I’m with the “call the cops” crowd. If anyone assaults the Celtling they are going to pay, hard. Further, I honestly think it’s the right thing for the bully.
Bullying kids are bullied kids. They learn this behavior at home. If a child goes to court then all sorts of resources come into play, including the Child Welfare Services. The school Principal should be brought in to protect your child while he is in their care, and to discipline whatever adult was (or should have been) present when this occurred.
There are still an amazing number of adults in this country who think that “letting the kids work it out for themselves” is the best character building option. The fact is, that these kids need an immediate and forceful assurance that society will not tolerate this behavior from them. The sooner they learn it, the better.
It would be a shame to let the bully continue until he can be tried as an adult.
Sadly, this can end up getting YOUR kid charged with assault. I see it happen all the time.
It may stop the bullying, but back when I worked in adult misdemeanors, I also represented a mother who did this, and the case did not go well.
In the days of zero tolerance policies, sometimes going to the authorities is your only choice to truly and fully protect your kid. The only advice I would give is that it’s never legal to throw the first punch. Teach your kid self-defense, but know that they have to take a punch in order to throw one.
What are the relative sizes of the children concerned? I was heavily bullied at school - sometimes physically, but mainly psychologically - and because I was so much taller than the other children, it was always seen as my fault as I appeared to be older and therefore more mature (not actually the case, of course).
If your child continues to be bullied, remove him from the school and place him at another. My parents left me, and it was the worst thing they could have done. My schooldays have scarred me for life.
This pat statement is such a pile of utter horseshit a backhoe could not dig you out. Over time I got to know the families of several of the kids that tried to physically bully me in earlier grades. The kids were not bullied or physically disciplined in any way by their parents. If anything they were usually spoiled rotten, and they had the run of the house. Bullies bully because they really and truly enjoy the power that comes with dominating, intimidating and terrorizing people. It’s really not that complicated.
One commonality was that most (not all) of the builes were from single mother households and, with one exception, almost none of the bullies had fathers who were on site or involved in their lives.
Ugh, no kidding. I only wish girl bullies were half so easy to deal with as just being able to deck the bitch and have it done.
Look, I want to point and laugh at people who take “martial arts” classes and think it makes them a ninja. If I were a bullying sort of kid and some geek-o threatened me with their leet ninja skills, that would be an instant path to swirly-city. In my experience, the vast majority of “martial arts” taught these days are not about real-world combat-readiness, but fitness, fun, and “self-confidence”. TKD in particular (at least the strip-mall, suburban variety) is all about style and form, not anything like street-ready efficacy.
Teaching your kid effective self-defense or street combat skills is great, but be careful with the “martial arts” thing. Putting them in some generic McMartialArts class and instilling in them the idea that those skills are directly real-world applicable, not so much.
I will echo Drain Bead in noting that in practical terms, “fighting back” carries with it a serious risk that the school will hold the victimized child to be equally responsible. Or perhaps more so – the fighting back may well be a more public spectacle than the bullying itself, and the bully may have friends who will push to blame the victim. Unjust as it may be, fighting back may backfire.
I think the real world expectation is that. on balance, it’s better to risk administrative discipline than having your child continue to be physically intimidated and terrorized.
Depends on the school district. In some areas, fighting regardless of reason gets immediate suspension, possible expulsion, and you end up at the alternative school. The alternative school might not be a great place to be.
If you don’t want your kid expelled, you need a record of abuse to point to at the administrative hearing.
So - get photos of the bruises immediately, and start checking your kid for marks regularly. This will be tough, as he might want to hide this.
Schedule a meeting with the Principal immediately. Do not accept a hand-off. Ask for the campus cop and teacher to attend as well. Bring the photos.
for the long-term, invest some money in Tae Kwon Do/Karate/whatever lessons. Give the kid some self-confidence, upper body strength and hopefully he can fend for himself and the other potential bullies will move on to someone more “pickable on”.
Obviously, jr. high is “Lord of the Flies” territory and being rational rarely works with bullies and “narc-ing” on the bullies (though right) may draw more ostracization.
You know, I already said the first step should be dealing with the school, but making your kid take his shirt off so you can take pictures sounds as bad as the bullying. (I don’t know how much it would help either; the school may think that’s flat-out weird.) Is that really necessary? It’s in the schoo’s interest to act on a report of bullying, and the parent’s word should be enough to get things started without making this into an episode of CSI. And all things considered I think letting the kids settle it is preferable to getting the cops involved since it would likely be more effective.
Paul Graham wrote an essay some time back, Why Nerds are Unpopular. It covered a lot of ground, but one significant part dug into the reasons kids pick on other kids. An excerpt:
My own opinion is similar to that of astro: that most individuals want to feel powerful, influential. As a kid, you don’t have the skills or resources to exert much creative/positive influence on the world around you, but it’s pretty easy to exert a destructive influence by bullying. The results are easy to achieve, immediate and obvious, as opposed to spending hours in community service trying to exert a positive influence.
In my own experience, it is the acceptance of bullying by adults which causes it to go on. It is not that the teacher has to become the enforcer for a specific kid necessarily, though iof necessary they ought to be prepared to do so. It is that the school has to become the kind of place where bullying is not acceptable.
I really dislike it when schools behave as though the child with just a little bit of encouragement could make friends, develop self confidence…while the bullying is still going on. Possibly suspicion of others, a feeling of betrayal, and low self confidence are not correlated to but are actually caused by bullying?
Where you start is by stopping children from attacking each other. Which does not seem to me to be too much to ask – a simple absence of abuse is not too high a standard. Bullying is not a natuaral part of life which must be accepted, any more than sexual harassment, date rape, racism, or homophobia are.
