We should treat all crimes the same as far as convictions, although age should be a consideration in sentencing. The police should pursue these juvenile criminals as though they were adults, but then can take 30% off if they are under 18 years old. 

Cops will Taser children, and arrest kids for drawing on desks, but they won’t arrest underage sociopaths for beating up, stalking, and even raping their peers?

No they won’t. as Amanda points out, School adminstrators and teachers are as invested in the school social hierarchy as the students are. Ditto the local cops.

In some cases it’s because the teachers are barely out of high school themselves, and still identify with those kids. In some cases it’s because bullies are expert flatters who typically come from “good” people, and teachers instinctively sympathize. In other cases it’s because they’re religious wackos who think weakness is basically proof of lack of worth, the same way poverty is seen as proof of lack of character. And in others, they think it builds character and makes things orderly if there’s a clear heirarchy for kids to fall into. It helps them know their place.

Zero tolerance polices only make the problem worse because if the victim, god forbid, ever fights back, they’ll be suspended or expelled along with their tormenter no matter what the circumstances.

I’m glad that the cops are doing something but I doubt anything will happen. No doubt local juries will themselves identify with the bullies. Especially once their families hire PDs to dig up dirt on the poor girl, or outright make shit up.

Having grown up in a pretty nasty school environment I can definitely attest to adult buy-in of the bullying culture. In middle school, I saw first-hand teachers who would figure out who the “alpha kids” were and it was simple math at that point: if you get in good with the alpha kids, they’ll police their underlings (most of the population) and all you have to do is turn a blind eye to the absolutely vicious behavior the alpha kids perpetrate against the bottom of the barrel kids. When you figure you can get easy compliance from twenty kids if two of the kids get tormented mercilessly, a lot of teachers figure that’s a pretty good deal.

I was once bullied so badly in a fitness class that, after two and a half years of letting the behaviour slide, my teacher finally threw up her hands and, instead of putting her foot down, dragged me into the counselor’s office like I was the offender and begged her to put me in a different class or something, anything, so that I wouldn’t be her problem anymore.

I faced worse bullying in grade school, but in that case, the teachers were more blind to what was happening and decided there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t going out to play at recess and I had no friends. In middle school, I had friends and I did things (it helped that it was a new town) but it never takes bullies long to sniff out someone who will crack under constant pressure. I’ll never forget how simultaneously angry and grateful I was to be out of that class.

I was never overweight. Unathletic, yes, but I was very slim back then. The teasing usually took the form of balls hitting my face and laughing at me when I was injured.

*steps on soapbox* (Sorry, it’s a touchy subject for me)

I think there’s a lot of parallels between bullying and spousal abuse, to be honest. What makes spousal abuse so difficult to deal with, is that in a lot of the cases, the people with the power to do something about the abuse simply like the abuser more. They’re a “good, upstanding member of the community”. Same thing when it happens in schools. My experience is that bullies are NOT insecure meat puppets who are just trying to put down others to make them feel good about themselves. What they are, are successful (by social standards), confident and as they are at the top of the hierarchy, they want to let those beneath them to know that they are beneath them.

The way our modern academical system is set up, by the way, makes it almost a certainty that this will happen at some point.

This is about social placement, and making sure that those beneath you “know their place”.

There are situations where we’re dealing with an individual bully. At times, this can be dealt with normally. Unfortunately, all too often the only way to truly deal with bullying would be to call in the fucking DoJ and untie all the knots civic rights style. You literally need outsiders to make the judgment. 

But such social placement and hierarchical thought are not outliers, they’re not “where things go wrong”. Bullying is a law with the way our society is. Just like gravity. If you tell people that some people are intrinsically better than others, people will actually act on that information. Surprise surprise!! Especially youth, who might not know things such as tact or the ol’ “wink wink nudge nudge”.

Want something interesting? Watch the whole current controversy with the Catholic Church through these eyes of bullying. You’ll see a lot that looks awfully familiar.

*steps off soapbox* (Again, sorry. No, not really. Frankly, if you ask me social placement and eliminating/altering such is the core of modern feminist thought)

And in others, they think it builds character and makes things orderly if there’s a clear heirarchy for kids to fall into. It helps them know their place.

This is the primary systemic reason the situation exists in most American public K-12 schools—it’s a way of training future consumer/employees. Former NYC and NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto describes the situation as follows (when I yammer on about 4th Purpose/HR Culture, this is where it originates):

School Becomes a Dangerous Place

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called “The Workplace,” even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.

Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.

Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well.

What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

This guy isn’t an anti-corporate leftist, btw—he’s a fairly reasonable small-l libertarian. But if this still seems overblown, keep in mind that the heirs to the Gilded Age robber barons would like nothing better than to see teachers join school administrators in the estimated quarter of the American workforce that economist Samuel Bowles calls guard labour:

The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.

In many schools, the administrators have become wardens and the teachers are being turned into turn-keys. So it’s no surprise that they use the bullies as “trusties” and casual enforcers in the corridors. Come to think of it, you’ll probably find a lot of these “zero tolerance policies” that punish offender and victim alike in prisons, too.

As a victim of bullying throughout high school (at three different high schools too), I can relate all too well.  As a guy, perhaps I had it easier.  All I got was basically hazing, featuring copious accusations and implications about my orientation (sadly for them, hetero), and I was regularly reminded that I was near/at the bottom of the social pecking order, etc.  But I didn’t take my life or even try — although I did think about it quite a bit. 

I must say, the picture of the girl in this case is haunting.  What a rotten world we live in…

Gracchus @7

There was a big sociology book that gets used in early sociology classes that basically looks at the deep similarities of closed systems like prisons, schools, and workplaces especially in terms of how a core group of bullies ends up policing discipline to prevent an overthrow of the existing hierarchy and other similarities.

And I think we can all see similarities to the bullies we knew back in school in most of the actions of the right-wing.

Which of course reminds me of the Frank Zappa quote about how all of life is recovering from the trauma of high school.

Not to mention how so much crap we deal with in life seems right out of high school.

Want something interesting? Watch the whole current controversy with the Catholic Church through these eyes of bullying. You’ll see a lot that looks awfully familiar.

I think that’s why so many of us here are particularly outraged about the Catholic abuse scandal—we grew up either being bullied or recognising from an early age how loathesome bullying is. Any time the topic comes up on a liberal blog, people flood into the comments with a host of painful memories about their school days.

I was fortunate enough to know in grade school that, for me, the best solution was to fight back when bullied (an adrenaline rush combined with being fed up does amazing things). Not being subject to zero-tolerance policies, the only consequence was that the bullies knew to leave me the hell alone for the rest of my school career and long after the point when office politics replaced fights in the schoolyard.

The conservatives who make excuses for bullying tend to be thugs themselves (e.g. Bill Donohue) or sneaky little toadies (e.g. Ross Douthat). Familiar, indeed.

There was a big sociology book that gets used in early sociology classes that basically looks at the deep similarities of closed systems like prisons, schools, and workplaces especially in terms of how a core group of bullies ends up policing discipline to prevent an overthrow of the existing hierarchy and other similarities.

All I can say is, you can add history and economics in support of view as it pertains to American public schooling and corporate culture.

Zero tolerance policies were the worst. When I was in middle school there was a very clear “it doesn’t matter who started it, if you hit another kid you’re both suspended.”

