Is bullying worse now than it used to be? Are we less tough now than we used to be? I’m not sure I understand what’s going on with this problem. I was raised to be in trouble if I didn’t stand up for myself and I wouldn’t be in trouble if I got into it with somebody at school for standing up for myself no matter what happened at school as a result.
Is the bullying crisis now a product of the Internet making all the dirty secrets we have as a society on display? What can we do about it?
There honestly seems to be a big problem now with this and kids are taking their own lives which should shock us all as a community.
I was bullied mercilessly when I was in grade school, and that was the 1970s. I don’t know that there’s a difference in “standing up for yourself” now versus then; bullies have always preyed on those who they perceive as weaker and less confident than themselves.
It wasn’t that I was unwilling to “stand up for myself” in 1977; it was that when you’re outnumbered 10 to 1, and you have a school where the teachers and staff are unable to (or unwilling to) do anything to stop the day-to-day stream of little insults and incidents, that even standing up for yourself doesn’t do much good.
Complete WAGs on my part: many parents are likely more protective now than they were back then, and social media undoubtedly makes it easier for bullies to raise their bullying to another level.
I was raised to stand up for myself, too, and wouldn’t hesitate to drop my books and go at it if I was physically assaulted. However, I was not exactly physically fit and had the crap beaten out of me constantly. And guess what? Bullies don’t leave you alone just because they already beat you up before.
That’s boy bullying, of course. For girl bullying – the kind where they go behind your back and gossip you bit by bit – getting physical does nothing at all.
If you have Amazon Prime, I recommend the documentary “Mentor”. It shows what a bully cuture really looks like.
No, I don’t think bullying is necessarily worse today than in the past. Nor do I think kids are weaker than in the past. I think we all just have greater awareness, including the bullies. They know that out-in-the-open harrassment is far riskier than anonymous, social media bullying. Whether the latter is “worse” than the former is up for debate.
If teen suicide is indeed worse now, I don’t know if I’d lay it all on bullying, but rather bullying combined with other stressors that have certainly become more intense (like preparation for college and financial anxieties). It probably doesn’t help that social media promotes feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, even apart from bullying.
I didn’t stand up for myself as a kid, and it didn’t have anything to do with “weakness” and everything to do with not knowing how without making things worse for myself. Picture a bunch of kids calling you “crazy retard” in the schoolyard. How do you, all by yourself, make them stop without conforming to the “crazy retard” stereotype? There is no way. We don’t expect adults to fight their own workplace harrassers, so why should children be held to a different standard? That’s ridiculous.
No, it’s simply something that is less acceptable now and so is more noticed and spoken about.
Define “tough.” What does that mean?
This is theopretically cute but in the real world it simply does not work a lot of the time. Sometimes standing up to bullies helps. Quite a lot of the time it doesn’t. If a child is physically weaker than the bully s/he may not be practically able to stand up for themselves, or the only way to fight back is to escalate the situation to a criminal level.
There’s a scene in the OScar-nominated film Moonlight in which (Hidden in a spoiler tag if someone has not seen it)
A boy is mercilessly bullied and has no practical recourse, and finally, in a last ditch effort to save himself, literally smashes a chair into the back of the bully’s head. It seriously injured the other boy and sends the protagonist off to jail.
In my experience this portrayal of bullying and standing up for oneself was very, very realistic. The “Karate Kid” version of this sort of thing where you fight back and and fair and the bully respects you and everyone’s friends is silly nonsense. Conflict is not that simple.
When I was bullied, I was among the smallest kids in my class. I was skinny, klutzy, and unathletic. Even if I had wanted to fight back, and it had been condoned, I would simply have been beaten up even more. One little kids who doesn’t even know how to throw a punch, against a half-dozen kids who were bigger than me? Even at that age, I realized that it wasn’t a solution.
And, frankly, most of the time, the bullying wasn’t physical…it was largely emotional torture, and ostracism.
My father, recognizing the bullying, and my lack of self-confidence (and lack of physical ability to defend myself, if the need truly arose), signed me up for tae kwon do classes. I was never great at it, and he (and my teacher) always told me to never use any of it to start a fight, but I suppose that it did help with my self-confidence.
Bullying has always been a problem, and if anything, it’s a little better now than it used to be, because people are finally recognizing that it’s a problem, and starting to do something about it. Just like a great many other problems in society.
