# School bullying, please advise. **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 6, 2005, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120 "2005-04-06T23:38:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![danceswithcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9e8a1a/32.png) [@danceswithcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/danceswithcats)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/41 "2005-04-08T23:00:06Z")
> [@glee](#): > > This is wrong. > > Firstly, do you salute every little kid who got beaten up by a gang because they tried to ‘kick the bullies ass’? Better to put up a defense than to simply print “doormat” on your back. > [@](#): > > Secondly there is a much better way to change bully behaviour. > > [Bullying and cyberbullying | Childline](http://www.childline.org.uk/Areyoubullyingsomeone.asp) > > Bullies don’t just come from out of the blue. Often bullies have had a bad experience themselves or they feel insecure or unhappy with their life. It doesn’t make what they do right but understanding what might lie behind their behaviour can sometimes help the situation. > What if you’re the one doing the bullying? You know that what you’re doing and saying is hurting people but you just can’t stop yourself. What can you do? > > This is Jay’s story: > > ‘There’s this boy in our class, Carl. He was a right pain, I mean, he just whinged about everything. I once told him he was a wimp and he cried and the awful thing was that I felt good seeing him cry. The others laughed and that made me feel even better. > Then it got to be a habit. People copied me and I got even worse and said really horrible things. Then I started hiding his stuff and I really enjoyed seeing him panic and run about getting hysterical. I used to think it was funny.’ > > Jay didn’t think much about his behaviour until one day when his class teacher said that Carl was in hospital because he’d tried to hurt himself to get away from the bullying. > > ‘It had only been a bit of fun really - I hadn’t realised how it made him feel. I didn’t mean him to take it seriously. I rang ChildLine and said I was afraid that there was something wrong with me. I mean it’s not normal to like hurting people is it? > The counsellor was great. He talked to me about my family, how Dad had treated me just like I’d treated Carl when I cried, and how I felt when he did it. I even sort of understood my dad a bit better. > The counsellor asked me if I had anyone I could talk to about it all. In the end I talked to my uncle. He’s Mum’s brother and we go to football together. He helped me get back into the habit of helping people out rather than putting them down and made me feel better about myself. > I even apologised to Carl for what I’d done. It was difficult but I’m glad I did and now I don’t feel like there’s something wrong with me.’ > > Note that in this case, the bully was being bullied by his father. Do you still think that beating this kid up is the only way to go? You’ve bought into the mindset of making excuses for oafish behavior. Perhaps it works for you, but it didn’t when I was a young pup. I couldn’t avoid them, tried to, and only when I became sick of their shit and defended myself was I left alone. ---
**Author:** ![Silver\_Fire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e4f/32.png) [@Silver\_Fire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silver_Fire)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2005, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/42 "2005-04-08T23:37:44Z")
> [@Carm6773](#): > > **Silverfire** , are you listed as an emergency contact for Tyler? Yes, I am. > [@FaerieBeth](#): > > I’m sorry, but the above sentence does not compute. I knew someone was going to pick up on that. 🙂 I love my sister, and I’m proud of the things she does. She’s been employed constantly since day one, falling back on state assistance very few times (at which time she was still employed, just making peanuts) which total _maybe_ one out of the last seven years. She works hard, and she’s trying. She provides for her son with very little help from his father (I don’t know the exact monetary total, but it’s probably less than a grand in seven years, and Tyler doesn’t even know him, having met him less than 6 times since he was a year old), and she’s working hard in school to make their lives better. She kicks ass outside of the house. Let me give you an example to show you why I think she’s apathetic and lazy. I was at my mom’s last weekend. It was a gorgeous day, perfect weather, and Alex (my son) wasn’t having fun in the house. I asked her if she wanted to grab Tyler and come to the park with us. She said she had to take a shower first. After watching her not move for about 20 minutes, I asked her again. “I have a headache.” I (jokingly, in the way sisters do, y’know) harrassed her about it for a bit, rolled my eyes and started getting Alex ready to go. Like two seconds later her boyfriend calls and, faster than a speeding bullet, she’s in the shower. I hang around until she comes back out, dressed up and full of make up, and I say, “Hey, I thought you had a headache?” All better! “Oh, we’re just going shopping.” Now, I’ve been shopping and I’ve been to the park. Guess which one is easier to do when you have a “headache”? :rolleyes: And then, rather than taking Tyler with her, she asked my parents if they’d watch him for a while. As another example, she got Tyler all psyched up to join the junior wrestling team when he was in first grade, and then she procrastinated until it was too late to hand the damn paperwork in. She couldn’t even do paperwork! So, yeah, apathetic and lazy. This is why I didn’t trust her to do anything about this. I finally got ahold of her, btw. She’d pulled Tyler out of school early today. She was chatting with me all, “Hey, guess what your ring tone (on her cell) is?!” When I asked her if she’d called the school yet, she said she hadn’t had time and then she