Ah well, I guess I’ll be the minority report then.
My philosophy, after 12 years in boarding school, is fight back. Even if you get pummelled, that one sweet punch you manage to sneak through is worth it. It does wonders for your self esteem. If you both get suspended, too bad. Life doesn’t begin and end in school. On the street there are no teachers to run to, and no witnesses prepared to testify.
You’re on your own. Always.
Ahhh, that explains a phrase that one of my friends uses all the time (an English translation of the above.) He’s from Miami.
I wish I had hit back at school.
I’m sure that most of North American schools will suspend for fighting regardless of the justification. This is good for society at large. Even grown men who play hockey know that, and suspensions are a non violent consequence compared to the strap of years ago.
Having said that, fighting back is the only course many kids have to maintain the respect of their peers who just don’t know any better. If you are tagged as a wuss and a pushover or rat to the man, you will lose your standing.
I have two daughters. The eldest never fought, but her earlier school years were a struggle as a social outcast.
My second daughter was a fighter right from kindergarten. Funny, because she didn’t like it and she would come home, and break into tears over it. She is a very popular girl with a ton of friends. Frequency of episodes diminished over time to my relief and her school life seems to have stabalized. She is well aware today, approaching 16 that violence is not the answer to resolve conflict.
Kids know what needs to be done to get respect. The real solution to the problem is vigilence by teachers on the school ground to interject and suspend to prevent schoolyard violence from getting out of hand.
I told my high school age kids that if they hit somebody and get suspended I will punish them. I also told them that if somebody hits them that they can choose to ignore, report, or fight back. If they get suspended for that, not to worry. Daddy will sue the shit out of the school for not protecting his baby and encouraging aggression in the bad kids who will hit the good kids because they know the good kids will remain passive to avoid suspension.
.
And this is what always pissed me off the most. I was picked on a lot when I was younger. When I did complain to the monitors they did nothing. There was a particular boy who was constantly assaulting me. I was very small for my age and I remember him as a giant. I told my Mother, she marched us down to the principal’s office where we were told, “oh, that boy just likes you and that’s how he’s showing it. Just ignore him and he’ll stop.” Yeah see, I had already been ignoring him for months and the assaults were getting worse. My Father then instituted the “if someone hits you, you hit them back rule”. I hit back and got in trouble. I pretty much lost all faith in so-called authority figures early on in life.
I have some sympathy for your point of view, Phase42, but I also have some questions:
Would your outrage have been the same if your niece were a nephew? (i.e. it had been a boy who was reprimanded for hitting back)
Does it matter to you how badly the other boy was hurt? Would you still be outraged if he had wound up in the hospital?
Do you honestly believe that “hit back” and “put up with it” are the only alternatives when someone attacks you?
Do you not see why people like the principal might not be really sensitive about making sure a school—even a kindergarten—is a safe place, and the students aren’t in danger of violence from one another?
#1 should not happen. It’s the responsibility of the school to take kids seriously when they report bullying. I know I do. I think it’s pretty well-handled here, though not perfectly, since we can’t be everywhere and see everything.
I think there is a major difference between defending yourself and hitting back/retaliating. It’s important to teach kids that there’s a difference, and that the “really satisfying” revenge is wrong and likely to cause you more problems. I personally don’t want to raise a kid that thinks he should do the really satisfying, wrong thing. YMMV.
Did any one read the story of the old folks from the cruise line that someone/people tried to rob?
Our society LOVES to tell us that the teachers/police/whomever will protect us if we Do The Right Thing and not fight back, except there is a lot of dead folks laying around that the police/teachers/whomever could not protect.
Yes, we are talking specifically about a child, a young child. Now let’s see how different Vermont, 9/11, Colombine would have been if we weren’t told from a young age to be a bunch of sheep.
It shouldn’t, but from my experience, it’s the case most of the time. I remember being younger and being bullied by older kids, then scolded by the people in charge because they thought that (because of my size) that I was the bully and that I must be older and thus more responsible for the behavior. This, of course, also happened when the person in charge was my own teacher, knew I was in her class, and scolded me because someone who was two grades higher had been picking on me. :rolleyes: Way to encourage a healthy perspective for an elementary school kid.
Of course, there are times when parental interference work out. My older brother went to a school in the '80s where, as a white kid, he was a pretty big minority. Back then, some kids took up the tradition of “Cracker Day” meaning “beat up the white kids day.” Couple of guys start to try to beat him up, he defends himself, and ONLY HE got punished. My mom takes off work to go to the school and has a discussion with the principal about this; apparently she lit a fire under his ass about this enough to completely cancel out whatever punishment that was originally given. But this was over 20 years ago, and now we have zero tolerance policies that prevent common sense to be used.
And the bully will wait until you’re alone, no teacher around, nobody to cry to, and they pummel you harder.
You will be seen as a victim, weak and incapable of defense.
He gets out of jail, ignores the restraining order because a piece of paper against a violent criminal is as useless as tits on a boar hog, and he kills her.
Or she fights back, defends herself successfully with or without a weapon, and he learns that hitting her is a really, really bad idea (or he’s dead).
The point of self defense is to use exactly as much force as is necessary to stop the person who is attacking you from doing so.
Sometimes that means you have to incapacitate or kill the attacker.
My father gave my sister and me one rule about fights: you never throw the first punch. He taught us not to start a fight, and then he told us that if someone starts one with you, make damn sure you finish it.
