Your opinion of the "anti bullying" videos and news coverage

In My Humble Opinion
21

jz8817 - Do you not think that people are responsible for behaving in a manner which most ensures their safety? As I said, the victim in *The Accused *isn’t to blame for what others did to her, but she is responsible for putting herself in the situation where it could happen. You’re not responsible if you’re rear-ended at a light, but you are responsible for not wearing your seatbelt. You’re not responsible for the shooting if you get shot in a driveby in a high-crime area, but if you’re there to buy drugs, you’re responsible for putting yourself in that area.

I stand by my earlier statement: You can make good decisions. You can control your behavior, not the behavior of others.

StG

22

I’ve watched a couple of episodes of the MTV show dangermom is so outraged by (erm, and she says she hasn’t seen the show in its entirety?) I thought it was a fine idea.

They round up a bunch of kids from the school. Not all the kids. Some jocks, some nerds, some dweebs, some gangstas, some weirdos, some preps, some normal kids. Whatever.

The kids meet with the leaders of the event. One dude who was a real badass and was a horrible person who went to jail and is now better. One perky lady who had a rough go as a teen mom (I think?) They get a pep talk about not being a jerk.

The kids then break off into small groups and “let it all out.” They talk about “If you really knew me, you’d know…” that the jock kid hates playing football but his dad makes him. The emo girl cuts herself. The preppy girl is having a hard time dealing with her parents’ divorce and that’s why she’s so mean. The school bully doesn’t want to be a bully but he’s a big dude and that’s his defense. Everybody cries, everybody hugs.

After that, they do the “horrifying” exercise where people cross that line if they’ve…ever lost a loved one, ever been a victim of bullying, ever bullied someone. The kids say “woah, I didn’t realize Preppy Girl lost a loved one…” “Man, even the bully has been bullied!”

Then the leaders call upon the kids to make a pledge to not be such douchebags to one another. To maybe think about how they’re not all that different. How everybody hurts. Everyone has a story.

One episode, at the end a group of unlikely friends went out together and had a fun time and made a video. On another episode, the kids from the event held a meeting with the freshmen to tell them not to go on to be assholes as they get older.

It’s just a big love fest.

I saw three or four episodes of this show and it really seemed cool to me. It’s not just a lecture on not being a bully and not just a way for sad kids to learn how to stand up for themselves. To me, it seemed like a way to mobilize the students to police themselves and have a little compassion instead of going about their day all self-absorbed and mean.

From what I saw from a couple of the “It Gets Better Project” videos where grown-up bullies atone for their previous behavior, empathy is not a lightbulb that goes on for everyone during their teen years. Challenge Day is a way to clue kids in to empathy before they figure it out for themselves.

23

BTW, three hours later…here’s the show on MTV about “Challenge Day”. Can watch full eps.

24

The schools and society fucked up when they started cracking down on fighting in school. By doing this they elevated the loud mouth with the verbal skills into the ultimate position of power and limited the ability of anyone to put a stop to it.

25

So physical abuse is okay, but verbal abuse isn’t?

26

Are you basing this on personal teaching experience or experience as a student?

27

This

And it will never change.

28

Verbal abuse is much more damaging and can go on for a long time. A fight happens once and then it is over, the winner does not earn anymore respect and actually loses respect by beating a kid up a second time.

There are many good kids that would gladly stick up for those being bullied but have no way to do so without lowering their own social status and making themselves open to bullying. Fighting would solve that problem.

Bullies are dicks because they can get away with it, and anyone with any power to stop them can’t.

There was a bully in my High school who was constantly tearing people down and verbally abusing them. I was always a bigger kid and played sports (jock), I knew the kid was a dick but I never knew really what was going on. Then the bully made the mistake of picking on me. He thought he could get away with it because the system is set up to protect him. I didn’t care about the system I kicked the crap out of him. He went back to school the next day and I was suspended for a week. That night I went to a varsity football game with my parents. I had to sit with them because I was technically grounded. At that football game no fewer than 20 parents approached my parents and explained how bad a kid the bully was and to thank me and my parents for what I had done.

I was the one suspended from school for fighting. Schools set up a system where the good kids are impotent to help themselves and others, because “good kids” tell the teachers, and the teachers can’t do shit.

In every school I was ever in the good kids were in the majority. In a situation like that bullying shouldn’t happen but when you give all the power to the bad kids that what you get.