I was one of the smaller kids in my class and although not systemically bullied, there were episodes. I never backed down and in a couple of cases landed some fairly decent punches at the other guy.
I would never try that now, and would never suggest it for anyone. No one brought knives to school when I was a kid in the 70s. The worst thing that really could happen to you was getting a black eye or bloody nose. (Although I did crack a knuckle once on the other guy’s head. Ouch.)
Bullies have always been among us. Just ask the fat/skinny/thick glasses/poorly dressed/disabled in some form kids of years past.
Like racism, in most circles, it has become socially unacceptable in our society, but it has taken on different tactics among those who want to fly under the direct-bully radar. Fortunately, with the current awareness, there are more tools to deal with tormentors than there were in 1973.
I think bullying now can be worse. Before the days of social media you could at least escape it for a time. Now it’s almost impossible to escape if the bullies follow you on line.
Do you have any sort of relationship with the 10 kids that were bullying you now as an adult? I’m just curious. I grew up in a VERY small town (my graduating class was about 20) and the people that were bullies to me as children are for the most part friends of mine now.
Was it a bigger school that you went to when you were growing up or a smaller one?
I don’t know anything about female bullying, never considered it to be a thing.
What did your father think of your bullying situation? Did you talk to him about it? My dad was of the premise that “I catch you starting fights, I’m going to kick your ass. You run away from a fight, I’ll kick your ass. You lose a fight? I will teach you how to win the next time you get into one.”
I went through a little bullying when I was a kid. If I came home whining about it though, my dad would get angry because “I didn’t solve the problem.” If I asked him what to do about it without whining, he would tell me to fight as long as you could. If you lose a fight, don’t come home whining about it. That kinda thing.
One time when I was in the 7th grade, I had a guy that was showing off to the girls in our class by smacking me hard with a 2x4 across the back when I was asleep in history class. The teacher had wondered off at some point while I was sleep (I know, shouldn’t have been sleeping, I got in trouble for it.) My dad was pretty calm about it, even though it laid a good stripe of black and blue across my back. My dad called up the school superintendent and told them this:
“I taught my son how to kill that little mother fucker that hit him with the 2x4. That little shit goes at my boy again, my boy is going to kill him. If it happens, its on YOU, goddammit. Have a good day.”
This was the first time I EVER heard my father say a cuss word. He was stern but never cussed in my presence before. When I got to school the next day, they pulled me into the administrative office and took pictures of my back, and then pulled the bully into the office and sent him home for a week. That was all I ever heard of it.
Fast forward 15 years or so into the future, and we were actually pretty good friends. His mom and dad became friends with my parents after that.
I am not advocating that as the solution, obviously, but it was handled and that was that. It wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, I graduated in 2001.
Would you say that you are still bullied today? At what point did it shop for you or did it ever?
I grew up in a very small bubble and the older I get, the more I realize I have no idea what it was like for most other people growing up in a more standard setting.
I have nephews that are getting bullied in high school. One of my nephews is a fighter and royally kicked the ass of a bully that was trying to pull his shorts down in the hallway of his school. My nephew somehow got the guy on the ground and then kicked the door of a locker repeatedly in the face of the kid, breaking his front teeth out. He got suspended. Both get bullied because of the older nephew having something resembling Aspurger’s syndrome. I had heard that they were getting bullied a lot and when the youngest of the two kicked the bully’s ass, the first thing I thought was “well thats what that little fucker gets.” About ten seconds later, of course, I realized that hey, breaking a child’s face because he was trying to pants another child like a jackass isn’t an appropriate response, but that was what would have been expected of me when I was a kid.
Without resorting to violence, what would actually make a bully stop screwing with my nephews, though? Holding their hand or “raising awareness” seems like you are just asking the bully to keep it up.
For me the bullying stopped all together when I beat the hell out of one of my bullies after school once. I was always younger and more weak than the boys in my class, I skipped the 5th grade and was young for my grade before I skipped. I just got lucky and when they were screwing with me in the weight room I broke the lead bully’s nose with a 2.5 pound weight across the face.
I guess what I learned from getting bullied as a kid is that there are a hell of a lot worse things than losing a fight. I don’t know if kids fight the same anymore but we used to all walk away from fights for the most part. I learned more from getting my ass handed to me than I ever did kicking one though.