Resolving differences of opinion with violence is uncivilized. Defending yourself against force is regrettable but occasionally necessary if you want to be practical about it. It’s a mistake to make a this into a matter of principles, but if we have to do that, I’d ask this: is it really a good thing for society to tell people “don’t solve your own problems, rely on authority for everything?”
I went totally nonviolent when I was 8 or 9 in 3rd grade and stuck with it until I was 15 in Junior High School. Would not fight back, would not defend myself physically. I’d get furious, defend myself verbally, and would indeed go and tell the authority figures if I were being assaulted or harassed.
Here’s my results:
• Anger and fear twist your stomach all to pieces and leave you shaking, and people can tell, and they find it funny and taunt you & pick on you more because they can tell that they are getting to you
• Other folks’ mileage may differ, but I started out with the impression that the adultworld was a world not run by coercion and intimidation but instead was one in which the righteous law-abiding civilized citizenry were in charge, one where principles came before favoritism or opportunism, one where with rare exceptions the people in authority did not use their authority to favor themselves or their friends or their personal causes but instead weilded their authority with great fairness and even-handedness. By the time it was over, I was pretty much of the opinion that the people in charge were in charge for no particular reason other than the fact that they’d won the power struggles, and that as long as there existed people who liked power over other people it would be those people, to a disproportionate extent, who would rise to positions of authority as long as such positions existed. And so, ultimately, when I was running to “tell the teacher”, I was most often turning to one bully for protection against another.
• I was not especially admired by the adults for being “civilized”, for being self-controlled and self-disciplined. In fact, male adults were often contemptuous of me, hostile, said I was “sneaky” and was somehow cleverly setting up and doing in those fine young men whom I was accusing of harassing me. As I got older, female adults were less and less sympathetic and occasionally hostile as well.
• When you stay out of fights from the age of 9 to the age of 15, you’re effectively unable to fight. What you once knew you’ve forgotten, and a nearly full-sized person who tries to fight as they did when they were 9 isn’t going to be formidable or effective. In particular, little kids don’t put their weight behind their blows because they don’t have much weight, and they do their damage by flailing.
• Lots of anger and fear that isn’t given an effective outlet tends to ferment and turn very dark. I can totally imagine my 5th grade self up in a clock tower with an automatic rifle. I had significant and powerful and perpetual hate for a great many of my classmates, mostly boys. I did not want them to accept me, I did not want them to like me. I wanted them to leave me the hell alone, and really I just wanted them to not be. Such people should not exist, their very existence was an effrontery.
My advice would be to discuss violence and authority and the relevant moral and philosophical issues with the kid. These matters are no more beyond the mental capabilities of a grade-school kid than mixed fractions. Instead of telling the kid to DO THIS when THAT happens, get into conversations about the outcome of doing ANY of the possible things one could do in response to violence. Everything has consequences. DON’T make the kid promises that “if you do XXX, everything will work out all right and get properly and fairly straightened out in the end”.
I think this is a marvelous theory, and one toward which we should all strive. It also just doesn’t work. Maybe you take reports of bullying seriously, but your outlook as described above seems to me to overlook that:
(1) Not every authority figure, nor even most authority figures, take these reports seriously. When I was in high school, I was a semi-nerd; I took the advanced and AP classes. The folks who picked on and bullied the nerds were by and large the athletes. I had a friend who was constantly abused in the locker room - not brutalized or beaten senseless, just whapped with towels, flicked, slapped, and so on. The guys doing it were the football players. The authority figure teaching the gym class was the football coach - who himself blatantly mocked the “Techers” in the medical science magnet program in which I and friend were enrolled. How do you think those reports of bullying went for my friend?
Not to mention that:
(2) There are incredibly intense pressures informing against making reports. Other kids will mock and/or refuse to associate with you if you are perceived as a whiner. Even teachers will make fun of the tattletales. The bully himself (or very, very rarely, herself) is very likely to find a way to redouble the attack if you get him in trouble.
Me? I fought back. I was small but I worked contracting so I had more strength than people expected. I have never hit anyone, ever, who didn’t hit me first. But I hit back if I was attacked. The first time I was bullied in the locker room was the last. Hell, it’s not ideal, but it got me through high school without ever sustaining a broken nose or a broken arm, and I grew up into about the least violent adult you’ll probably ever meet.
Which is to say that I agree with the OP, although I don’t think the gender of either kid is relevant in this particular case.
Right. Zero tolerance for violence lacks common sense. You’re absolutely correct. Kids should hit each other with impunity if they state that they were defending themselves. Fight violence with violence, that should be school policy. :rolleyes:
All through high school, this girl used to pick on me unmercifully. Just because. She was the tough, mouthy one and I was the peaceful, “ignore her, she’ll go away”.
She eventually did go away.
But, if I could go back, I’d punch her right in the nose. It would have ended a hell of a lot sooner.
Boy, these posts explain a lot about why so many people get killed in that country of yours. This whole ‘beat the crap out of anybody that gets in your face’ mentality is real, real creepy.
Isn’t there a bit of a middle ground you’re excluding there? Isn’t there room for a policy that is neither “fight violence with violence” nor “no room for interpretation, discussion, explanation, or actually tailoring your response to a particular situation?”
Err, Quiddity, I think you’ve missed her point. The way I read it is that it is precisely because of the “do not hit back” rule that the Columbines occur in the first place.
Yes, that’s how I took it, too, and I agree. I think it’s important for kids to learn to defend themselves. If my daughter (or son, for that matter) was hit by someone in school, I would tell them to go ahead and hit the kid right back, no matter what the school policy was.