Good in theory, bad in practice when the popular kid has a bunch of lackeys lined up to attest that they never threw a punch and you just started hitting unprovoked.

I spent those years unable to defend myself because my mom made it clear that if I ever got suspended there would be hell to pay. When we talked about some of the crap I had to suffer years later, she was *very* upset when she realized that her prohibition against getting suspended basically amounted to her daughter getting tortured for 3 years.

If your kid attends a zero-tolerance school: make sure that you tell them that they can defend themselves. Yes, it should be the option of last-resort, but being suspended is no big thing compared to being bullied because the bullies know you won’t fight back.

The biggest bullies in my middle and high schools were the “popular” kids - kids who had every privilege, were on athletic teams and cheerleading squads, etc.  They were total assholes to kids who didn’t conform for some reason and they seemed to have complete approval from the teachers, coaches and administrators.  I can’t imagine any of them grew to become decent human beings because there was no incentive for them to change.

I’m really glad charges have been brought.  Even if they get off, they’ll have to get lawyers and it’s much worse than the typical slap on the wrist. 

School adminstrators and teachers are as invested in the school social hierarchy as the students are.

Just as Catholic bishops are invested in keeping their reputations intact.

I went to both public and Jesuit highschools.  My senior year, two of my friends managed to steal a paper from a recent grad’s house.  This girl had been a star at the school, so one of them copied the paper outright, and the other paraphrased it.

My mom’s a teacher.  Teachers tend to keep copies of work they really liked.  These two were busted.

But…

One was the last of 5 that had gone through the school.  And he was accepted to Cornell.  The other was accepted to Brown.

So, despite the rules against plagiarism, they were both just put on double secret probation, so that their schools would never know.  The school wanted the bragging rights of sending seniors to Ivies.  Had it been some of the poorer kids of ‘lesser’ families?  Failure of the course at best and expulsion at worst.

That’s the type of environment where bullying can flourish…status quo must be preserved.

I want to see the parents of bullied kids start to sue not just the schools but the perpetrators and the perpetrators’ parents.  And what are the legal issues involved with going to the police directly when a kid has been bullied or assaulted at school?  School aren’t the military with a legal system that supersedes civilian authority, so why can’t kids go directly to the cops to complain about being beat up?

Zif, I agree.  I think we definitely see with domestic violence how merely switching from a society that tolerates it to one where it’s often prosecuted created a dramatic downward trend in the number of domestic violence incidents. I can’t find the stats, but I recall that it’s amazing how much it’s gone down just since 1992, when the VAWA passed.  Realizing that you could in fact go to jail has caused a lot of would-be wife beaters to think twice.  Sending the signal that it’s socially unacceptable removes an abuser’s self-justification of being in the right.  Same story with bullies, I’m sure.

That kind of bullying—and the follow ups of abusive comments on the murdered child’s/suicide’s site has also started in Australian schools, along with increasing physical violence against teachers.  I think it has to do with “child centred education”.  Children don’t learn to develop an internal locus of discpline, but instead revert to impulse and sado-masochistic tendencies.  Lord of the flies.  Please don’t export your Western culture to Africa.  Leave it be.

Good in theory, bad in practice

I don’t know if it’s much good in theory, either, since the focus is on making things easier and more controllable for administrators, not protecting the vulnerable.

I want to see the parents of bullied kids start to sue not just the schools but the perpetrators and the perpetrators’ parents.

Last year, my buddy found out his elementary-aged kid was being cyber-bullied. He was visibily upset and I told him it was a natural reaction for a decent and empathetic parent. I then said there was only one thing worse for that sort of parent to discover, and that’s if he finds out that his kid is the bully.

Unfortunately, many parents aren’t empathetic and decent. As far as I’m concerned, any parent who brushes off the significance of their child’s bullying or, worse, tries to help their kid weasel out of the situation (as the mother of the bully in my friend’s case—an attorney, BTW—tried to do) is fair game in a lawsuit if death or injury results from the bullying.

Schools create winners and losers.

“Social networking” for kids is nuts. Kids are assholes; uncivilized, barely human.

Girl on Girl violence is doing the work of the patriarchy

.....Simply put, girls’ treatment of other girls is a reflection of and a reaction to the way society sees and treats them.  While we may not want to admit or even believe it, girls and women have less power and garner less respect in the culture—their voices and concerns are less likely to be heard, documented, or taken seriously.  Because the power they do have so often arises from qualities they either have little control over, don’t earn, or openly disdain—their looks, their vulnerability, their accommodation to others’ wants and needs, their feminine wiles—they take out their frustration and anger on each other.  Girls and women derogate and judge and reject other girls and women for the same reasons they fear being derogated and judged and rejected—for not matching up to ideals of beauty and behavior or for being brave enough not to care.  Girls’ meanness to other girls is a result of their struggle to make sense of or to reject their secondary status in the world and to find ways to have power and to experience feeling powerful within the limited filed of possibility we offer them.

Read the whole essay. It’s by far the best and most thorough analysis of girl on girl violence.

@6

I always thought it was some sort of freak thing about my high school that the rich kids were the bullies and not the poor, big kid that you always hear about. I was bullied terrible in high school. There was this one boy in my class who just hated me with undying passion. He was skinny, smart, and rich. Noone would believe me the few times I sought help because he was “such a good kid”. I just had to put up with it until one of his friends became friends with me and realized i was not a huge, evil slut like this kid led everyone to believe. It scared the shit out of me too that he was obsessed with ME for absolutely no reason, even though I was actually an inch or two taller and he likely could not have physically done anything to me. The fact that he defied stereotypes just made it worse for me when i tried to make my case to authority.

insecure meat puppets who are just trying to put down others to make them feel good about themselves.

The school administrators which spout this line of shit always follow it up with “so just ignore them and they’ll go away” which is pretty much the tipoff re: exactly how much of a fuck they give about victims.

I always wonder what happened to the kids who were bullies. You can’t find any adult who’s going to admit that they were a bully when they were a kid. I’m assuming that they just make excuses for bullies or talk about how it’s just part of growing up. But I’d imagine that there are some contrite former bullies out there, who feel horribly about the way they treated people back then, especially since so many adults are so frank about how deeply being bullied scarred them. I was never a bully, but I confess to being not very nice to some other kids who were bullied. One kid, who I recall not being very nice to, told me a few years after high school that my kindness to him on a few occasions helped him to decide not to take his own life. It made me feel horrible, because I wasn’t particularly nice to him, really. Not as nice as I should have been, certainly.

There are others that these shitstains have bullied, and others that the shitstain townie excuse-for-teachers failed to protect.  Additional charges are being sought for bullying of other children in South Hadley, a typically insular MA townie run closed minded buddy buddy patronage shithole.

Great point about the parallels between DV and bullying.  I’m glad bullying is starting to be taken seriously.  I also think violence and bullying by siblings needs to be addressed as a real problem.  All too often parents let a (usually elder) child beat and torment his/her (usually younger) sibling, chalking it up to “kids being kids” and assuming they’ll grow out of it.  I’m talking well beyond playful roughhousing here.  My older sister beat the crap out of me on more than one occasion when I was a child, and one time let her friends join in.  I know a woman who was molested by her older brother.  I know a young man who was so verbally abused by his sister the entire time they were growing up that he refuses to speak to her to this day.  Honestly, my anecdotal experience is such that I’m rather when I meet an adult who has a loving or even cordial relationship with his/her siblings.

