Bullying/Namecalling - Unneeded abuse or rite of passage?

[Podkayne]

I honestly can’t say what I learned from being teased. In college and graduate school I met like-minded people who liked and respected me for who I am, and I really came out of my shell and became confident and out-going. More importantly, I didn’t have to associate with the kind of jerks who made fun of me. When I visited my old high school, my teachers couldn’t get over how different I was. I was suprised that they said that I had been very meek and quiet. I thought that I was loud and obnoxious and always saying the wrong thing, and that’s why people made fun of me.

But, anyway, I got to thinking, hey, I’m a new person! I’m a mature and secure with myself and if I could magically be transported back to high school, boy, would things be different! If people made fun of me, I would just shrug it off, and ignore it. (Hmmmm, where have we heard that advice before?) With my hard-won confidence and core of inner peace, I would be impervious to teasing!

Then, a few years ago, I found a note that some of my students had been passing back and forth in class, making fun of me.

And I might as well have been 14 all over again. I felt like complete and utter shit for a week. I knew I should just shrug it off, that I’m smart and successful and I’m doing what I want to do and I have good friends and a loving husband and the opinions of a couple of bitchy little undergrads should mean nothing to me. But it didn’t make any difference. All my having - it - all - to - do - over - again fantasies shattered. If I was teased every day, I’d be just like I was: miserable, defensive, and shy (apparently!).

I have become a happy, confident person, not because of anything I learned, not because of growth and maturity, but simply by not having to put up with that crap. For one thing, other adults engage in this behaviour less frequently but, more importantly, as an adult, I can avoid that sort of person. In high school, you’re surrounded by that sort of person all day, and there’s no way to escape. I think phouka’s comment on age-ghettos is particularly insightful.

I wonder what I would have been like as a kid if I hadn’t had to put up with teasing. I almost certainly would have been a lot happier. I imagine I wouldn’t have built up such a thick shell of obnoxious intellectualism, and I’d have probably been a lot easier to be around.

I agree with many of the posters in this thread that there’s almost no way to get kids to knock it off. However, if anyone thinks that teasing is in any way constructive, or that kids should just ignore teasing, I think they need to be reminded what it really feels like to be humiliated by someone’s cruel, ceaseless taunting. As adults, most of us have mercifully forgotten.

[yosemite]

cj wrote:

I was also too beaten down to report it. Why should I? Experience told me nothing would have been done.

This was my experience too. Bullying was hellish, but perhaps the most damaging lesson I learned was that authority figures would do nothing and so the idea of “fighting back” or reporting abuse didn’t even cross my mind after a while. It was a useless gesture, and often made things worse.

I remember a friend reaming me out years later when I lamented about the bullying I experienced. She said, “Well, you didn’t report it, you didn’t DO anything, so you must have deserved it!” I was so absolutely furious at this. Fighting back usually got ME punished (but my tormentors got nothing, and were usually treated as my “victims”) and trying to get the notice from authorities when I was being tormented was useless. They looked the other way and DID NOTHING.

I remember seeing one teacher treat a handicapped student with great impatience that bordered on abuse. My reaction was to hide into my shell even further, and try to be as “invisible” as possible. Why would I report any abuse to teachers who are abusive themselves?

[rowrrbazzle]

*Originally posted by neutron star *
We’ve all heard the old adage, “What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.”

That’s from Nietzsche, the guy who came up with the Übermensch and inspired Hitler.

*Originally posted by chula *
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not pro-bullying or anything. But…

As far as I can tell, every child gets bullied. It’s a way of establishing a pecking order. The kids who go home crying are the ones who end up in the bottom of the pecking order. I can think of many times I was physically attacked and severely teased, but I never saw it as bullying. I took it in stride and fought back, which established my position in the top of the hierarchy. I don’t think you can eradicate this kind of behavior.

How lucky for you you got to the top. It’s too bad about those at the bottom, but that’s life <shrug>. :rolleyes:

I’d like to mention something posted in another thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=2575017#post2575017

*Originally posted by Nametag *
I simply must quote from David Foster Wallace’s Harper’s Magazine article “Tense Present” of April 2001.

My comments are directed at Wallace and his article (PDF).

These teachers usually don’t see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable.

We can’t blame the perpetrators. Their self-esteem might suffer. By all means, blame the victim.

But the other children’s punishment of the SNOOTlet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They’re learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning going on . . . for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn.

Wrong, idiot. He’s being viciously assaulted for non-conformity to the arbitrary and constantly changing standards of other children. And the “SNOOT” is learning that might makes right, and you are on the side of the bullies and their violence.

What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity, and it’s these abilities that are really required for ‘peer rapport,’ which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid’s life.

I think everybody, including the bullies and the author realizes exactly what is really going on. See my last comment.

