I suppose I’d have to be a jerk to ask for a cite here, so I’ll just think it loudly and hold my tongue.
This borders on blaming the victim. Or at least it seems like an outmoded, callous way of looking at childhood as the place where people get abused and toughened up.
I don’t know if you were directing this at me or not, and I don’t know if you are still reading this. I just want to say that yes, some teachers are useless, and yes, some teachers will look the other way rather than do something. Surely this is no shock, is it? No profession consists of 100% saints. Some are bound to be useless.
I am not claiming this is the case with all my teachers—I only mentioned this one, after all. I wonder how you can speculate that a brief mention of the incident as “fixation.” I simply reported something that happened to me, is all. Nor am I exaggerating about what happened. It happened. Surely it’s not inconcievable to think that some teachers might not be very good, no?
Yes, bullying does result in serious physical injuries in many cases. I still have scars from those days, bub, though I think I won about as often as I lost. And in many other cases, it leaves psychological scars that last a lifetime. The callous attitude you’ve expressed here is beneath contempt.
Wow, what a surprise. How old are you? You need to get over it and stop being a baby. A scar is not a serious physical injury. You act like kids are always getting broken bones and stuff.
Obviously, that was my opinion.
I can see why you might think that, but I disasgree.
Sure. I suppose I was thinking of injuries, but you’re right, it’s an opinion and not a qualitative statement.
You have obviously never been bullied in your life time.
Try having your property damaged. You can’t walk down the hall without someone tripping you up or stepping on your shoes. You flinch whenever anyone comes near you. You come home from school to find gum and spitballs stuck in your hair. You arrive at school in the morning to find your desk completely trashed, your books and school paper ruined. You try to shrink away, praying at least to be invisible. You sit on the bus and try desparately to ignore the jeers and projectiles thrown at you, to pretend you don’t hear them, to blink back the tears that are flooding your eyes. You never wanted anything more than that the earth would just open up and swallow you.
A friend of mine had a bully grab her hand, pinch the back of it and twist until he pulled the skin off. Another time a kid in my school was suspended for three days after he pushed and injured a kid with muscular fucking distrophy. I had to endure it when the principal’s idea of stepping in was to tell the kids I was “special” and had “problems.” (Outside of a ADHD, when I wasn’t alone, this was so fucking not true).
Do you plan on having children some day? Because you bloody well need to change your tune if you do.
Funny point of view there. I was the foul tempered skinny guy who used to be in trouble all the time for beating up the bullies. I gave about 2 shits about any Alpha Male nonsense, I just wasn’t buying into “the program” of being nice to assholes. So, if in your mind, why should there be such a difference in treatment? Bullies get tolerated (not a big deal)while those who fight back get in trouble (antisocial).
Are you being sarcastic? I’m sorry if I’m reading this wrong, but you responded with the following:
[QUOTE=Marley23]
I suppose I’d have to be a jerk to ask for a cite here, so I’ll just think it loudly and hold my tongue
[QUOTE/]
to my assertion that the effects so of bullying are overstated.
How would that not be my opinion?
Sorry that all of those things happened to you, but that is not typical. I think that may be clouding your judgment.
Yes, I was picked on during high school.
When did I say those who fight back should get in (more) trouble?
Of course bullies need to be punished if it gets out of control, but I think that most of the bullying that goes on in schools is basically harmless.
I got one of those scars after they took me to the emergency room to have my upper lip sewn back together. I got a couple of others after they took me to the hospital to sew up knife wounds on my right arm. The one on my forehead came from having my head banged repeatedly on a locker.
Oh, yeah, I’m just being a baby, all right.
Your attitude is stupid and callous.
Baby.
In all seriousness, your situation is not very common. Do you really think most bullying results in hospital visits?
Not typical? Read some of the previous threads on bullying, and you’ll find that my experience was very common!
Re: the OP:
I’ve done a lot of research recently on workplace bullying, and reasons why the bully goes unpunished and the victim finds no recourse include:
A peer at work recently complained to me of her experience at the hands of a workplace bully. She had confronted the bully about her behaviour in a very transparent, adult fashion – “Let’s talk about the incident,” and received a ton of cold-shouldering and passive-aggressive bull in return i.e. “No, I don’t want to talk about it, but you’ve CERTAINLY given me something to THINK ABOUT,” delivered with enormous disdain. I did my research, took my findings to our superior, and was received some astonishing feedback in return, including:
The bully had only ever created distress for me and my peer. This was patently untrue; I told my superior as much, naming names and describing situations, including an incident of her own with the bully that she confided to me had caused her to lose much sleep in the year previous. She agreed that this was all true, yet remained extremely reluctant.
She feared that the action I recommended (amounting to inservice education and policymaking on the issue) would result in people “targeting” and “isolating” the bully, and causing her to become a victim.
