D’oh. :smack: Obviously I was so upset at the time that I actually said that and I didn’t mean any intent on that.
I will say that despite having nobody (and no siblings too), it does give me more access to things I can do by myself. Nobody to drag around, no differing minds to lead me off course, and all the food I can eat without anyone else taking it. I’ve got the basement, the roof, and everything in between in life, and nobody else.
Valentine’s day is coming up, I think I’ll treat myself. 
no, we’re just no longer as willing to write it off as “kids will be kids.” Children- despite how some people want to extol their “innocence”- can be incredibly vicious and cruel towards each other. Lord of the Flies is a book for a reason.
Unfortunately, we as adults are ill-equipped to deal with it since some of us were bullies back then, and don’t see any problem with our precious little angels. And others (like me) clearly remember the relentless ridicule and torture we experienced in school, and to this day harbor a visceral dislike of children. And the remainder have forgotten the bad parts of childhood.
DO kids today kill themselves at greater rates over bullying than they used to? Or, like teen pregnancy, is it just that having a child commit suicide was considered enormously shameful and therefore covered up before?
I haven’t been bullied in many years (I’m 51 now). It really started in 4th grade, when we moved from suburban Chicago to Green Bay, and I was thrown into a new social structure, in which I didn’t fit at all. The bullying was at its worst from 5th through 7th grade, in part because we had a very weak principal at my school (a Catholic grade school).
In 8th grade (at the same school), we got a new principal, who was both (a) a lot more self-assured, and (b) had no tolerance for bullies. Within the first week of school, he got wind of what had been going on, and called the rest of my class into a meeting, where he read them the riot act. When I later discovered what he’d done, I was mortified, since he had clearly shamed the entire class for what they’d been doing (and my classmates, of course, were certain that I, or my parents, had requested it…which we hadn’t). But, the bullying tailed off after that.
High school wasn’t nearly as bad, though I was still a bit of a social misfit. It wasn’t until college when I really both (a) found a social group of like-minded brainy nerds, and (b) gained more self-confidence socially. As an adult, I think I’m pretty well-adjusted, and I’m blessed with a great wife, and a very large set of awesome friends.
Also, as an adult, I’ve had some contact with some of the ringleaders of the bullying. Frankly, some of them are still jerks today, but others have approached me to apologize, and I’ve learned that a lot of them had miserable home lives themselves (being abused by parents or bullied by their own siblings). That doesn’t excuse their own bullying, but it does explain it, I suppose.
Possibly so; it may also be that social media has made it easier for us to hear about events like child suicides from other cities and states. When our primary sources of news were local TV and newspapers, a child suicide from the next state over wouldn’t have ever been known to us, unless the story was unusually horrific.
Sure, my father tried to teach me to defend myself, but I was the fat, awkward, uncoordinated, glasses-wearing kid who always lost a fight. Like I said, I would never hesitate to defend myself, but that didn’t mean I was any good at it.
After I’d come home with a bloody nose or torn clothes or whatever, my father would say, “Do you want me to go down to school and take care of it?” But I knew the code - if your parents intervened, you’d just get beaten up worse the next time.
Right. So you fight as long as you can, you lose, and then you get beaten up the next day, or the next week. So much for the “you’re better than them” approach.
I confronted one on Facebook, on our junior high’s Facebook page. (He mentioned being bullied for his weight - he was, and still is, somewhat obese - and I said, “Yeah, well, you were awfully mean to me.”) He did not remember me, or it, but he did apologize and I felt that he was sincere. I think a lot of what he did to me was blowback from his own experiences.
Looking back, I do suspect, or outright know, that some of them had really messed-up lives - usually neglect, and after they hit their teens, drugs and alcohol were also a big factor and yes, other kids just used them to obtain them.
So I don’t miss the edit deadline: One of the very worst bullies - she was nasty to EVERYONE - had a sibling with terminal cancer. We found this out after the sibling died. Again, that didn’t excuse it but it did explain at least some of it.
When the aforementioned Facebook page said that she had died, the silence was deafening. That spoke volumes.
One thing I remember was that she was a really big druggie, and everyone knew that she got her drugs by having sex with the dealers. That’s a sign of horrible dysfunction at any age, but 13, 14, 15? Yee-gads.
** nods **
One thing that has changed since 1977 (the year I graduated from high school, incidentally) is that back then the perception bullying was that it happened to otherwise-ordinary kids who didn’t stand up for themselves. No one was thinking much about not-so-ordinary kids who were on the receiving end of much more protracted bullying.
I actually did stand up for myself successfully on a couple of occasions in junior high and high school where it did make a difference. So that’s not entirely a lie, that you can make them back down (sometimes).
But I was also targeted on occasion by a cluster of people.