Meant to say “I’m rather surprised when I meet an adult who has a loving or even cordial relationship with his/her siblings.”

Keshmeshi, some parents have no idea or clue what their kids are up to unless the school brings them in for a conference.  There was a cyberbullying incident that was very nasty and two kids were suspended for a month each.  I asked my son if BullyAssX, who we busted in the first week of school for harassing a kid on the bus in a racist fashion, was involved since he typically would have been.  My son said “well, he’s still an asshole, but he’s sure been staying clear of trouble since Principal E hauled his parents in when you called him in September!”.

The kids parents are assholes too ... but they have been effectively recruited into controlling their asshole bully kids such that the bully part has gone away.  If they weren’t so notified - and put on notice - BullyAssX and his brother would likely be serving time at home right now.

“so just ignore them and they’ll go away”

Seriously. Has that ever worked even once? That is possibly the most guaranteed road to failure you can possibly suggest to a kid. Much better to tell them to tell the bully to fuck off, or, if it gets violent, to flip out so bad they’ll be picking the victim’s teeth out of the bully’s face for the next week (naturally, you will have thoroughly documented the lead-up to all this, and will have the victim’s back 100%.) That will preclude a repeat performance pretty good. :p

“so just ignore them and they’ll go away”

That’s what they told me, and I tried.

The first thing I thought upon reading this story was that if the social networking revolution had been a few years earlier, I might be dead now.  That poor, poor girl.

My brother was horrifically bulled - turned out he was Aspy.  He wasn’t the only one, though.  Staff and teachers would play the “we can’t do anything about it” powerless game.  It didn’t help that we moved a lot.

I wouldn’t take it and, the first time it got physical, would go all Tasmanian Devil on my attacker and this usually resulted in a concussion or a broken bone.  I would never remember what happened - usually somebody would tell me that I took the arm around my neck and held it firm as I flipped the kid over my back and twisted it or screamed loudly as I knocked somebody down and smashed their head in to the concrete or something like that.

I don’t want my kids to have to hurt people like that to get the peace that I found after those incidents.

Baglesian, ignore it and it will go away works specifically if you are using it to escalate to a physical confrontation.  Otherwise, no.

I was absolute bottom-of-the-food chain at my middle school. The insecure meat-puppet bullies did exist, but they weren’t the real problem. a) they could only bully those kids further down the food chain, which was relatively few kids. b) teachers tended to believe the victims when they complained. c) they weren’t all that bright, so their form of torture tended to be straight up physical, which could usually be avoided with some foresight or quick thinking; psychological/emotional torture wasn’t part of their repertoire.

The rich, bright kids were the ones that provided the day in, day out horrors. They were the ones with the social authority to make sure no one would talk to you. The ones the teachers wouldn’t believe could be as mean as you said. The ones who could make every day a living hell without laying a finger on you. And the ones clever enough to figure out how to hurt you physically without doing anything that could get them in trouble.

Suicide ideation was a way of life for me for years. I’m still vaguely surprised I survived middle school.

I got bullied really badly in junior high school. At the time, I was absolutely livid that nobody was willing to treat the kid who tried to light my hair on fire as a criminal. In retrospect, I’m not sure it would have been in anyone’s best interest to treat my 14-year-old abuser like any kind of criminal, even a juvenile offender.

My siblings and I fought a decent amount when I was a kid, but it was all pretty “clean”—mostly arguments and roughhousing.  We have highly positive relationships now; in fact, the act of moving out pretty much ended all the fighting for each of us. 

That said, I’m glad bullying is getting some attention, though I’m very sad that it took some poor girl’s suicide to bring this out.

I’m in Jenny’s boat. Though I was terribly bullied in 5th grade, to the point that I considered taking my own life at the time, one of the ways I rescued myself was by engaging in mean behavior about another girl. All I did was laugh at other people’s jokes about her behind her back, but still, I was aware even at the time that what I was doing was buying myself some safety at her expense. She had been one of my few friends and I threw her under the bus. It was behavior I never would have considered engaging in before my year of torture.

It’s hard for me to feel terrifically guilty for these choices made by my 11-year-old self, though. They were wrong choices, but they were the only choices that I knew of to protect myself when no one else - not my parents, not my teacher (who hated me and actively encouraged verbal abuse toward me), not any school administrator - would do anything to help me.

This is how the system perpetuates itself. In order to not be a victim one becomes a perpetrator. Glad I only dipped my toe in that pond, but it is part of the pain of that time that I remember so clearly what I did to climb out of it.

And always you get some of those dumbass administrators who turn their backs on the absolutely rancid culture of violence and hierarchy in schools and then they are shocked, just shocked when a kid wanders into school and blows away half his class. Maybe he was bullied, maybe he wanted to be a bully, whatever. He saw the hierarchy very clearly, and was not pleased with his place on it, so he kicked it up a notch. The drop-outs and the suiciders are like frogs, who die individually and early from the toxin that later kills people by the magazine-load once it concentrates sufficiently in a particularly violent teenager.

Suicide ideation was a way of life for me for years. I’m still vaguely surprised I survived middle school.

Must be that EVILE GOTH CULTURE that got ahold of you, we don’t know how! (/snark)

Lindsay, the reason criminal charges are being sought here is because the DA realized that she was the only Real Grown Up willing to step in and start taking names and kicking asses and do something!  Criminal charges are the tools that she has available to her.  It wouldn’t be so necessary if the typical MA town wasn’t such a massive clusterfuck of townie patronage that nobody dares say nothing or do anything.  They all got this hierarchy thing sorted when they were in high school, you know!

In retrospect, I’m not sure it would have been in anyone’s best interest to treat my 14-year-old abuser like any kind of criminal, even a juvenile offender.

How so? That seems like it would be in the best interest of the other people down the line he tries to set on fire, yeah? Sure, abuse/violence can be a subtle thing and treating kids as adults is often unhelpful, but it’s not like a 14-year-old doesn’t know it’s wrong to set people on fire. Like, that’s not a gray area…

Suicidal ideation was a way of life for me for years. I’m still vaguely surprised I survived middle school.

HA! It took years for anyone to diagnose my depression and anxiety, ‘cause everyone assumed it was normal for unpopular middle/high-school girls to be miserable as fuck all the time. So, yeah, I feel you on that one…

I was absolute bottom-of-the-food chain at my middle school.

Oh, I was worse. I was second from the bottom.

Participating in the bullying of the girl at the very bottom to make myself feel better is something I will regret to my dying day.

Phoenician, now you also understand why white trash teabaggers can be so racist when their economic interests are in line with those they bully.

law enforcement isn’t just shrugging its shoulders, but instead hitting everyone involved with legal charges from statutory rape to criminal stalking.

I largely agree with your post, but this point is wrong, I believe. They’re charging all of the young people. The adults are getting off scot-free because “it wasn’t clear what the policy was.”

It’s a sad world when adults have to wait for a policy to tell them how to respond humanely.

(I’m probably more upset over this because I recently dealt with a situation in which adults were not only failing to respond to harassment and violent assaults, but were in some cases actively participating.)

