Social Bullying

First off, bullying is something that I really hate, so this is something of a sensitive topic for me. I didn't get it as bad as some people did and do, but it's the primary reason I was a gigantic misanthrope in my mid-teens.

Not everyone is willing or able to fight back. Support systems should be in place to help prevent bullying regardless of who it happens to and why. I've seen someone driven to near-suicide by bullying - and this was at a private school, mind.

One thing that seems absent in this thread is any mention of collective bullying. When one person is singled out, ostracised and picked on by an entire group whether physically, verbally or through indirect action it can mentally destroy them.

You can attempt to blend in - that was my primary defence mechanism - but sometimes it just doesn't work.

edited 9th Feb '11 11:16:27 AM by pagad

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

I was picked on by nearly everyone I grew up with. I certainly know what collective bullying feels like.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Pagad:Actually, that's what this whole thread (and the study) are about. It's not so much about individual bullies (who quite frankly can be dealt with quite easily in a whole bunch of different ways), but it's about a community that has bullying almost as an innate value.

It's also that when we think of "bully" our mind goes to certain tropes. Like as I use as a proto-typical example, think of Nelson Muntz or dang..I forget his name, the bully in the Back to the Future movies. Biff Tanner. That's it. That's the trope we think of when we think of bully.

When in reality we need to stop thinking so much of those things, and start thinking more of Bullying as in say Mean Girls (which was based on a book about social bullying).

But yes, you can tell pretty easily when someone hasn't really experienced the new tropes. Note the advice to just hit back or sometimes you'll hear advice to go tell an authority figure or something like that. None of this helps, or at least rarely in terms of social bullying for a variety of reasons.

edited 9th Feb '11 11:24:04 AM by Karmakin

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

Did they even define bullying?

That's the definition from the article.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

Spreading rumors counts as bullying now? Jesus.

I did have one case that's kind of interesting to me..

There was a "friend" of mine in High School. He was actually a pretty horrible friend, talked massive shit all the time, picked on me for laughs, etc. Well, he joined the Air Force. Doing Security Forces. At the worst base in the entire US Military, Minot, ND.

If I ever run into him, I'm an NCO, he's still an Airman First Class. I basically own him. In a deployed environment I could very easily end up being his boss. We still talk on facebook from time to time, but I like to think that karma always works its way around. Minot is currently -23 if you don't count the wind chill.

Ahhhh, yes, the old "You should work harder at blending in, or just fight back. High school is hell, so just get used to it. Who cares about the severe trauma some people carry with them the rest of their lives, its just how it is"

God, I fucking wish school shootings happened more often...

What's so terrible about dressing weird, that it warrants causing lifelong psychological scars? Are you guys listening to yourselves? Do you have any sense of right and wrong?

Oh, and I tried the 'fighting back' route. It didn't work - just got me in trouble with the teachers. It only works if a) you're a better fighter than the bully, b) your teachers are so useless they let kids pound on each other without even token intervention, and c) you can take on bullies one-by-one. The vast majority of bullying situations, none of those are the case.

The sad thing is, most kids being bullied really has no way to stop it. That's where the adults have to step in - you know, the ones whose job and/or moral duty it is to prevent harm to the children. A competent teacher can stop bullying in their classroom, a competent principal can stop bullying in their school. And parents and others need to put pressure on them so they can no longer get away with not doing their jobs!

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

^^ I'm sure the victims of Columbine and Virginia Tech would agree. Except they can't, because they're fuckin' dead.

I can't really agree with just falling into line with the bully's demands. It reinforces the behaviour, for one. The usefulness of conforming after the fact is dubious - once you've been identified as a target, no amount of contortion is going to save you. And, really, if you can't express your passions with anyone, it removes half the point of having them in the first place.

@ Barkey: Would dressing like a 'freak' be more permissible in situations where disapproval wasn't as severe, or is it a habit that should be broken at the first opportunity regardless?

edited 9th Feb '11 12:08:58 PM by DarkDecapodian

Aww, did I hurt your widdle fee-fees?

^ Hey, like Kino and Barkey said, high school sucks. I just took it to the next step.

@Ettina: Let's not forget the cases where teachers are bullies as well. Students are one thing, dealing with someone in a position of authority is even worse.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

@SS Yeah, because everyone's high school experience is exactly the same and no one has ever had a good high school experience.

There's no justice in the world and there never was~

You guys are thinking about this in the wrong context, I never said it was right or justified, but sometimes bad shit happens, and your stance has to reflect the reality of the situation.

Sticking out like a sore thumb in a way that asks to be picked on doesn't mean you deserve to get picked on, but you will. That's the brass tax of it, find the element in what you do that gets you picked on, and find some way to fix it, obscure it, or otherwise change the situation so that it doesn't happen anymore. That's the reality of such a situation, it's not pretty, but it's true. Sitting around and being morally outraged at something you don't think is nice won't get anything done.

