to hear people's own experiences and ideas.
From what I've seen, bullying and animosity between students in general is a lot less prevalent in high school. I think it has a lot to do with the decreased presence of cliques and rigidly-defined social groups.
I'm focusing mainly on the change in bullying prevalence and procedures in the transition from middle school (grades 6-8) to high school. Also, being a dude, I don't know a whole lot about the female side of things. I'd like to hear people's own experiences and ideas.
From what I've seen, bullying and animosity between students in general is a lot less prevalent in high school. I think it has a lot to do with the decreased presence of cliques and rigidly-defined social groups.
BY THE HOARY FUCKING HOSTS!
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I can assure you that this is almost entirely anecdotal on your part
So wait, you're on Bizarro Earth?
Here in the midwest, high schools define social cliques for many people. For a few, it defines them for life. You're a gangsta, a nerd, a jock, a dork, or some permutation thereof for four years of your life.
Please see Wikipedia - Schoool Shootings and then come back.
Unless this thread is a study of bullying, where we pick on someone defenseless (an OP who never reposts). I'm on to you, Mr. Jones...
I do live in an upper middle-class, mainly white suburb. There isn't a lot of tension in the neighborhood because everyone is mostly the same.
Fights in Jr. High had kids all gathering around and cheering me or the other guy on, and girls still swooning over a-hole jock #5 even though they saw him spit on me from upstairs. High school fights had a lot less approval from the surrounding spectators, and some girls would actually admonish a-hole jock#7 for picking on people smaller than him and find being a total a-hole somewhat less attractive.
My recent experience on the other side in high school (um, as a teacher, not a bully) has me thinking that kids are just a bit more mature these days, too (conforming with evidence that kids today ARE developing a bit faster), so that might make his experience a lot more likely today than it may have been for many of us. Still, it's just a small sample that we're working with here.
Not just kids, either - I lost track of how many sweaty, obese, living-in-mom's-basement "adults" have tried to cyber-stalk me over things like finding gigantic logical flaws in their shitty, self-important "arguments." Never have I had someone try so hard to "get" me over so little. At least jr. high made a twisted sort of sense - "Geez, that little guy has a lot of good comebacks, and it turns out he can fight back, too - let's keep getting people to try to fight him until we find someone big/good enough to win a fight with him!"
In middle school, you're encouraged by your peers to see the differences between you and other students. Kids start molding themselves to fit the stereotype that they identify with, and feel animosity towards the other groups.
In high school, I think kids start to get over that and recognize that they share a lot of similarities. Making fun of people seems less important when you actually have a future to start worrying about (jobs, difficult classes, serious relationships, etc.). The kids that never developed any social skills and still don't fit in are still going to get picked on, but I think, overall, there is less bullying in high school.
But more to the topic, I was mainly bullied in the sixth-eighth grade, but as to the culprits, think that sociopath from Bully. It wasn't so much testosterone raging lunkheads who wanted to assert their dominance as much as disturbed kids who got a kick out of inflicting pain.
On the black screen
In high school, there wasn't so much outward abuse as there was simple exclusion from groups, something that really happens to everybody to a certain extent. Being excluded and hot having any friends is an obviously painful and harmful thing, but I'm not sure there's any way from groups such as that from forming. I was in a small school so I didn't have many options--pretty much the "in" group constituted a majority of my class, and I didn't necessarily get along with the others.
Having extracurricular activities, such as Boy Scouts, youth group, basketball, amongst other things, helped me get through those years only partially scathed.
High school was much better, and I attribute that to having a larger population with more separate groups, general maturity increasing, people having more freedom in school (leading to less aggresive forms of social differentiation, since you don't have to distance yourself as much from that geek when you can sit across the cafeteria from her), and to people learning to not stand out as much. My being bullied was largely a result of transferring schools in the middle of sixth grade and not really "getting" the culture of my new school: I dressed in hand-me-downs from the 80s, apparently talked more like a little kid than a teenager, and was very socially awkward. Once I learned to dress and act in a way that didn't get me a lot of unwanted attention in the 8th grade, the bullying decreased a great deal, and by high school, I wasn't a target anymore.
Middle school is generally grades 6-8, which is generally between ages 11-14. So yeah, that pretty much matches up.
It toughens you up.