I think fighting back is only appropriate when the bully is being physical–hitting, pinching, bumping, etc. I don’t think a kid should hit a bully just for name calling. But once it gets physical, it’s no holds barred.
If it is just verbal, tell your kid to not show that it bothers him. He may feel horrible inside, but don’t give the bully the satisfaction of knowing it. Don’t try to reason with the bully or explain why what he says is false. Work with your kid on ways to reply such that it seems like the bully’s words are just rolling off his back. For example:
Bully: Hey four eyes!
Kid: (pulls out notebook, pretends to look something up) Hey! that’s the 1000th time I’ve been called that. Here’s your prize (hands him a pencil)
Bully: Hey four eyes!
Kid: Wow! I haven’t heard that since 3rd grade. You need to get better material.
Bully: Hey four eyes!
Kid: (shouting) Hey everyone! Listen up. You have to hear this incredibly original insult Bully just came up with. What was it again, Bully?
Bully: That’s an ugly shirt.
Kid: I didn’t know you cared so much about what I wear. Are you a fashion expert?
And so on.
Have you ever seen that Steve Martin movie “Roxanne”? He plays a character with a ridiculously large nose. At one point a bully calls him something like “big nose”. Steve handles it perfectly. He says “That’s the best you can come up with?” and then proceeds to rattle off 20 better insults. Rent that movie and show it to your kid so he can see it in action.
Oftentimes parents frame it as the teacher’s job to stop the bullying. Yes, the teacher can and should not permit bullying, name-calling, etc. in the school. But the teacher is not everywhere. As I mentioned, kids leave our sight after 3:30, and we don’t have the ability to follow them home. A child who is dependent on the teacher is going to have serious problems when he/she is out of his/her sight.
Teachers have voluminous responsibilities in the classroom and it takes everyone involved - kids, parents, administrators - to solve problems. And I have seen many occurrences where parents expect the teacher to solve the problem, while not helping their student to develop confidence.
I actually do think bullying is everywhere in our society - in homes, in schools, in workplaces. Because of that kids need to be empowered to stop it and understand that they will have to confront bullies all their lives. I gave many examples of things that parents can teach or help kids to do so they are not victims, or potentially worse, “tattletales.” I wish we could simply snap our fingers and make bullying stop, but it won’t. Bullies are devious and find other ways to insult and demean kids.
If a child is bullied in different contexts - not just by one kid in one class, but in different settings - I would say that the child needs to learn tools to deflect this behavior. One poster listed retorts to insults. It might sound cheesy, but the sad reality is that bullies typically seek out victims. Just as we teach young adults assertiveness skills, and self defense, we need to teach kids these same skills - looking people in the eye, using forceful language, and if necessary, retaliating - and it shouldn’t happen when kids are starting college.
It’s a YouTube clip from Big Brother. Start watching around 3:40. Russell is the big guy lifting weights. He says he’s going to rile everyone up. He starts yelling at Jeff and calling him names. Jordan comes out and tells Jeff not to listen to him. Russell then switches to Jordan and she completely loses it. Jeff, however, remains completely calm.
In my opinion, Jeff handled it perfectly. He was calm and didn’t validate what Russell was saying. He deflected his insults. You can see how Russell is losing interest in fighting with Jeff. But Jordan did not handle it correctly. She let him get to her, got emotional, and you could see Russell was loving it. That’s what he wants. He wants people to get in his face and yell. Show that clip to your kid and tell him to be like Jeff when a bully is verbally assaulting him.
It is the responsibility of the school to prevent children from harming each other. Children cannot leave school when they are being bullied, unlike in a work setting. I myself have never worked in a place where it was acceptable for me to be struck/pinched/kicked or otherwise attacked in such a way that I was bruised from it. At the OP’s school, this is apparently the case.
Power struggles between people are indeed a fact of life, which children express differently than do adults, sometimes by bullying. This is normal. But it is not acceptable and that is what adults are for in the lives of children. I have not found namecalling, taunting, pinching, hitting, kicking, or pulling chairs out from under people (just to name a few) to be everywhere in our society; possibly we have different experiences. But I think these are the kinds of stories people tell themselves to justify what they knwo to be unacceptable. It was also believed that sexual harassment was simply a fact of life and something women had to put up with. We have not done away with it, of course, but the problem now is a great deal less than it used to be – and everyone knows that it is not acceptable. What we now call date rape was long believed to be normal behavior and something individual women were responsible for preventing, or suffer the consequences. I could go on but I think you follow.
If there is ongoing bullying in one setting, I would say that the problem is the culture of that setting. Teaching children to insult, attack, and whomp up on each other seems to me counterproductive, and certainly not the direction I would expect a school to go in.
I agree that it takes everyone being involved. I agree that the approach needs to be school wide. Mostly, some commitment to the notion of social justice (in a very small society) is where it begins,
When I said ‘the moral high ground’ earlier, I meant it in two ways. One, the principal, the teacher, the school authorities will look on the situation differently if it is clear cut - bully is bullying and the victim is not retaliating. It becomes muddier if the victim retaliates - now both sides are being violent. Or, to put it another way, if the victim’s retaliation is justified, why is the bully’s retaliation not justified?
Two - If Son of slantih has made the moral choice not to fight violence with violence then I don’t want to see that beaten out of him. It takes guts to be a pacifist. Let the one who is wrong become right, don’t say the one who is right should become wrong because that’s the way the world works. The world needs more people who stand up for their principles. He should do what he thinks is right (even if it’s not what I think is right; I’m just a stranger on the internet.) with the advice and support of his family and the school authorities.