I never really contemplated suicide. Ironically, the reason was that I was so convinced nobody gave a shit that I figured the whole school would be high fiving each other and celebrate if I offed myself, and I would never give them that satisfaction. In reality, people always end up being sad about these things… after the facts. So yeah, my teenage narcissism saved my life, I guess.

The worst bullying I got was one year in *Religious & Moral Education* class. (I wasn’t born an atheist.) I credit that partly for my lucid understanding of the social function of religion as a tool of control and enforced comformity.

THE DEATH OF ATH*ISM - SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF GOD

EVERYWHERE!

http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?t=280780

Einstein puts the final nail in the coffin of atheism…

*************************************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7vpw4AH8QQ

*************************************

atheists deny their own life element…

LIGHT OR DEATH, ATHEISTS?

********************************
***************************LIGHT*********
************************************

I’m too old to be goth, Ms. Kate. It was teh evil punks in my day. I wasn’t one, though. If I had actually killed myself, I’m pretty sure all the adults would have been astonished - “she was always such a quite girl, and so well-behaved!”

Bagelsan - we had a most noteworthy conference at my elder son’s middle school two years back. The school psychiatrist was very worried because our son wasn’t popular, and wasn’t miserable or unhappy about it (he’s fairly introverted, but well thought of by his classmates). My husband and I were flabbergasted that she would think he’d be better off miserable - as if that would be more likely to make him extroverted and popular?

I hear you, Piator. It’s one of the few things I’m grateful for from my middle school days - that I have no shameful memories of passing the treatment meted out to me on down the line. If it helps, I don’t bear grudges against the kids who were primarily victims themselves and just looking to survive. It was the kids at the top who set the standards, and who bear the responsibility.

Oh god, the “ignore them and they’ll go away” thing! I heard that all the time. I think that advice only works if you live in some fantasy where bullies just hurl insults at you from across the room, and are never friendly.

In my experience, my bullies were nothing like the stereotype. Most of them were girls (and at least one boy that has since come out) and their behavior was much more subtle than simply calling me names or throwing pieces of paper at me. In grade school, my appointed bully and her lackey spread rumors about me that resulted in my total isolation from other kids in my class (had plenty of friends in my neighborhood at home). I mean, I minded it, especially when some new kid would talk to me and the next day act like I was a stranger because my bully got to her. But mostly it was the threats from the school to involve child services because they thought there was something wrong with me that had the worst effect. It was being pulled out of class for special counseling, carrying around that stigma, that did me in socially.

In middle school, my bullies were attractive, athletic popular girls who would give me backhanded compliments that I didn’t know how to process until later, the volleyballs, soccer balls, and laughter in my face in gym, and having an entire room full of people staring at you and laughing without saying anything. Nothing would stop them, because it wasn’t about whether I reacted or not. Mostly I didn’t. It was because I was poor and had frizzy hair and almost no one on my side. And the teachers who let it happen were often their parents or friends of their parents, or valued them above me because of their involvement in sports.

How do you ignore that?

I also find it interesting that so many of you experienced your bullying in high school. I certainly witnessed bullying toward other people during that time, but NOTHING like what I saw and went through in middle school. I don’t know how to explain that, given that I was dealing with the same group of people in both cases. Do you think people grow up, or is this a totally anomalous experience?

I’m with you, Cola. My bullying tapered off after freshman year. I think it was a combination of people growing up, and the meanest kids moving away or dropping out of school.

I don’t know, Cola82, but that was my experience too. Bullying started 3-4th grade, and escalated to its worst height in 7-8th grade. In high school people mostly ignored me - most of my misery came from the abusive boyfriend I was too beaten down to realize I didn’t deserve. And even that was miles better than middle school. (Middle school in my district was 5-8th grade)

I think it was worst for me in elementary school*, but middle school was pretty bad. By high school there was very little actual bullying, just a general social isolation and the unpleasantness of being able to rank everyone you knew by how much better the school liked them than you (or how much worse—I was never at the bottom of the pile.)

*naturally it was a group of girls, and one boy. (Is that ratio, like, a thing now?) In 3rd grade they flat-out lied about me as much as they could, going so far as to convince everyone I was a thief for a year (among other things), but once their group broke up I wasn’t a favorite target of anyone in particular. The teacher didn’t care one way or another; she was too busy randomly screaming at one of the boys in class every few days to do anything to/for me.

(Totally coincidentally, if was the summer after 3rd grade that I had a genuine nervous break down. I couldn’t leave the house.)

The parents of the bullied kids seem to either be in denial or people who just “don’t want to make waves.” “Ignore them and they’ll go away” is code for “don’t bother me with your problems.” And the parents have been conditioned “not to make a fuss,” usually because of the way they perceive themselves in the class hierarchy, while the parents of the bullies, if they’re entitled, would never think twice about pushing against administrators to get their way.

Middle school was the worst, by far. By high school, my peers were all too worried about the fact that everything they did and every grade they got counted towards college. The large physical distances between our homes and our school meant that we could carry on independent social lives outside of our classmates, so there was little social capital to be gained by engaging in bullying.

We need to stop using the term “bullying” and replace it with what it actually is: harassment, stalking, and assault.

Excuse me - how the shit do you ignore tehm when you’re basically locked up with them eight hours a day - and the bus ride home.  Students aren’t enrolled - they’re fucking incarcerated.

Along the lines of what others have said, I really don’t remember the bullying in high school at all, but it was brutal in junior high and elementary school.  Well, ok, it was there at the “regular” school I went to in 8th grade, but not the magnet school I went to in 7th before we moved, and I was back in a magnet school for HS.  Completely different social structure, in addition to more maturity of the extra year and seriousness about grades.  I wasn’t at the bottom of the ladder in elementary, just third from the bottom rung, but I do remember the 5th grade teachers taking the whole class aside on a day when the bottom kid was out to explain that everyone needed to KNOCK IT OFF.  And I’ve been grateful for them for taking that approach for a long time, as it let me know young enough not to participate in the abuse of those even lower than I, so I don’t have any painful memories of picking on those of lower status.  Just standing by and not sticking up for them, which is bad enough.

As much as these bullying stories pain me, I do get a certain enjoyment out of seeing all the parents of the bullies go on Oprah, AOLnews, whatever, all the other sources that usually piss me off over their tolerance of bullshit, letting the parents just say, “Yeah my kid was mean, so what, the other kid was a dork that deserved it,” and being portrayed as just awful human beings themselves, forget about bad parents.  It’s nice to see the cultural tide turn - women who return to their abusers might still be seen as not worthy of any sympathy, but at least the women who do try to leave are seen as deserving some.  Not like what I’ve seen just one generation previous to my own where women were actively shamed for “breaking up their marriages”.  Progress may be slow, but it’s much better than the alternative.

The revenge of the downtrodden with mega-weapons in a very national-news way, may be what finally made those who weren’t bullied understand that this is a problem, as the golden children who do the bullying appear to be the ones in danger.  Cynical, but if the bullying is addressed for the bullies’ own potential protection, well, at least it’s being addressed at all.  Of course, I don’t know any people in the late elementary-high school set, so I really don’t have any idea how much fear the average kid has of reprisal from their tormentee.

I actually know someone who admits to having been a bully in high school. He showed no contrition over it, rather the opposite the “They had it coming”.  He’s a police officer.

Wow.  A cop who is an unrepentant bully.  Color me completely unsurprised.