29

Yep, that’s where I went. I watched a chunk of an ep that was filmed in a nearby town, until I couldn’t any more. I saw the ‘if you really knew me’ part, as well as just footage of kids talking to the camera, etc.

Sorry, I just can’t deal with it. I’m way too reserved to tell most people personal stuff about myself. It’s my mind, stay out of it, is pretty much my attitude to stuff like that.

30

In my experience, nothing shuts up a bully/tormentor quicker than loosening their teeth; laying their nose over on the side of their face. And the fact that I might get mine face loosened/flattened just as much is part of the price to be paid for being recognized as a person, instead of a target, an object, to be used for the amusement of others.

All this huggy/feely crap is doing nothing more than providing the cruel, sadistic fuckers with more ammo to use against you, because you’ve now revealed the chink in your armor, your core emotional vulnerability, and they will exploit it ruthlessly.

Zipper, does this MTV show ever do a follow-up with the kids who were bullied to see if it truly stopped? Or did it just stop while the camera was rolling, and start right back up again as soon as the MTV camera van rolled on to its next assignment?

31

Getting mobbed by four or five kids bigger than you are isn’t any more pleasant than being insulted. Not that “cracking down” on fighting even meant much but going after any victims who fight back in my experience.

The fundamental problem IMHO is that far to many teachers and administrators are pro-bully. Back when I was in high school there were teachers who openly encouraged bullying.

32

Schools are often pro-bully. Mine was. I was bullied not by just one bully, but by all the rest of the class starting in first grade. School was hell. I coped partly by treating it as a prison sentence, counting the days until I would graduate high school, and telling myself that 12 years was not all that long when women in my family lived such a long time. My great-great grandmother lived to 99, and then three of my great grandmothers were alive and well. From what I could see, adults did not have to live with such intolerable situations. My mother had left my father. I did not see her situation as intolerable, but the idea that she had the ability to just get up and leave gave me powerful hope. Many kids can’t see that far ahead. This message is important.

The counter messages from the school “running away never solved anything” more than once nearly drove me over the edge. “Don’t scream and they will stop” was a flat out lie. Don’t scream and they just kick harder and find new ways to hurt you until you do scream. “Kids just need to learn to deal with these things between themselves.” Why? As an adult if I have a pack people who want to beat me up, I would not face them alone.

My daughter’s school has an anti-bullying program based on the Oweus program. They have rules posted prominently all over the school, and each month focus on a different aspect of dealing with and preventing bullies. It is not all huggy/feely. It focuses on problem solving as well as communication and feelings. The rules they post not only say they won’t tolerate bullies, but that they will include those that are left out, and tell adults both at home and school when they see bullying. They are trying to change the culture. They seem to have buy-in from the teachers, and many of the parents as well as the administration. The program is district wide, and many of the districts here now have similar programs.

This is not just about gay kids. Kids commit suicide because the pain is too much and it seems like it will never get better. Hope Witsell toughed it out for nearly two years before killing herself. If someone could have convinced her that it would get better, or if someone had spoken up and put a stop to it, or told her parents how bad it was for her, she might be alive today.

33

I was bullied from 8th grade through 11th. I went to a private school, and because I hadn’t grown up with these kids and been part of the rich-kid cliques, I was the designated punching bag. I begged my parents to not send me back there and told them what was happening; their response was basically to tell me to suck it up.

It messed me up so bad that I tried to murder one of the bullies. I staked his house out, fully intending to kill him if I got the chance. I didn’t; he apparently wasn’t home that weekend.

I went back for my 11th grade year with a plan that consisted of two things:

  1. Get myself thrown out of the school, and
  2. Never take any more shit from any asshole at that school.

I succeeded at both. By the end of the first week in school, I had broken one kid’s nose in study hall and beat another to a pulp in the gym. The kids left me alone after that and I spent the rest of the year showing up in class, never taking tests and never doing homework. They asked me to not come back at the end of the year. It was the best year of my high school life.

Bullying is a severe problem. Very severe. That’s why SWMBO and I are taking a training program later this month about bullying prevention and we are immediately going to implement it in the Taekwondo school, then offer it to the public and private schools in the neighborhood at no charge.

34

My mother, who began teaching in country school at age sixteen and continued to teach until she retired, had a reputation in a five county area as a good teacher had a method of handling bullying which is contrary to current opinion.