"Spreading rumors counts as bullying now?" - Kino

If the rumours are false and malicious, then... yeah.

Ah yes, sixth grade.

Spacetravel: It's entirely true that bullying victims could do with a bit of self-revelation. Don't expect it to help much though; the main consequence of being a bullying victim is that you may not have enough successful social interaction behind you to notice the very things you'd be looking for. The thing about bullying is it puts an iron chokehold on the very experiences you'd draw from to stop being a target.

edited 9th Feb '11 1:59:16 PM by Pykrete

I'm getting rather sick of being told it's my fault for being picked on.

I honestly don't think I make myself 'stick out' in any way. Certainly not by acting all gangsta like some of the other kids who get bullied do. What exactly am I expected to do to stop this? The last time I tried to solve that sort of problem with violence charges were pressed, against me. Not doing that again.

I have my group of acquaintances/friends/whatever you'd like to call them. But most of them get picked on too, and we don't do anything that would qualify as 'sticking out' to me. And yet we're constantly harassed by the school douchebags. There are about a dozen videos of me on Youtube doing mundane things like doing classwork, talking to people, and such. This is supposed to make me feel bad, and despite how stupid it sounds, it does. Because I don't want my daily life broadcast to the world. The administration of my school has said there is nothing they can do about it. That's not all they do, they also toss things at me, mock me, it's little things. But it's a lot of little things, and I just try to brush it off because I can't think of anything else to do. The fact that I'm talking about it at all should be a clear indicator that it's not working.

The only semblance of an explanation I've gotten is that I'm "creepy". Nothing more specific than that. Keep in mind, I don't talk about my sexual preferences in school, I've never hit on anybody, I don't talk to people I don't know, I don't hover, so I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. If someone would like to offer an explanation and a solution. Than BE. MY. FUCKING. GUEST. But I'm coming to you if it doesn't work.

edit: Oh, and I forgot about the kid who threatened to kill me. But that was one of the aforementioned wannabe gangsters.

edited 9th Feb '11 2:23:30 PM by SpainSun

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

@Pykrete: Sixth grade, try grades one through eight. My music teacher was a bitch.

@Spain Sun: I remember when I was walking home from the library back when I was a sophomore and these kids came up behind me. One of them slapped me on the back of the head and said, "Quit looking like a nerd, nigga." before his friends filmed me and left. I wanted to say something along the lines of, "Better a nerd than a worthless piece of shit like you." but there was five of them and my two friends were not all that great in a fight. That was probably one of the most humiliating incidents I've had since I left private school, so I get where you're coming from.

On the subject on what makes a person "creepy", I've found that so much as looking in a person's general direction will cause them to label you as creepy. It certainly has happened to me in college.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Well, so I've been told.

But if there's genuinely something wrong with me, I'd like to fix it.

For the longest time I thought it was the beard. But I kept myself clean-shaven for about a month and noticed no change.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

I do think that's foolish. But it's also not always the attitude, and in any case, we're talking about kids here. They're not always particularly self-aware.

Yes, this.

It's all very well to tell people to stop making targets of themselves, and to some extent I think it's a fair point; I certainly made a target of myself for much of my time at school. But I didn't know any other way to behave. Attempting to imitate the other kids was worthless, because they knew I wasn't like them, and they'd shun me anyway. I wasn't confident or stoic, and I didn't even know how to feign those things.

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Definitely. See my "how to make a friend" thread to see how much social language I don't know today. It's a whole new kind of painful when you've finally got some peaceful time to do some catching up, then look back and realize all that you didn't know then.

whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion

At my school, the bullies deliberately targeted the kids who tried stay unnoticed to avoid the bullying in the first place. Trying to stay "under the radar" just inspired the bullies to redouble their efforts. Fighting back resulted in no punishment for the bullies, being ganged up on by groups of 5 or more kids, and getting punished myself by the school.

Anyway, that's a few years ago now. But victim blamers can just fuck right off.

If I ever got sent back in time, either litterally or just being sent with all my experience back to my old body as a small child while being a child: One of the things I would do be to start pressing charges on the school administration, and most likely after that commit murder.
Sick and wrong? Yes.
Will it solve the problem? Yes.
The option is getting the school to take responsibility, and forcing the parents to properly raise the kids, which will only partially help. And since the school did not... I guess it would be the only "senseible" option? The only thing they ever did was to have some "mild talks", not even harsh, and they did not even bother to notice the fact it did not help either.
Mind you, I grew up in a small community, there was no more people to blend in with, or people to hang out with, you had just a few classmates and 10 classes with barely any people in. My "problem" only went away because we changed school after 7 years, the last 3 years of elementary was on another school, which was just in the other end of the commune.
But yeah, we need more school shootings. At the least until the moral is to take responsibility, and then attempt to at the least enforce the rules and laws that is suppose to exist.

A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.

^ THANK you.

Much as I detest bullying, I'd rather we had that than more school shootings.

I mean, really. That's a horrendous thing to want.

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