And you know those “boy rules” of fighting, where it’s considered entirely OK to force someone to fight just because you want to beat them up, but it’s supposed to be one on one (with the friends of the bully cheering and making fun of the victim, perhaps) and there are things you’re not supposed to do (bite, kick balls, gouge eyeballs, use weapons, etc) and other things you can do (hit with fists, wrestle, use elbows, pin down, throw someone’s body into stuff)? And all that shit about how they may even become friends after a good fight?
Well, when boys decide you aren’t normal and that it’s practically a moral necessity to hate you and your kind, they don’t play by their own rules. They’re every bit as relentless as mean girls. They gang up and they go over all those lines as they see fit. Sometimes they kill or maim people. They tend to egg each other on.
It was happening in 1977 but school principals and people’s parents and whatnot often felt like abnormal people who elicited those behaviors had brought it on ourselves and that it was different from bullying. Which it was. Anyway, we have systemic sympathy now and we more often didn’t then.
This claim is hard for me to understand. I’m not saying it’s wrong, since I don’t live in that world, but:
Online, it’s trivial to just block, not follow, or filter out people who are being dicks. If anything, being online seems like it should make bullying much more tolerable. Bullied kids can go find friends away from their school. They can create their own identities and find accepting communities.
I mean, yeah, if you just go on facebook and “friend” all the fuckers who are tormenting you at school, then you’re not going to be able to get away from them. But why would people do that?
As I understand it: even if the target of the bullying isn’t “friended” with the bullies on Facebook, that certainly doesn’t mean that the bullies are precluded from talking with everyone else about the target on Facebook. And, if the target is friended with someone who is friended with the bully, they might still see it.
From an historical perspective, I’m not sure if it is better or worse. That said, I would not be surprised if it is worse in two senses: that the Internet has increased the ease of anonymous or impersonal bullying behavior and that our more isolated society (in terms of people being more isolated from their families, neighbors, etc.) has led people to become more neurotic or otherwise in a mental state that makes bullying more attractive and less repulsive.
Children are the future we are told. It’s the over forties we have to worry about - the oaps even more so.
Or is it those from a certain side of the political spectrum that say that?
Also, as I understand it, the bully basically poisons your (assuming “you” are the bullied) entire social circle. During teen years that can be devastating. Do you really want to unfriend all your friends and everyone you know, and if you’re a teen who lives with parents, are you at liberty to move to a new school or community and start over?
I watched this last night. It was appalling.
My seventeen year old daughter is currently being girl bullied - enough that I’m thinking about pulling her from school.
She is tweeted about and snapchatted about behind her back. Anyone seen talking to her is ostracized and told they can’t. She is called a liar and a slut (she’s asexual, the slut thing is so weird to me). Text messages show up on her phone from numbers she doesn’t recognize telling her she is worthless, no one likes her, and she should just kill herself. There is nothing physical about it, but it is so emotionally draining. Plus, she has my own depression and anxiety - so she is a huge target.
She enjoys drama, but the theatre kids are lead by one of her primary bullies. The administration told her that she should stop doing drama - because removing herself from the situation was the only way they knew how to deal with it. They aren’t willing to do anything about the texts or snapchats. (Good advice, allow herself to get bullied out of the one thing she enjoys).
She has good friends - but none that go to her school. At school, her only friends are her teachers - whose advice to her is “high school sucks for a lot of people.”
And the text and social media thing is one thing that has changed - a lot. When I was bullied, my home was a safe place. I could not answer the phone. It isn’t when you are connected to the world through a cell phone.
I think it is more prevalent in that it now continues into adulthood. Many more bosses bully their employees and not only is it legal but many think the solution is that if you don’t like it just quit your job* i.e. punish the victim.
I think it is highly probable that just as many girls are bulled as boys. It may not be as physical, but on the other hand, there is no physical recourse either.
I was bullied in middle school by boys. It made my life a living hell. The only thing that stopped it was graduating.
Bullying leaves scars that never really go away.
The whole anti-bullying movement took off after Columbine, because of the widespread, erroneous notion that Klebold and Harris were driven to their killing spree by jocks who had bullied them.
I was a girl who was bullied by boys in elementary school and on into the early part of high school. I had a chronic physical problem that seemed to make certain boys want to torment me. I had a distinct limp so they’d do things like kick my feet to make me trip, and verbal taunting. The girls seemed to only be puzzled by me but mostly left me alone.
Regarding your comment about scars that never go away… I read a book on company politics once that theorized that nasty behavior in the workplace comes about because we learn most of our social coping skills in school. Because of that, a lot of people bring “mean girls” (and whatever the boy equivalent is) behaviors into the workplace. I don’t know if it’s accurate but I thought it was an interesting theory.