[fluiddruid]

*Originally posted by neutron star *
**It seems to be the natural inclination of childred to be cruel to each other. Should we discourage that attitude and punish it to the point of wiping it out, or turn a blind eye like my teachers did? **

Frankly, I don’t care what the natural inclination of children is. It has absolutely no bearing on the situation. If something is demonstrably harmful to others, it is not okay even if it is ‘natural’. War, murder, spousal abuse, and pedophelia all seem natural to the human species – that is, culturally nearly universal and relatively common – but that doesn’t mean we should acecept those things.

Also, I disagree that it is the natural inclination of children to be cruel. This is far from proven (i.e., “cite?”). I know that, despite my usual position as a teasee/abusee, I did once take the role of teaser/abuser. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway. I regretted it, I still regret it, and fortunately the person involved was big enough to be my friend later in life.
But even if it may well be instinctual behavior to root out the ones among us who are different, it plays no role in civilized society.

Quote from the article above:

When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning going on . . . for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn.

I’ve seen or known people to be isolated or verbally or physically abused as children, and yes, it is for failing to fit in to what rowrrbazzle eloquently named as changing and arbitrary standards – not just of behavior, but of being in general. These include (and this is by no means an all inclusive list): being the wrong race, being the wrong gender, being poor, being rich, having the wrong type of clothes, trying to have the right kind of clothes but being too unpopular to wear them, wearing glasses, being too tall, being too short, being overweight, being underweight, having a handicap, being gay, exhibiting behavior arbitrary labeled as gay, having parents who are gay, having parents who have the wrong kind of jobs, practicing the wrong religion, being too religious, being too smart, being not smart enough, studying too much, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Is this what we really want to teach kids? Do we want to enforce that when somebody is different, it’s okay to isolate and torment them? Maybe this sort of behavior was beneficial in tribal hunter-gatherer societies before the rise of agriculture, but what positive role does this really have? Sorry, this doesn’t fly for adults, and we should start teaching kids – and enforcing to kids – that this is not okay either.

Frankly that article smacks of academic apologetics for bad behavior as a child and adolescent. “Oh, I was mean and cruel to other kids, sure, but that’s the way kids are SUPPOSED to act, and really it’s not a bad thing what I did, it was actually a GOOD thing.” Sure. Tell me another one.

[Boris_B]

rowrrbazzle wrote,

That’s from Nietzsche, the guy who came up with the Übermensch and inspired Hitler.

I would have said, that’s from Nietzsche, the guy whose vehement critique of anti-Semitism and doctrine of personal improvement made him a target for distortion by Nazi propaganda hacks.

[Boris_B]

I totally agree with phouka’s point about the unnaturalness of this age-ghetto. Take a bunch of people with undeveloped social skills, some of whom are from broken families, some of who have had no role models to speak of, and mix them together in an environment with just enough of a veneer of adult supervision that it doesn’t remind us too directly of A Clockwork Orange or Lord of the Flies, and see what the results are.

I think part of the problem here is the all-or-nothing fantasy implicit in the idea of wiping out all bullying. Is a solution which reduces bullying by 90%, or 50% or 10%, really not worthwhile because it is incomplete? Should we give up and sit on our hands because we are flawed humans and our solutions will always be imperfect. I don’t think so. People don’t wind up depressed, lethargic, underachieving, suicidal, or drug addicts because somebody called a funny name once.

The point is (and forgive me for preaching to the converted) that the bullying situation is way beyond that.

Bullying is gang-oriented and gang-perpetrated. Lots of people make fun of you at once. It may only be the bully-boys who actually slam your head into a wall, but there are plenty of bully-girls around cackling when it happens. Your friends are victims too and they shrink away. Anybody who thinks gangs of bullies always wear distinctive clothing reminiscent of the criminal underworld is just ignorant. At my school they wore Polos and alligator shirts and boat shoes.

Bullying is repetitive. Does bullying really create a sense of bliss, of some kind of biochemical rapture, in the mind of the perpetrator? I don’t know, but if it did it would explain a lot. The abusers take it like a drug, getting their fix between classes and never getting enough. The victims don’t get used to it, in the sense that it stops bothering them, but they do come to incorporate awareness of bullying into their darker, emptier world-views and - it should come as no suprise - into their self images.

Bullying happens to those who have simply not yet formed defenses against it. I can’t stress this point enough. If you think the phrase “don’t let the bastards get you down” has any meaning to a ten-year-old you are out of your mind. Children can’t earn their own living, drive cars, raise families, or keep households in order - why should the be able to defend themselves - psychologically or physically - against abusers?

And why should the tender age of their abusers make the situation any less egregious? We’re not advocating show trials and public executions for bullies fer cryin out loud. We’re talking about protecting children in situations in which they are in the care of the public. That sometimes requires separating kids; if a few bullies need to get pulled out of mainstream education, so be it.