The revenge of the downtrodden with mega-weapons in a very national-news way, may be what finally made those who weren’t bullied understand that this is a problem, as the golden children who do the bullying appear to be the ones in danger.  Cynical, but if the bullying is addressed for the bullies’ own potential protection, well, at least it’s being addressed at all. 

My experience with schools is that they treat any potential “Columbine kid” with utter fear and loathing, and not a lot of empathy—essentially, these kids are treated as disciplinary problems.  After all, bullies don’t target teachers or administrators, but school shooters do.

This comment thread is heart-wrenching…it’s crazy how many people were bullied growing up.  And what’s even more crazy is how no one seemed to have found an effective, non-violent means to stop it when they were kids. It really is up to the adults in the school; unless the kids know that shit won’t be tolerated, almost nothing you do as the bullied person makes a difference (other than beating someone up, which will usually result in an expulsion).

There’s a This American Life where someone talks to a former grade school bully girl.  She grew up to fight for social justice or something, but feels no contrition for bullying. She saw it as giving people character or something.

They’re charging all of the young people. The adults are getting off scot-free because “it wasn’t clear what the policy was.”

Witt, it’s because they can’t find an actual crime of which the idiot adults were guilty. Of course, that says nothing about whether the adults can be sued into oblivion in the civil system, which they certainly can be.

We’re somewhat fortunate in that there was a huge national scandal about a bullying incident in my kids’ school district, so they’re hypervigilant now. We also had a new principal come into the middle school the year we moved here, and I am 99% positive she was bullied as a kid, because she got livid whenever the subject came up.

The net effect was that when my oldest (who has an ASD) was harassed, she’d do something like chuck a soda can at the kid tormenting her. The principal would call both of them in, wag her finger very sternly at my kid and say “We don’t throw things at people. You’re suspended for the day.” Then the bully would get an ear-blistering lecture and get a suspension for the week; parents were called; and repeat offenders were warned that police intervention was always an option.

Word got out very fast that if you messed with the weird kid, not only would she throw shit at you, but she’d get a slap on the wrist and you’d be in serious trouble. It’s astonishing how little bullying they had.

Ugh. We had to deal with some proto-bullying in preschool—our son was getting depressed and clingy and hysterical about going back to school. Conferenced with the teachers, found it was one particular kid and maybe his friend doing the bullying, and so he was moved and that has resolved it for now. But it starts early.

Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time talking to our son about what’s not ok (grabbing, hitting, hurting, throwing things at people) and that when someone wants you to stop something, like playing or tickling, you stop. (no means no).  That stuff I know we can teach; it’s the dealing-with-violence we’re wondering how to handle. He’s not aggressive at all, and like I was, he’s slow to realize he’s being mocked/picked on/treated unfairly. So he’s going to, at some point, run into other bullies, and turning into a fighting machine is probably not going to be his option.

So the things I was thinking of that we would have to teach him had he been a girl—recognizing abuse/harassment, setting boundaries, valuing yourself—apply just as much to boys, even tall, strong ones like mine.  That has been a revelation.

My attitude towards bullying, that I told his preschool teacher and anyone else, is that I, personally, don’t have to worry about going to work and having the shit kicked out of me by a coworker. Neither should a child. The consequences for bullies should be appropriate to their age, but should not be nothing.

In fact, I think a child who bullies is displaying sociopathic tendencies; besides disciplinary punishments, extensive counseling and anger management should be mandatory. Someone who is being a harasser as a child needs to be viewed with the same alarm as a kid who abuses animals or is doing self-harm; clearly not well-adjusted, no matter how charming the kid can be to adults.

Yeah, I’m dreaming.

Has anyone done studies on what behaviors a child can take to reduce how much others bully them? That’s something I’d really like to know.

I was a bullied child.  As an adult, two former bullies stopped me on the street and apologized.  Precious moments.

THE DEATH OF ATH*ISM - SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF GOD

EVERYWHERE!

http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?t=280780

Einstein puts the final nail in the coffin of atheism…

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7vpw4AH8QQ

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atheists deny their own life element…

LIGHT OR DEATH, ATHEISTS?

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***************************LIGHT*********
************************************

I would love it if they would take seriously even things that someone has claimed to have done.  If someone says, “Yeah, I totally did her a million times,” I would hope they would be arrested and charged with statutory rape to scare the piss out of them, assuming it’s all talk. 

When I was 11 years old and my brother was 13, there were these two classmates of his who would harass us before school (all students had to wait in the lobby until just before the start of the school day).  They did this by telling my brother about all the sex they were having with me and what sex acts I supposedly enjoyed.  I was eleven.  I hadn’t even reached puberty.  In retrospect, it would have been great to see them charged for crimes they claimed to have committed. 

The worst part was that my brother, being a gullible and naive nitwit, didn’t know whether to believe BULLIES or ME when I said I certainly was not having sex with these guys.

No wait.  The worst part is that one of these guys turned out to be an actual rapist and the other turned out to be a cop. 

I was bullied by a few guys throughout elementary school and then into middle school.  Everyone gave up by high school.  I didn’t ever have many friends in elementary or middle schools, but suddenly had tons in high school, so I guess that made me sort of untouchable.  And the worst bullies in my class?  The rich, “gifted” kids.  I’ve had so many arguments here with my adult students about bullies (some think bullying is necessary for children to grow as people or some bullshit), but the most frustrating one was that bullies are always stupid and poor.  My grade had one of the largest “gifted” classes at my school, and while there were 0 bullies in the other grades, mine was almost all bullies.  Amazing.

Bagelsan - we had a most noteworthy conference at my elder son’s middle school two years back. The school psychiatrist was very worried because our son wasn’t popular, and wasn’t miserable or unhappy about it (he’s fairly introverted, but well thought of by his classmates). My husband and I were flabbergasted that she would think he’d be better off miserable - as if that would be more likely to make him extroverted and popular?

Look, the modern workplace demands cheerful, gregarious team players.  Get on board, ‘kay?

What a horrible story.

I was also bullied through middle school (5th and 6th grade in particular), and I have to agree with the assertion that bullies are a) NOT insecure and looking to feel better about themselves, but are rather at the top and know that they are, and b) well-liked by the teachers and authority figures, who empathize with them and not the precocious but awkward and kind of annoying kid they were picking on. One girl in particular who was a horrible, evil person to me would sit in the back of my math class with a sweet little smile pasted permanently on her face for the benefit of the teacher. It nauseated me.

When I was young, the advice I got was often, “he’s jealous, just ignore him.” It rang hollow after a while, since it clearly didn’t work. The only advantage of not reacting is denying the bully something else to latch onto, like anger or tears. That doesn’t mean they stop, and it certainly doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Bullying is abuse, pure and simple, and it had a powerful negative influence on my emotional development. My 6th grade teachers were shocked, SHOCKED! that I had anger issues, the enabling fucks.

Fortunately, I switched schools in 7th grade, and things got better. I never got to the point of considering killing myself, but who knows? I certainly would have emerged even more damaged, and I was pretty damaged by the experience that I had. It’s not too hard to imagine the horror of more years of that kind of torment. I was never really popular through high school, and there certainly bullies and other jerks who tried to make my life difficult, but not in the thoroughly systematic, inescapable way that virtually everyone tortured me before then.