There's about a million other less damaging ways to achieve this that you know, don't make some students lives miserable. Plus it has a good chance of backfiring, totally destroying their confidence, hampering their social development, academically stunting them, or making them get shooty.
I'd also agree that bullying was prevalent between the ages of 11-14. Aged 15-16 it had descended into catty rivalry. Going to sixth form college aged 16 was the turning point. In sixth form you're treated more like adults, and the bullies are largely weeded out at that point by academic performance (had to gain certain grades to be accepted into sixth form). Personally I had an amazing time in sixth form and so did many other people I know. It was cool to be different or unique in sixth form, while those who had been popular in high school were also still popular. Everyone seemed to win.
In fact I also found the tiered classes in high school a lot less problematic than the non-tiered ones.
I say the same thing about anal rape. Now bend over, sissy.
Maybe he means it's good for the bullies. Kicking the shit out of the helpless nerds can be a real workout, I hear.
Yeah, but there's not as many beaches or rich, beautiful students in real life though.
On the black screen
I dunno. There were some pretty damned beautiful students in my graduating class. It just wasn't 100% of the student-body except token-fat-girl.
Also thank you for the insight with the female side of things, Trowizilla.
My high school was not like that at all. The "jocks" and "nerds" were often the same people.
There were some cliques but they were based around racial lines and were usually kids who wanted to get into (or were already involved in) gangs.
Also:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You may not have enough time before your speech is due, but if you're a quick reader you might want to check out Queenbees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence.
This is why I am so perplexed by my complete hatred of bullies.
I should also put the project into a little more context, I suppose. The presentation is a group effort designed to dispel misconceptions and myths about high school for students that will be freshmen next year. My speech is going to be about four-five minutes, and is designed to give them a clear picture of what bullying is like in our high school, and how they can get around it.
On that note, does anybody have anything to share about how they avoided being bullied in high school?
I wouldn't say I was "bullied" the way some kids were. But there was this one kid in my 8th grade class who I seemed to have every class with, and would do everything he could to annoy the shit out of me. It really bothered me at the time, but eventually I found out things we had in common, and then we teamed up to annoy the shit out of other people.
[edit] I'm pretty sure this is how SE++ was formed.
Maybe highschool is just better here. Who knows.
I acted out. Like crazy. ("Crazy" having both metaphorical and literal meanings here.) I basically made everybody think I was a ticking time bomb prepared to go all Columbine on their asses. (It was a few years before Columbine.)
Well, it wasn't quite that simple. I was troubled, I did need therapy, I just exaggerated how troubled I was to protect myself.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't see anything too wrong with that. You lashed out in quasi-controlled (hopefully) way in order to save yourself from physical and emotional violence repetitively.
Some kid repeatedly picked on me by yanking on my backpack to the point where I fell down, every day. One day right as he went to do it, I kicked him in the gut, he fell down, and cried. This was the last time I was bullied, ever. My results are probably atypical, seems most people who stand up to bullies get the shit beat of them harder or the bullies bring greater numbers.
Yeah, and I pulled a lot of classic "cry for help" behaviors. I didn't end up going to therapy, but I did end up getting the attention of one teacher who would on a regular basis sit down with me in private and talk to me about what was going on. (Which I think was more effective than a therapist would have been anyway, because at that age I would have just manipulated the fuck out of the therapist for my own amusement.)
And I still had problems with people getting all up in my face in high school, but not nearly the same problems I'd had in junior high and grade school. (that and by high school I was in better shape and the age difference didn't matter nearly as much, so I guess I just wasn't an easy target anymore.)
Edit: lemme explain that last bit.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The geek/jock thing wasn't much of a thing at my school, looking back, our cliques were mainly divided along economic lines.
Honestly, I think our school culture is pretty horribly broken. It reinforces a lot of poor behaviors, and results in a lot of kids not getting either the intellectual or social/emotional development that they need to be healthy contributory members of society. I think it has become very apparent that we can no longer count on parents to ensure that children won't enter the world woefully illequipped do deal with the world.
There are so many way in which our school fail our children, and as a result we have the stupid, violent and hateful world in which we live. Permitting bullying is just on of those ways. Schools aren't the only source of these sort of problems, however it is the only method of preventing these issues society as a whole has control of. It's our last best hope of not turning out another generation of broken people, and it is failing.
