I have issues believing that most adults have been in physical altercations at work (let alone several), but maybe I’m completely blind to the ways of the world.
Glad to know you don’t feel like you’ve been victimized. I’m also glad I’ve cautioned people how best to deal with, well, not crossing your boundaries. Since we’re sharing anecdotal evidence from our own lives, let me share a short story about my experiences with other stalwart men with well defined boundaries.
For the last 25 years of my working life, I led work teams, supervised shifts and eventually managed projects in a manufacturing environment. In that time, I remember well five guys who either worked for me or worked with me whose histories remind me a bit of what you’ve described.
All of these guys used to show up to work occasionally with banged knuckles and various abrasions, bumps and bruises on their persons. Some of ‘em would come in late or not at all every now and then. They’d always have a story about being set on by some asshole and his buddies over “nothing.” At least one of ‘em missed some work because he spent time in the Gray Bar Hotel (what we supervisors called the city jail) because of it.
Not one of these guys ever started any of the fights they were collectively involved in. It was always some other asshole “pushing” them into it. Two of them had similar problems in the workplace, one of them getting fired for it. The others had no workplace conflicts, but they all left or were fired for other reasons in short order, so I can’t say that they wouldn’t have.
So forgive me if I have trouble seeing you as just a standup dude who won’t put up with rowdy shit from assholes like the rest of us stupid peaceful schlubs might do. Because I think I’ve met you before.
Teach your child how to fight back. After he puts a kid in hospital, word will get around, & other kids will mostly leave him alone.
Well, maybe. I think I knew kids who’d use that “past” to bully someone. So maybe not.
I may have been the bully to someone, in the “unneeded needling” sense, but was sort of unaware of it. I didn’t beat kids up or get beat up. But I was more the psycho kid than anything, I think. Closer to the bully in character, but not in any kind of control.
Oookay, here goes another rant. After all, this is the Pit, right?
School performance the other day. Kids after kids singing and dancing, everything from beautiful voices to out-of-tune-and-beat squeaking which makes your ears hurt. Just as it’s supposed to be. Fine. And then, the PC number. A short number starts with a pretty lame don’t-tease-my-friend-dialogue before switching to another song. WTF? WHAT THE FLYING FUCK? You, lady, are so FUCKING NAÏVE THAT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A CAPITAL OFFENSE! Do you really think this has any damned effect on anything at all? I can’t believe that for my life! If you were a lying, cynical bastard, and this lame attempt was to show off you larger-than-bowling-ball-size spit-shined, chromed stainless steel cojones, I could’ve related to it. But THAT’S NOT THE CASE. You seem to actually believe that feely-softy positiveness is the only thing you need to enforce to comply to instructions about bullying in school. You are so fucking lame and naïve that it would have been a service to humanity to smother you to a slow death in your own fucking FLUFF!
Yeah, I’ve probably got that principal stuck in my gullet. Sort of.
Are you saying that someone who claims not to take crap is actually using some hyperbolic euphemism to obfuscate the fact that he is actually a violent criminal?
Nope.
Ah. So then I completely misread the conclusion of your big long story about guys who don’t get shoved around getting into fights all the time and vacationing at the Gray Bar Hotel, being reluctance to believe a guy who “won’t put up with rowdy shit” can be taken at face value. Apologies.
It’s not just my work experiences with fight clubbers that make the “standing up to bullies throughout my life” story register poorly with me.
It bugs me that the claims are “I have well defined boundaries and won’t put up with being crossed but I rarely ever fight,” combined with “I’ve only had a few fights, but only ever walked away from one, yet when I do fight it works effectively to get ‘bullies’ off my back.”
This is, in a word, bullshit.
There are mainly two ways people become effective at violent behavior. Method 1 is to train in a martial discipline over a long enough period of time that when violence is brought to bear upon you, or is required of you, you can perform the necessary actions without considering them. Method 2 is to do violence regularly over a long enough period of time that when you want to be violent, you can perform the violent actions without considering them.
People who have pursued either of those methods are better than you at violence if you haven’t done the same. Period. I don’t care if you’re a giant, or a rockstar at some contact sport, or fast, tough and strong. So if you walk away victorious from a violent confrontation with one of these guys without being one of them yourself, you’re either weirdly lucky or you used disproportionate force (weapons, stealth and/or accomplices). Law enforcement doesn’t call people who use disproportionate force in discretionary fights lucky, they call them “assailant.”
Or if you walk away victorious without being good at violence, your opponent wasn’t so good at it either. Which means he’s not likely to have been a bad bad bully, just someone in conflict with you.
But assuming you’re someone who’s pursued Method 1 and that you don’t use disproportionate force, I have to wonder how you get into fixes where you’re forced into a fight often enough to call it a “pattern” yet you’re not looking for those fights. And if you’ve pursued Method 2, you’re fighting frequently any way.
So if you claim to be an exemplar for the principle that fighting bullies is the best way of dealing with them, I have to at least question your definition of “bullies” and put forth the counterproposition that you’re just dealing with conflict in the dumbest way possible. If all you know how to do is swing a hammer, most problems start looking like nails to you.
Interesting theory.
This assumes that the bullies fit into Category 1 and/or Category 2. Why must we assume that?