Ugh, I guess that I don’t really have any real insight to add, other than that bullying is a real problem, it does the victims absolutely zero good, and it is not inevitable but allowed to continue by the asshole teachers and administration who couldn’t believe that it was SO bad.

In fact, I think a child who bullies is displaying sociopathic tendencies; besides disciplinary punishments, extensive counseling and anger management should be mandatory.

Nope.  Let me suggest that a child who bullies is showing human behaviour - people have always cemented social hierarchies and asserted their status by domination and scapegoating of a sociall accepted convenient other.

The reason why bullying is so prevalent at schools is because bullying is written into the human DNA.  It’s mediated by culture, but when the culture allows it, it will always show up.  People, especially hormonally confused teenagers locked in a school and engaging in a constant peer struggle, are animals.

Indeed, I’d suggest a sociopath wouldn’t bully except for consciously instrumental purposes.

Me too, t-ster, but I suspect that the answer would be: nothing. I certainly wasn’t doing anything wrong, and one of the problems that we have with bullying is that the victims are already told, implicitly if not explicitly, that it’s their fault for not being popular/attractive/cool/whatever enough. Or that the problem is them for feeling a reaction to it, rather than ignoring it.

Even if there were something the victims could do, it’s absurd and unfair to ask a victimized child to have the kind of emotional intelligence that it would take to accomplish anything. Given that bullying stunts the development of emotional intelligence, that’s a bit much.

In any case, like I said: bullying is the fault of the bully, not the victim. Fuck that; children need protection from abuse, not more reasons that being abused was their fault to begin with.

Has anyone done studies on what behaviors a child can take to reduce how much others bully them? That’s something I’d really like to know.

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but focusing violence prevention efforts on the targets of violence is never a good idea.

My sister was the target of some nasty bullying a few years, and yeah the net was a big part of it.  Those kids messed with the wrong family though: my dad’s been volunteering at community things since I was 2, both of my parents grew up here, and oh yeah, my dad is childhood best friends with the county DA.  Result: new county-wide anti-bullying measures, and those kids’ parents got a visit from county attorneys.  So, we got lucky there.  Of course, my sister has mental health issues that have seriously impacted her this year (junior year) and a lot of it stems from that, so even when you “win” you still lose.

Oh, and the district still insists on Zero Tolerance.  From what I hear it’s “selectively enforced” now, aka “on the books but the administrators ignore it at their leisure”, and the high school’s admins, at least, seem to be using that discretion wisely.

A few years ago.  I can type goods!

I was bullied in 7th grade.  One girl who had been my best friend the previous year suddenly turned against me and constantly harassed me.  We had counseling with both sets of parents and the principal, but it wasn’t very effective.  I really admire my school for trying to solve the problem rather than just slap on a zero-tolerance band-aid, but the administrators simply didn’t know how to deal with it.  My family ended up moving (unrelated to the bullying), so things worked out that way.

I don’t really know what the solution to bullying is.  I think it’s important to educate children and try to prevent it.  That’s a good first resort and will reduce bullying, but some people will still bully and that’s harder to deal with.  Punishment or threat of it is not very good at modifying behavior, especially among teenagers who think they’re too clever to every get caught, and also assume that they can get out of any punishment by crying and saying sorry like they did just a few years ago.  We really need to consult psychologists on how to stop bullying once it starts.  Without the correct insight, most of our attempts will probably not work out like we planned.  We need to understand what makes some kids into bullies in order to determine how to stop them from being bullies.

However, I do not agree that statutory rape should be used when other charges won’t stick.  We need to deal with the actual problems and it’s not ok to get justice by perpetuating a severely flawed system.  I believe that statutory rape laws should have an age of consent (preferably 16-18), and also exclude couples who are within 2 or 3 years of each other.  We need to crack down on sexual assault, and abusing statutory rape laws does not help.  I started having sex when I was 15, and I mostly had sex with boys who were 16, 17, or maybe even 18 because I couldn’t drive yet.  When I was 19 in college, I had sex with a guy a few weeks before his 18th birthday.  In my state, both of those things were legal, but wouldn’t have been in some other states.  Prosecuting someone for something like trivializes sexual abuse of minors and other types of sexual assault.  It just makes it that much harder to get rape taken seriously because people can point to these cases and make law enforcement look ridiculous.  It is counter-productive to charge these guys with statutory rape while letting them get away with real sexual assault and the other illegal things that they have done.

The only way victims to stop being bullied is to flip their shit, and do it often enough that the message gets across. And this only works if you’re a heavy and strong kid like I was. As a consequence, I had no friends for years, but I managed to make people stop harassing me.

As for the shoe being on the other foot, well…

I was never someone who did a targeted vendetta, being socially awkward and unpopular. I did occasionally join in on accepted targets. I still feel shame to this day.

I also noticed a decrease in the amount of bullying once I got to high school, which I suspect was because four or five different junior high schools fed into our high school, so all of the established social hierarchies got upended.  Freshman year was probably the worst, and even there I think it was because all of the freshmen were isolated in a single building and that kind of isolation fuels bullying.

As others have said, the only thing that might make a bully leave you alone is physically attacking them.  It worked for me when a girl who’d been harassing me for months took a swing at me in the hallway.  Unbeknownst to her, I had four older brothers, so I had her up against the lockers with my hands around her throat before her friends could react.

The principal scolded me for that, but I don’t think I got much punishment.  The girl talked really big in the principal’s office, but she left me alone after that.  I have no idea what her punishment was.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/columbine-jocks-safely-resume-bullying,661/

Somehow it’s fitting that a godbothering prick like revlamb is showing up in this thread to make a feeble attempt at trollish cyberbullying.  Fortunately there’s no need to expend effort ignoring him when a good killfile can do it for you.

I was bullied at school, thirty years ago: whenever I brought this up at home my mother’s response was to ask me what I was doing to “provoke” the bullies. (Nowadays she asks me, bewildered, “but why did you let so much go on without telling me?” and the answer is - though I’m not sure she’s ready to hear it - that it was so painful to me to hear that my mother thought it was my fault I was being bullied, that I just mostly never wanted her to know.)

I was somewhere near the bottom of the school hierarchy - not right at the bottom, I think, though it’s hard to tell since the only kid I ever bullied was my younger sister. 

(My older brother bullied me: I passed this on to my sister: I recall figuring out when I was 12 or 13 that I didn’t like what I was doing any more than I liked what was being done to me, and tried very hard to quit. I’m pretty certain I’d stopped by the time I was 15. I can only be “pretty certain” because I know for a fact that it always looks different from the bully’s perspective than from the victim’s.

Years later my sister confronted me about this and I apologized. I’ve never confronted either my brother or my mother (who enabled my brother). Possibly now my brother’s also a father I might - I think my sister’s parenthood made her realise what being a bully/not being a bully involves.)

I had figured out by the time I was 15 or 16 that it is possible to appeal to external adult authority with specific incidents, if you can stay clear, calm, articulate, and non-blaming - which of course is way more difficult if you’re in tears at the time. I never did manage to stop the name-calling: I just got to a place where I could ignore it. But I did manage once or twice when the bullies got physical to tell someone “That girl keeps hitting me with her ruler, I want to sit somewhere else” or the like (it always was girls who got physical: boys tended to avoid actually hitting girls).