I realized at this point that I was pissing into the wind, and dropped the issue, first making clear how I would handle any future incidents involving me i.e. with direct confrontation, on the spot, amid peers if need be. Subsequently, the bully has managed to push my peer out of a workplace opportunity she enjoyed, in a measure pre-emptively dismissed by our superior as “certainly not about all that.” She is looking for another job. I can only hope that when she leaves, she will be able to communicate her reasons for leaving effectively. As it stands, I am supposed to inherit the management position, and some of the inertia could be related to just waiting for the change of guard to come along and solve the problem.
Many members of my family are in education. Some are teachers, others are administrators. They have over 100 years of experience between them. While situations like yours happen, it’s not all that common.
I disagree with your theory completely. Bullies, pure and simple, pick on those that they fee will let them get away with it. They do it because they are cowards who have low self-esteem issues. They sometimes attempt to “rationalize” their actions by claiming the victim “had it coming” for some reason or another.
They are just cowards. Making other people feel bad makes them feel good.
Aside from the fact that this is clearly your uninformed opinion, is there any reason we should accept your statements without ridiculing them? There have been numerous studies on bullying that demonstrate that the dangers of bullying are very real–both to the victim and also to the bully. Leonard Eron of the University of Michigan, for one, has studied bullying for over 40 years (including a couple of cohort studies that he followed for over 30 and over 20 years) and he has found that the victims suffer a number of problems adjusting to life as adults and that the bullies also suffer numerous problems, including a 60% better chance of going to jail as adults, and a greater proclivity toward spousal and child abuse, while the number and scope of problems diminish when there is effective intervention to break the practice.
Now, it is possible that a vague knowledge of studies such as Eron’s has made some parents overeager to interfere in the sort of pecking order assertions that occur in all societies and that may stop short of actual bullying. However, your cavalier dismissal did not address any such point and you are basically injecting ignorant opinion into a discussion to no good purpose.
How many? If ten relatives have 100 years’ experience, that is only 10 years apiece. If several of them are administrators, they are likely too removed to be in touch with the problem. We also only have your claim that they may not feel the problem is that big a deal (or they may be among the large number of school personnel already noted who fail to recognize real problems). As such this is one of the weaker anecdotal bits of “evidence” I have seen submitted.
Do bullies serve to enforce the status quo? Good question. I guess I’d have to agree.
In aristocratic societies, the king and queen are the best-bred, most gentle, noble-minded and correct-fork-using people humanity can produce. But if you were on the wrong side of the staus quo of which they were the apogee, you’d find yourself in the hands of torturers and executioners who were the most sadisic creatures on earth.
Killers who pour gasoline on winos and strangle streetwalkers target the undesirables of society. Are these simply targets of opportunity, or do the killers somehow feel sanctioned by society’s contempt for winos and streetwalkers?
And you thought the bully in junior high was bad? Check out the guy who calls the shots on cellblock 5. Purely anecdotal, but every guy I’ve met who’d lapsed on his traffic tickets and was hauled in for a weekend “taste of the slammer,” until he could get creative about finiancing a way to pay off his fines, was deliberately put face to face not with the justice system, but rather with the system of injustice that underlies it.
Since hard-core violent personality types were the enforcers of the concentration camps, the gulags, and, still, the LA county jail, why would this obvious pattern of human nature not apply in classrooms and cubicle-farms?
Still, since they don’t kill us off, the bullies only make society a weaker place where, as columnist Dan Savage considered, a post-high school world where all the working-class girls had been labeled ‘sluts’ and all the non-athletic boy “faggots.” What dignity we possess we have from the knowlege, like Ben-Hur viewing the dying Massala, that while our tormenters may have excelled and enjoyed the best of this wicked world, we have survived and endured its worst. Still, we never completely escape the ingrained belief that we should never have been born.
No danger.
In the school where I taught, bullying sometimes lead to death. Usually, it was the death of the bully. Some kid who just couldn’t take it another day would bring a handgun to school and blow him away. One girl got her throat cut and bled to death in the hallway. Sometimes the kid would go home and get the gun and come back.
The teachers don’t have as much power as one might think. In my school system, we couldn’t even keep a kid out of our class if the principle wanted her or him back in. I’ve had a principal overrule an assistant principal to put a student back in my classroom. (Then the student tried to burn down the school with us in it.)
Teachers are allowed to discipline students only for behavior that we observe. We are not allowed to discipline a student based on what another student says. I’m sure you can understand the reason for this if you follow the logical consequences.
Our eyes cannot be everywhere at once and the antagonist always waits until our attention is elsewhere.
And as for those “precious egos,” brickbacon, they are indeed very important – especially during adolescence when self-esteem is still being shaped. If people don’t have very much self-esteem, they become bullies and thugs.
Don’t ever kid yourself that there was a time without bullies. That is ignorant.