We must only assume that the bullies offer a sufficiently persuasive threat of violence that it must be responded to in kind. The claim is not “I got into fights with other guys,” it’s “I’ve had to deal with bullies by beating them up.”
In other words, in order to accept that these were all encounters with bullies, we have to assume that a) in each instance the other guy was the initial aggressor, b) that the aggression was of a physical nature putting our protagonist in fear of being injured, to the degree that c) only a counter threat made real would serve to relieve protagonist from the aggression. This **doesn’t **require a trained or practiced assailant in order to be true, but it does require that the hero of the story has received physical abuse or a very credible threat that such abuse is imminent.
So he’s either being bullied by bullies who don’t bully very well or often yet still inspire fear, or he’s being bullied by bullies well practiced in violence. In the first case, I call bullshit that violence was the appropriate response for a reasonably capable adult. In the second case, I call bullshit that a violent response would effectively forestall any further aggression from the bully.
In both cases, I think the term “bully” is being used as a label which forestalls examination of the real nature of each conflict. It handily places each participant in a clear, black and white role which sets up the preferred course of action as a default.
I think this is where your reasoning falls apart–you’re essentially saying here that bullies can’t be both violent AND cowardly, when in my experience that’s a pretty useful definition of a bully. Most bullies I’ve dealt with prefer to pick on those smaller and/or less powerful than they are, and reacting with appropriate violence to one of those bullies can cause them to re-classify you as “too powerful/risky to risk bullying further”.
Of course bad, violent jerkwads can be cowards. Who said they couldn’t be? But fear’s a great driver of disproportionate responses. A cowardly violent jerkwad might not think twice about knifing you in the back or jumping you in a parking lot with a couple of his buddies. Most cowardly violent jerkwads don’t practice higher order thinking. If it feels good do it, and if it scares you fuck it up.
We’ve been discussing adult conflict situations this page, but the OP’s focus was on bullying in elementary schools, which works very differently than later in life. Childhood bullies can be discouraged by violent response, certainly. But fighting as a solution is still the wrong counsel to give children, and doesn’t prepare them at all for dealing productively with conflicts later in life.
Missed edit window:
Cowardly violent etc. aren’t interested in fighting you in the first place. They’re interested in hurting you or taking things from you, which may involve doing violence on you but doesn’t necessarily involve a one on one confrontation. (This is part of what makes them more effective than you are at violence.)
The dude who confronts you in a bar and offers to fight because you bumped his girlfriend’s chair is most likely some testosterone driven tough guy raised on tales of standing up for himself against bullies - which is what you’ll be in the story he tells his friends later.
I can’t really disagree with the latter statement, but I’ve also found that “the authorities” are far, far more inclined to make correct decisions in my adult life than they ever did in my school life.
So while I can totally concur that “fight back” is not appropriate strategy most of the time as an adult, I also think there’s a need to teach kids effective and workable strategies for dealing with bullies regardless of those strategies’ application to adult life–it would be far from the only set of behaviors that we expect to be different between junior high and the workforce.
Absolutely agree with that last paragraph.
I think for much of this thread people are overthinking this shit. Yes, I realize how that sounds coming from someone who posts 24 paragraph analyses, but really there’s only two main points germaine to the OP:
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If you’re a parent or guardian of a school age child, you should train/get them trained in both physical and nonviolent resistance to bullying. (These nonviolent techiques do exist and are published, and actual courses are available.) Physical response has by far the most negative potential consequences and should be taught as the option of last resort.
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If you’re a parent/guardian and want schools to do something about bullying, you need to teach your school age children to work with school authorities when they see or are victims of bullying. Teachers and administrators don’t know what they don’t know.
And those are the arguments that are getting such a workout here. Argument 1 just isn’t controversial outside of internet discussions. Argument 2 doesn’t assume all schools are competent to address this problem, it just assumes they can’t and won’t take any action unless they feel it as a problem.
Making allowances for idiotic school policy with regards to bullying (I count “zero tolerance” in there with that, as well as the stuff mentioned upthread of the kind of teachers who think some bullying is beneficial, and the kind of administrators who refuse to acknowledge bullying because it makes their jobs easier.) I can’t find a good way to disagree.
We CAN disagree on the effectiveness of retributive violence as a solution, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s at best highly dependent on the situation and personalities involved. I would guess, based on my experiences and what I hear nowadays, that it continues to be “the more rural and/or affluent your school is, the more likely retribution/fighting back is to work.” In my experience, both are less apt to cross the line from “kids will be kids” fistfights to serious weapons or ganging-up related shit.
That’s the one. Tae Kwon Do. Ummmm Method 1
One fight in the past 20 - odd years is hardly a pattern, is it?
So in the spirit of your post, I’d say your attempt at armchair psychiatry is also bullshit.
So then your earlier accounts in this thread, shall we say, shaded the fucking truth? (And it would be “armchair psychology” unless you think I’m diagnosing a mental disorder.)
If you’re going to advise people to choose to fight “bullies” as the best way to deal with them, maybe you should qualify your sage counsel. You know, the way others have done in the thread by mentioning situational variables and alternatives.
Since you listed fights in “the Army” and “at work”, care to explain the consequences that went along with those exercises in bully management, or would that too harshly weaken your thesis? Were those effective bully control sessions also done quietly and discreetly so that no UCMJ or employer sanctions occurred?
Jackwad.