One of the boys who regularly bullied me, once hit a book out of my hands into the mud, and my brother saw it. This was when I was 14 and he was 16, I think. My brother asked me about it, and I told him “they do things like that” and he confronted the boy - who was one of the other scouts in my brother’s scout troop. The boy apparently told my brother that he never bullied me, it was the other boys - and I had to admit that the boy identified as “the real bully” was pretty much the worst and the leader in bullying me.

The odd thing is that although the boy had certainly been one of the bullies before then, after my brother had spoken to him, he stopped. Perhaps because my brother had made him realise he was a bully - or perhaps it was a feeling that having lied about not bullying me to a fellow Scout, he ought to make his lie truth by stopping: or perhaps he liked my brother and quit bullying me because the conversation had made him realise that I was human, not a just a convenient target.

I have not much time for Scouts as an organization - homophobic/religious - but certainly in my home town their hierarchy did seem to understand bullying and how to stop it much better than any of the teachers I came in contact with at the schools.

I think Tyro really hit the nail there - we have to stop using the word “bullying” for these things.  If you read this thread, and ANY other comments section under this same story anywhere on the internet, all you see is haunting tales of people who were once tortured in school.  Bullying?  It’s assault, it’s harrassment, it’s stalking, it’s slander, it’s sexual humiliation, and it’s depraved indifference and willful child endangerment on the part of the school officials. 

Stephen King writes in one of his books, it is either “IT” or “Christine” about bullying.  I remember the passage he wrote was really memorable because he acknowledges that some don’t get out alive.  But then he goes on to write about those who do, or those who look like they do because their bodies are still alive.  Chilling.

Is it any wonder that adults supported and still support, the torturing of terrorist suspects?  That they support Sheriff Joe?  That they take pleasure from the idea of sexual torture in prisons?  You see that all over too “cant’ wait till they make him his bitch in prison”.  As if rape should be a legal punishment.

What a horrible world we’ve created. 

I’m very sorry for what happened to this girl, and that she reached the point where she couldn’t hang on.  I hold zero sympathy towards the kids who did this to her, or their parents, who raised monsters.

And I believe that the school officials who it can be proved knew about the abuse, should be fired and stripped of all benefits they may have accrued.  If depraved indifference or willful endangerment charges could be brought against them, I’d be all for that too.

I have not had a chance to look at the comments yet, but would like to note that one of the “boys” charged with satutory rape is 18, and therefore should be considered an adult in all legal matters.  Eighteen is legally an adult.  The others charged as adults are 16 and 17, and teens that age can be and are charged as adults at that age when it involves strangers or occurs outside of the school setting/community.  If a 16 year old attacks a random stranger on the street, they would usually be charged with assault as an adult.

I second Ms Kate’s solution - the only thing that ever worked for me was to go all Tassie Devil. Unfortunately, I rarely won the fights as I was a very small child (the photo from my tenth birthday shows me only coming up to the shoulders of all the other children), but I always made it more painful than easy for bullies and I never let them see me cry. However, I think a taught a few of them some new words! When I was 14, I actually threw a study chair at one of my tormentors in the middle of science class, and the teacher just applauded, then denied he’d seen anything. I think he was as sick of her as I was.

I was bullied a lot in junior high and earlier parts of high school.  Then I got into a fight with a male bully and won, and that was basically the end of most it, in retrospect.  The only thing I got after that was occasional sexual harassment from the jocks, which they doled out to all girls, albeit in different quantities.

On the Today show this morning, they showed a town meeting here, and the parents in the community are demanding that all of the school officials who knew about it are fired.  They also want charges brought.  They are really going to the wall that they want these officials, including teachers, who knew of this abuse out of their jobs.

I completely agree with this.  I believe that many teachers look the other way, because they are afraid that the parents of the harrassers will sue, or try and get them fired. That’s how cowardly so many people are.  They will allow a child to be tortured if it causes them less grief than stopping it would.

So let’s as a society bring on the grief big time for those who turn the other way.  let’s make them pay.  And pay, and pay and pay.

Because sadly, only when the price of looking away becomes higher than taking action, will these fucking cowards do something.

Personally, i would put their asses in jail if I could.  But if the best we can do is fire them, strip them of any and all benefits they accrued, and put a stain on their records so that they can never be in a power position over children again, then let’s do that.

We have to change this.  We just have to change this.  We will never bring this young girl back, she had her life stolen from her, and the most we can do is make sure it never happens again, and that today, this very morning, every child going through something similar looks at their tv, or reads articles on the internet and understands that they are not freaks, that the ones hurting them are the freaks, and that there are safe havens out there.  Reach out and keep reacing out until you find the adult who says, I will stop this.

Sad to say, I was one of the lower-status demi-bully (?) kids in middle school.  Mostly it was just some repeated jokes about the same handful of kids on the bottom rung.  It definitely seemed to make me “safer” from being the butt of it myself.  But I can say this: I got stopped very abruptly by two events:  1) I was repeating the same old joke during sports, and another player told me very loudly to “shut the fuck up!” in front of everyone.  I shut up, and never did it again.  2) Later that year, at the only party I was ever invited to, a couple of the popular girls decided to humiliate me.  An adult looking on wouldn’t have seen it that way, but I definitely received the message.

Between the two events, not only did I stop paying it forward (negatively), I also stopped all attempts at rising in the social ranks (thus no more party invites, no dates, and very few friends).  So by high school as far as I know I never hurt anyone else even behind their back.

So maybe proto-bullies can be stopped if they get caught at the right time.

I always wonder what happened to the kids who were bullies.

I only know about one who bullied my friend mercilessly from elementary through high school—terrorised him. He was a classic psychopath thug, although apparently his shrink mother couldn’t recognise that. My friend said he showed up at the 10-year class reunion (I’d moved before middle school) and “apologised” by spouting self-help BS excuses about himself. As to some very specific and memorably monstrous things he did to my friend ... not a word.

On the plus side, my friend said the guy was definitely on some sort of calming meds. But there was apparently no satisfaction or closure.

I would never remember what happened - usually somebody would tell me that I took the arm around my neck and held it firm as I flipped the kid over my back and twisted it or screamed loudly as I knocked somebody down and smashed their head in to the concrete or something like that.

That’s pretty much how it worked for me the single time it happened. One moment my tormentor (normally a cowardly weasel) started taking physical jabs in addition to the verbal ones. Then a brief period of no-time, and the next moment, I was straddling him, pinning him to the floor, with my forearm on his throat and my fist poised over his nose. And his friends and toadies watching with freaked-out looks.

Once I’d gone on my way after warning him to leave me alone, I was pretty freaked out myself. I wish there were other alternatives, but then and now most school administrators don’t offer effective solutions.

AnglScarlett@80:
That would be and not or IT and Christine.  Almost all of S. King’s sotries have at least a background of bullying within the closed system a small school within the further closed system of a small, inbred NE town.

Twenty-odd years ago, they brought in the district psychologist to talk to the girls in my seventh grade (elementary school) class about the concept of scapegoating.  This was pretty enlightened for the time, and I believe it was at the instigation of one girl’s parents—she was kind of mid-range on the social hierarchy, higher than me, anyhow, and I guess she was being targeted.  A lot of us were. Our queen bee was smart, subtle, privileged, and capable of great nastiness, most of which flew under the official bullying radar.  I think the teacher knew, but what was she going to do about it?