Mostly I just don't want kids to grow up like me. I don't think blanket zero tolerance rules would ever change that. I think it is probably better to look at bullying as a symptom. Maybe do a little digging into why Peter is such a little twat, and why Johny is so easily upset by being called... well whatever it is the bullies have found effective. An awful lot is going to slip past teachers, I don't think you can really do too much to prevent it. Shit tonnes more so with girls than boys on that count, because they tend not to start physical fights, and mostly just try to destroy each other emotionally and socially.
I look at all the money we spend on keeping people in jail and all the money we spend on drugs to keep ourselfs happy, and all the money we waste on excess and depravity, and I can't help thinking we could have saved a whole lot of time, money and suffering could have been saved if our school were good enough environments.
Just, you know. It would cost an ungodly amount of money,and the political will to take a stab at making people better is pretty rare. and the states. The states would complain.
It's hard to define what actually happened. There were no fights, arguments or anything of a similar nature. I was best friends with one girl when I also became friendly with a second girl. Something really idiotic happened, like my best friend didn't sit next to me in class once, and that was all it took for the second girl to start the rumours. My best friend and I were each so hurt by the other that instead of talking about it and sorting the situation out within five minutes we instead ignored each other and thus it escalated. The whispering and rumours continued and pretty soon my (ex) best friend and I, who had never been that popular, were two of the best known people in our year purely due to our 'falling out'. It was absolutely ridiculous looking back on it now (we've since made up and have been friends ever since) but at the time the whole year, all 200+ students, were involved. You were either on my side or her side. It grew so bad that at one stage the deputy headteacher had to call five or six of us into a room to try and sort it all out. I was the only person who would even speak; everyone else sat there with their heads bowed and wouldn't volunteer a word. It continued for 9-10 months, affected my grades, and I'm sure affected the other girls' grades, too.
A similar thing happened in middle school (ages 9-10, the incident described above occurred when I was 14-15); again, no arguments, no words exchanged (it might've been sorted if they had been) but the rumour mill created an extremely oppressive atmosphere. It's devastating at the time, but the teachers are pretty much powerless because no one has actually 'done' anything, and the source of the rumours are hard to trace. Nor can you force someone to discuss their problems; no one is better at sulking and giving the 'silent treatment' than a teenage girl.
By contrast there were a couple of boys who would tease my best friend I relentlessly, which seemed distressing at the time but, looking back, was really quite tame. What we found frustrating was that, again, the teacher's hands were tied. The boys were from a difficult home, had already moved class once and constantly skirted with expulsion. They weren't bad boys, just needed an easy target to vent their frustration on. I was weak and cried easily and this encouraged their behaviour. If I'd just been able to laugh at them they would've stopped. They never got physical and I don't believe they were even being that vicious. From the teacher's point of view they were just being boys and I was altogether being too sensitive.
As an adult I have patronized more bars than I should care to admit. I have only seen two bar room fights. Both lasted only a minute or two. No one was hurt. I have seen two other fights that were prevented before they started. The image of "the bar room brawl" is largely mythical.
One of the jocks (basketball/baseball player, I believe) in my science class continually physically and verbally harassed me. One day, I had enough of his shit, so I grabbed the science book and smashed his knee with it. I didnt break his knee, I just gave him a limp for a week or so, which was my intention. I gave the warning that next time, it would be his face. No more problems from the jocks after that.
One of the rednecks decided it would be good idea push me off off a ledge I was sitting on. The way I landed could have broken my neck, but it didn't. I was so pissed I lifted him about a foot in the air and nearly crushed his neck. I later found out he didn't do it, but some skinny ass idiot did, but he had bet the guy to do it. Problem solved. No more problems from the rednecks.
Bullying is very prevalent in high school, at least in my area. And cliques are very much still an integral part of high school life. If we could do away with cliques in schools, I think the prevalence of bullying would decrease, though I think it would never cease to exist. My old high school did not have a counselor on staff for psychology purposes, though I believe they do now. Are counselors for this purpose common in high schools today, or still rather rare?
The catholic school I went to only had about 150 students, with about 30 of those in preschool/kindergarten. My 8th grade class was only about 8 people. Bullying was rare there, from what I remember.
That sounds like something that depends a lot on where you live. A friend's told me stories of his high school in the North that sounded like something out of Dangerous Minds, only with knives and thrown desks instead of guns.