She believed that the more attention given to bad behavior the more it escalated. That isn’t to say that she ignored or allowed bullying but she had quiet and private ways of dealing with it without calling sensationalistic attention to it. This included a little sensitive attention to the needs of the child being bullied, also without drawing the attention of the rest of the class. This lessened the drama in the school environment.

She had good success with this method. Of course today, and probably arising early in the history of this country, we’ve tended to think the solution is to join coalitions and shout the cause from the rooftops in the hopes of totally eliminating the prejudices of others. Militancy is the word which comes to mind. So far it has seemed to me to only drive our problem of us vs. them underground where it festers like a societal cancer. It also seems to foster dictitorial attitudes of censorship and punishment when it holds sway. That’s a frightening thing to me.

To take the public to personal I believe that to raise a strong child you teach them that unkind people are the problem, not himself. That he may engage others for personal support but that we all fight our battles internally and success isn’t gauged by making others change but by making internal changes that make the stresses of life more manageable.

To raise a weak child you teach him that others are the cause of his unhappiness (external factors) and that the only way to make life bearable is the impossible task of changing others. I think this has the unfortunate result of robbing him of his sense of personal power and is crippling. The slowness of gradual changes which eventually occur in society with positivity is enough to create a defeatist attitude in those who consider life a war to win.

How that all translates into encouraging social change is a more difficult and very slow process but I think it begins with the individual and his ability to create the most emotionally healthy lifestyle possible. From my perspective true strength is less about prevailing and more more about persisting well.

Push and others push back. Exist with grace, prosperity and health and you open the way for others to do the same.

35

Sounds like a way to raise a kid who’ll be a lifelong victim to me. A kid and later adult who’ll passively accept abuse, never fight back, never reach out for help; just sit and take it like a punching bag.

36

My own anti-bullying message would consist of a single word: tattle. Children, tattle like motherfuckers. Abandon those bullshit of standing up for yourself and making the problem go away; we don’t ask people whose houses are broken into to stand up for themselves against home invaders, and most of them are armed better than you are. Document, report, and (most importantly) escalate.

In my case, what was most effective at stopping the bullying was a combination of both reporting the bullies to the authorities, and reporting the authorities to other, better authorities when action wasn’t taken. It made me no friends, either among my peers or the authorities, but if I had enough friends to be worth caring about in high school, I wouldn’t have adopted such a strategy in the first place.

37

Good point. Anti-tattling messages are spread by

  1. Bullies
  2. Potential bullies
  3. Some authority figures who want to decrease their workload

In each case, not people whose opinions are worth a damn. (On the other hand, it’s true that it has become a social norm, and you will pay a price for it. The point is to recognize the tradeoff and tattle relentlessly when worthwhile, rather than blindly obeying the social norm.)

38

In a world-view with only two options, bully or be bullied, it would appear to be passive, I suppose. In a worldview where a child is taught from an early age to be proactive rather than reactive it is a third choice.

As much as we all detest the thought, there are some children who exhibit behaviors which indicate to others that he is open to bullying. This child will experience repeatedly more than his share of unkind behavior. Once a pattern has been established within a group it becomes very difficult to undo. And a child who develops a victim’s stance runs the risk of carrying his defensive behavior with him into new setting.

I believe that the world is a better place when we focus more on our own thoughts and behaviors than on others. In fact. if we all did this there would be little use for us vs. them.

There’s little reason to believe that this will ever be a universal belief. It requires good ego strength, self-discipline and time. Learning how to handle oneself in social groups of different types is a decades-long experience.

So, of course, it isn’t reasonable to expect a child to be totally passive. Knowing how to take care of himself is equally important. Yes. But knowing he has more options than fight or flight gives him more flexibility.

I don’t see it as an either or situation but as arming a child with a multitude of choices all based on what works best for him. And I’m not convinced that spending his life anticipating and fending off attacks by others is his best choice.

39

There are various anti-bullying programs with pretty good track records. Nothing can completely eliminate bullying, but you can reduce it significantly.

The main problem is usually resources and consistency, ie one school does it, another doesnt, because theres not much support up the line for it. Also there are a fair few crap programs, and one bad experience can mean people are loath to try another.

Otara

40

I bet that guy never had to worry about being bullied.