was suddenly too busy to talk. Huh? I talked to her about 2 hours later (after she’d been back to my mom’s, who I assume talked to her), and I asked her if she just wanted me to take care of it. She informed me that she’d called and it was “being taken care of”, so we’ll see. :rolleyes: Since it’s clear to me that she isn’t going to listen to anything I say (including all the stuff you guys say), I’m going to filter this shit through my mom because it seems like my sister is at least listening to her. So I’ve asked my mom to talk to her about getting Tyler involved in martial arts and she agreed that it’s a good idea. In the mean time, I feel like I’ve been banging my head against a wall for 2 days for nothing, and I feel even more helpless now than I did when I started this thread. Maybe she’ll get all this someday; I just hope it doesn’t take something awful to make her see it. In other news (the local 5 o’clock, to be precise) a family is suing a school just south of here for wrongful death because their son killed himself after being bullied forever without appropriate action taken against the bully by the school to stop it from happening. So… yeah. ---
**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2005, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/43 "2005-04-09T06:10:52Z")
**Glee** , re the entire contents of your post #25: When you read my comments about giving my son the go-ahead to hit back , please consider those in conjunction with my earlier comments in this thread. Hitting back is very much a last resort. My son knows this, and that is one of the reasons why he has not done so. Other reasons he has not done so are that he’s a little scared to (partly because yes, it could mean he gets his arse handed to him by the bully, and partly because it’s against the rules), but mainly because I managed to get that particular incident nicely sorted through more conventional means (talking to the school authorities). This is great, and I’m happy he has never had cause to hit back. However, this is not an academic exercise. It is the real world, and there is a time and a place where hitting back is the best option. It is not without risk, but I feel I would be doing my son a gross disservice by not letting him know all the available options and their attendant pros and cons. In the _real world_, sometimes a bop on the nose is a justifiable course of action. It is also not one to be taken lightly. I desire my son to know all this stuff. As for my son and I sitting in the teacher / principal’s office with my son being the violent student and my being the angry disfunctional father who is trying to raise a thug, it would not pan out that way. My son is an average to slightly above average student academically, but more importantly he is noticeably above average behaviourally at school. On the other hand, the boy involved is physically much larger than him, and is a known habitual bully with no respect for others whatsoever. For my part I can scrub up well enough not to go in there looking like a Jerry Springer guest. I’m sure the school would understand my son’s actions and he would be exonerated, especially given the fact that my son has NO history of this sort of behaviour and was under extreme provocation, AND the fact that he ran-not-walked to the nearest teacher and gave an honest account of events virtually before the other boy had hit the ground. I’ve got no problem with fighting back in certain situations, no. Doing it as a first option is of course wrong, but ruling it out completely is dangerous and unrealistic. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2005, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/44 "2005-04-10T03:04:10Z")
> [@glee](#): > > What evidence do you have for this assertion? A Fifth Degree Black Belt and more than twenty years experience in martial arts, most of which has been as an instructor. > [@glee](#): > > Why do you want the child to fight with the bully, instead of reporting straight away? > > You posted earlier about martial arts training: “I then ask them what they would do if someone punched at them. In 14 years as an instructor, I’ve probably had less than a dozen students give the right answer. And when I tell them the right answer, they look at me as if I had just grown a second head. > **The right answer, of course, is to run away**.” > > And also: “ **Using physical force is the last resort**.” > > How come it’s the first resort here? We like to teach students to control their environment. That means not getting themselves into situations where they can possibly be attacked. It’s not 100% effective because we cannot control the actions of the attacker; all we can do is try to minimize our exposure. However, with kids being bullied at school, they cannot control the environment because they have to go to school. They can try to avoid the bully as much as possible, but more than likely, the bully will get to them. When that happens, the bully will probably trap the kid in a corner or somehow get them in a situation where they can’t avoid the bully or run as a first resort. At that point, the situation changes to a self-defense mode. The basic concept of self-defense is distract, release, stun, run. The kid now has to create the opportunity to run and if that means blocking the bully’s attack and then counterattacking, so be it. But rest assured, it is NOT the first resort. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2011, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/46 "2011-09-04T04:47:15Z")
[Looks](http://www.medwonders.com/support-groups/acute-lymphoblastic-leukemia/discussion-posts-11028-1.htm) like [spam](http://www.medwonders.com/discussion/news-comments-1.htm), reported. ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2011, 6:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120/47 "2011-09-04T06:37:40Z")
Take off and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/school-bullying-please-advise/298120.md?page=2)