Does society need the bully? Do they serve a purpose, such as discouraging kids from being fat? Do they toughen up kids for life as adults? Does it hurt children that they can go crying to teachers or administrators rather than learn to handle problems themselves? Maybe a small percentage of bullied kids never learn to take it, but is that the price society must pay to toughen up the rest?
No. Any other questions?
This probably needs to be moved out of General Questions to really explore the issue. What sort of objective criteria are you looking for? Studies on bullying of children suggest that it leads to lifelong psychiatric issues.
Moved to IMHO, and title edited to indicate subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
No. They are traumatizing and destructive. They don’t “toughen kids up”, they damage kids. They don’t prepare kids for life as an adult, unless they are going to spend their life in prison. They don’t teach kids how to handle problems themselves, unless you think suicide and school shootings count as "handling the problem’.
As an extension in the same vein to the OP: To what overall benefit does a society enjoy due to the action of liars, cheats, pedophiles, arsonists, bigots, and other sorted characters?
To paraphrase TriPolar: None.
Kids do need to learn how to handle criticism and conflict. In that sense, toughening them up is good, but bullies do this in a way that is negative by definition. What many victims learn instead is that they can’t resolve the problem and no one will help them.
If bullying were the only way to learn how to handle criticism and conflict, I might agree that bullies are a necessary evil… but there are plenty of ways to learn these skills that don’t require anyone being scarred for life.
It’s like any other education or training, really. You should start small and build up. Exceeding what you’re capable of is a good way to hurt yourself. Sometimes permanently.
It’s like the Town Drunk…but harmful to others, not merely himself.
Seriously, what possible benefit to society could there be from the local bully? He’s toughened up all the other kids, so when they get in the army, basic training will be a piece of cake? He’s made himself so hated, now hate comes easily to young men, and they’ll be more competitive in business? Racist bullies have put those uppity minorities in their place?
Who but a Nazi could find any conceivable admiration for the local bully? The right thing to do with Liberty Valence is have someone shoot him in the back.
I don’t think the world needs bullies.
I have often wondered, when I was a child, I got my ass whipped by my parents when I did wrong. This was back when it was still socially acceptable to use corporal punishment on children.
The day I stopped crying when such punishment was used on me, was the day they stopped using it. I’ve often wondered, had it not been for all those ass whup’ns, would I still be brave enough to stand up to my would be childhood bullies?
(Not trying to make the case corporal punishment.)
“The Bully” presumably does other things in their life besides bullying, am I right? They might also cure cancer. Well, probably not, but anyway let’s not glibly define people by any single one of their traits, OK?
Bullying? No, we don’t need it. Society does not need it and should not tolerate it.
Trying to resist the urge to play devil’s advocate here, and failing a bit. How about if we frame the question slightly differently:
Is it better to have grown up having faced bullying and overcome it, than to have grown up without ever facing it?
I would say it’s better to have overcome it, because the challenge of bullying is similar enough to other situations that are unavoidable in the adult world, that the skills gained in overcoming bullying are useful to adults.
Well, some of them. And of course the above is a false dichotomy, because it would have to assume that everyone who faces bullying does in fact overcome it, which is untrue. Some are destroyed by it.
At best, I would say:
[ul]
[li]For people who face bullying and overcome it (becoming better, stronger, more resilient), bullying can perhaps retrospectively be identified as a ‘need’.[/li][li]For everyone else, the bully is not needed.[/li][/ul]
There’s no evidence bullying makes you stronger, and much evidence it makes you weaker.
We don’t accept it as adults (there are laws against in in the workplace), so why should we as children?
Bullying is a sympton of a deeper problem. Usually the bullier has lousy parents. This is not to be encouraged.
Why do we have to overcome bullying as children? Why can’t we overcome it as adults, if and when, we face it?
Even this is too simplistic. You may have overcome (or simply survived) bullying, and learnt something or developed something in doing so, but this can still be at some cost to yourself. To survive or overcome bullying, for instance, you may have had to repress emotions, to learn not to trust people, etc. These are not necessarily good things, and they will not necessarily tend to make you happier in life.
We could equally say that some people overcome child abuse, or childhood bereavement, or physical or intellectual disability, and that in doing so they learn or develop in ways that they would not otherwise have done. But we would still never say that society “needs” child abuse, etc, or even that those who have experienced and survived such things are strengthened by that. Even the survivors are strengthened in some respects, but diminished in others.
I would say that you’re thinking of bullying in very limited amounts and intensities, small enough to get overcome quickly; of something like a child trying to bully another in a context where that is considered unacceptable, where the person under attack can get help. Some of us took decades to overcome our bullying, partly because of how intense or how long it had been, or of having been informed repeatedly that we were imagining it, exaggerating, etc.
In my case, “overcoming bullying” came at the cost of, among other things, getting married and having children. While neither has ever been a key objective for me, it would have been nice to be able to decide about it without that particular piece of baggage.
no, because
-
bullying is not the only possible form of adversity to overcome, and
-
many of us never “overcome” it, we tolerate it as best we can and live the rest of our lives hating ourselves to some degree.
what a terrible question. Any justification for bullying is garbage.
There’s nothing good about being bullied. All it does is damage and embitter people.
Frankly, I’d much prefer it if I could look back at school after all these decades without rage and murder fantasies.
What “skills”? The only way to overcome bullying it to beat the bully badly enough they’ll leave you alone or kill them, both of which are likely to get you arrested as an adult and aren’t very useful “skills” for non-criminals.
Have you ever been bullied yourself? You seem to have this notion that being bullied instills a backbone in people, makes people better than they were before, makes them stronger, not so weak, rubs a bit of good dirt on to their previously-shiny new suit of armor.
Having been the victim of online bullying before, I can tell you that that is most definitely not the effect that bullying has; fact is, it often leaves victims weaker than before.
This thread seems to be an emotional version of the Broken Window Fallacy; namely, claiming that something bad is actually a positive good.
Using bullying to ‘toughen up’ children is like using child molesters to teach sex education. :smack:
A novel take.
In that vein stalkers serve a purpose, since they discourage women from getting into bad relationships.
And con men have value to society, since they tend to weed out gullible people who are stupid about money.
I agree with this. I was intensely bullied, though for a relatively short time (six months), and in my own “life narrative” I think I probably see it as a good thing – because I overcame it, and to my mind rose above it, by choosing to focus my energies elsewhere ( in my case, I decided to read all the plays of Shakespeare as a way to avoid depression and distract myself). But even so, I look back on, especially, the physical bullying and realize that it is on,y luck that I wasn’t seriously injured. And I am now very slow to trust people and don’t make friends easily, something which I think is related to how the bullying went down – someone I saw as a close friend turned on me, and got others to join in – after I, concerned that she was suicidal, told an adult.
I’d do the same thing again, even though I know that my bully fed me with tons of lies out of pure malice and because she was herself being abused at home.
But just because that’s how it happened for me, I don’t think bullying would be something good for everyone to experience. Especially the bullies themselves.