Somewhere after 2001 after moving away from the city of Chicago due to rent prices, I moved into a suburb in Cook County (I’m keeping things vague for my privacy), and I wasn’t treated well. I was snubbed and bullied (albeit mentally and emotionally, but not physically) right up until graduation after high school. This was one of those little “too little, too late” situations cause I was bullied during the bush-era, back then you had to toughen up and roll through the punches, it wasn’t fun at all. Would it matter if I was 10 years younger and got bullied during the 2010s? It wouldn’t matter.
The methods were picky and I got little to no support. Because back then, I was technologically challenged at the time- I didn’t get a computer until April 2006 (and it was a Windows 98se computer), didn’t get connected to the internet three months later (and it was dial-up), and I didn’t get a DSL connection until next year. I didn’t get a cell-phone until much later in 2014 or 2015 or something like that, and I didn’t get a smartphone until Easter of last year (but that was when the bullying stopped cause I vanished from the virtual eye). Was there any cyber-bullying? Fuck do I know.
My childhood doesn’t exist between age 7 in 2001 (September 25th, 2001) and when I started college, which lead me very disadvantaged for communication skills, and getting any contacts after high school. You ask me how many people I have outside the internet, and I’d laugh at you and drink some water cause that’s my life. Hell I still don’t have any friends today, even with college and a job program, but even then it doesn’t matter. For years I’ve been a overweight guy who struggles to lift objects as heavy as 50 pounds and can’t run worth a damn (or used to before I started walking in downtown Chicago with transit passes I got during college and then later started biking in Chicago), and was picked on for such disadvantages as bullies use it to their advantages.
You grow out of it though. There are tougher things in the world today than what I got in the 2000s. A loss of childhood and a loss of developing relationships is nothing compared to death and taxes, but mostly death on the street. Not that I’ve seen it, but my birth-town is bleeding. Money matters- I’ve been a poor guy for years, it’s time to turn my rags into riches, even if I have to kill someone to get there (hopefully not with my own hands, but perhaps along the way).
Yes there’s a culture. That’s called being assholes.
It sounds like you had a rough time Ultimate. I’m sorry to hear that. Do you see the same trends on the internet as far as bullying goes that you saw as a kid in person?
I can totally see your point. I don’t know why my dad was that way to me, but I did find out from his brother that he was bullied a lot in high school himself. He graduated in the mid 70s. His dad was a real hard ass on him, but my father never really was hard on me, other than this one area.
What is strange to me looking back today is that my father was very similar to the other fathers in the town. My dad’s reaction to bullying was very similar to what my friends’ dads had.
Since I don’t use Twitter or Facebook, I wouldn’t tell you (nor would I find purpose for the sites I mentioned since I don’t have friends to chat with. Figures.) There’s internet trolls, but that’s laughable compared to the stuff I faced as a kid. Can’t think of any other sites that smite me.
Since I hear no evil, I also see no evil and speak no evil in the present time. So that’s about it, really.
When one of my bullies lost his father to suicide a few years after we graduated, I got a sympathy card and wrote in it, “Hi, Jeff! Remember when we were in 9th grade and you wanted me to kill myself? HA! HA! HA!” and signed my name. I didn’t mail it because I knew I wouldn’t see his reaction when he read it. Other people to whom I have told this story have said things like “You are one sick puppy”, “You should have mailed that card”, and even “You should have hand-delivered it.” When he started showing up on my Facebook feed, I blocked him.
My worst one was a girl who among other things wanted her brothers to gang-rape me and get me pregnant so I would have to leave school. :eek: I sure wouldn’t want karma to have bitten her in the ass one that one, if only because it’s not the baby’s fault. I will not hesitate to say that if my parents had owned a gun, I would have taken it to school and shot her, and a few other people too, all of them honor students from “good” families. I really believe that if I had done that, people would have stood in line to defend me, and even said that they had considered the same thing themselves.
My parents’ attitude about it? Whatever I had done to them to make them do this to me, I had better knock it off because it’s embarrassing to them. :smack:
Hi, **ultimate11 **- I realize this is an issue of personal importance to you and I do not intend to diminish that in any way. That being said, please do not joke about killing someone in this fashion.