We had at least one or two sessions with the psychologist, just the girls (there were 23 of us); however, I don’t know whether it helped improve life for the girl in question (who remained unnamed—I only found out years later who it was).  It sure didn’t change anything for me.  Things only got better when we all got dumped into high school, which shook up the old hierarchies, and there were hundreds more kids, so we weren’t all stuck in the same room for 6 hours a day.  No wonder suicide ideation became a coping mechanism.  You really are incarcerated, with no way to fight back.

This is why I dislike Maryland’s law that you can’t record audio without the consent of both participants.

When I was a kid, in New York, I had fantasies of bringing a tape recorder to school with me to record the bullies, so I would have evidence to present to the principal (who was very much of the “kids will be kids” school.) The technology didn’t really allow for it at the time; a tape recorder was the size of a large and heavy textbook, and not cheap. But now that my kids could bring a near-invisible machine to school in their pockets and record 6 hours, I live in a state that would consider them criminals for doing so.

One-sided recording should *always* be allowed for the purpose of gathering evidence of a crime against yourself. I was as glad as any Democrat that Linda Tripp got nailed for recording Monica Lewinsky against her will, but there’s a big difference between recording an adult friend who’s confiding her sexual escapades to you and recording a bully or domestic abuser who’s tormenting you.

My oldest son is dealing with bullying of some kind, but he is really unclear on exactly what’s going on; I am transferring my daughter to his school (mostly because she can’t deal with the chaos at the school she goes to), and I’m hoping that she might be better able to observe and describe what’s going on. They’re both in middle school.

Phonecian, I never implied that bullying wasn’t “human” behavior. Sociopathy is a human problem. And bullying, especially widespread and violent bullying, is sociopathic, and should be treated as such. I’m not talking about medicating all the kids, just treating their violent and hateful behavior as extremely serious, dysfunctional, and wrong, not as just something we shrug our shoulders over and ignore.  So that they understand that we, as a society, expect them to attain a “normal” that excludes violent and oppressive behavior.

The reason why bullying is so prevalent at schools is because bullying is written into the human DNA.

No. Status and power-seeking are certainly part of our ancestry, but it’s silly to say ‘kids bully cuz their DNA makes them do it’. People seek - and get - power and status in all kinds of ways that don’t require bullying. Kids harass their peers in school because the adults in that environment have tacitly told them a) that’s an appropriate way of obtaining status and b) the adults are either ineffective authority figures, or will place their authority behind the bully, not the bullied.

“There is also a lot of bullying behavior that, if it happened in the adult world, would open the harasser up to lawsuits.  Think of libel or slander laws, for instance.”

I don’t think so.  As a matter of fact, workplace bullying is a huge problem in this country. Other Western countries have laws on the books to protect people from workplace bullying, but not the good ol’ USofA.  Probably because bullying is part of our culture- especially corporate culture Human Resources will protect the bully and not the bullied as well.  Just like teachers in schools. 

http://www.workplacebullying.org/

In some cases it’s because the teachers are barely out of high school themselves, and still identify with those kids. In some cases it’s because bullies are expert flatters who typically come from “good” people, and teachers instinctively sympathize.

Word on this. Two of my worst bullies in middle school were like this. one was the daughter of a teacher and the other of a school guidance counselor.

When I had to take a health class, the teacher of that class actually joined in on my bullying by the teacher’s daughter. She was the class pet and even though I was a good student, the teacher kept giving me bad grades.

My consolation is that the counselor’s daughter ended up joining a cult and the teacher’s daughter ended up dropping out of high school because she got pregnant.

Helen, you are right.  Once you mentioned that, I thought about it (I have read all of King’s earlier work, but nothing recent), and he does do that.  I guess he knows of what he speaks huh?  I do remember being so struck by that one particular passage.

hp, I do not believe that you are kidding.  That sounds exactly right to me.

I was bullied all the way through school and to this day can’t decide if the chemical imbalances which caused my depression were ‘natural’ imbalances (family history) or caused by repeated stressors from grades 4 through 8… (it wasn’t until grade 12 that I was finally treated appropriately for depression, which I had been experiencing since at least grade 5 I think… onset of puberty, which is why I don’t know if it was caused by the school situation or just bad genes).

But I do have an “up-side” story from grade 8. in grade 8 there was a group of boys who decided I was the most fun to bully through a whisper campaign. I had already been bullied for a few years at that point, so I kept my nose in my book and dealt with it, mostly through pretending I didn’t hear/see them. And for months the pressure built and built and built… and one day I walked onto campus and the two leaders of the pack lit into me again (always verbally), and I looked at them and I turned and I walked away, off school property, heading home…

That freaked them the hell out, they realized I guess that they’d be called to account for their actions as soon as I had to account for mine (skipping school) and that the shit was about to hit the fan, so they followed, apologizing profusely all the way. It must have seemed so odd to them because normally I would have just pulled out a book and sat down to read and this time I looked at them with utter contempt and walked the other direction… they hadn’t seen things building up…

And because they had apologized and because I had believed them, when the shit hit the fan later that day I didn’t name names. And when later in the year the new girl in school decided the easiest way to get in with the popular kids was to bully me (which she did very effectively) and I had put down my head on my desk and cried, one of those two boys was the one who stood up for me and told the teacher exactly what was really going on.

But as I said, by that point I had been bullied for years, so it’s a silver lining on a very black cloud.

As a matter of fact, workplace bullying is a huge problem in this country.

Yes, it is, but it is still actionable. A manager who walks around snapping female workers’ bra straps is opening himself and the company up to lawsuits - and possibly criminal charges. When a 13-year-old does the same thing to his female classmates, it’s only quite recently that any school treated that as more than “oh, he just does that because he likes you”.

Alara - generally two-party states don’t require CONSENT, merely NOTIFICATION. If you tell the other person “I’m recording you now, go ahead,” you’re no longer secretly taping them.

Also, I bet Maryland allows restraining orders for minors. Just a thought.

@#94 and #96, why do I now have a picture of fire-baton-twirling Lynne Cheney in my head?

Bullying seems to amp up with the approach of puberty, and then recede. But, when I was a kid, bullying did not seem to cross gender lines.

While I don’t know if she was officially bullied, I definitely knew who the omega girl was in my younger sister’s class. The other girls merely treated her as a pariah, as far as I could tell. She was the first one to get pregnant, at age 15.

Comment #98: cminus on 04/01 at 10:01 AM

We got to talking, and his recollection of sixth grade was that we got into “a couple” of fights, but only because I was bullying him.  He identified things I did—always raising my hand when the teacher asked a question, answering the question correctly, using words like “Kafkaesque” in the answer—as having been calculated to make him feel inferior and hurt his feelings.

That’s literally narcissistic and paranoid.  The technical term is “ideas of reference.”

I wouldn’t take it and, the first time it got physical, would go all Tasmanian Devil on my attacker and this usually resulted in a concussion or a broken bone.  I would never remember what happened - usually somebody would tell me that I took the arm around my neck and held it firm as I flipped the kid over my back and twisted it or screamed loudly as I knocked somebody down and smashed their head in to the concrete or something like that.

As one of only 2 Asian-American kids in my elementary school, I ended up having risk possible suspension by stoning the bully who tormented me in second grade before the violent beatings stopped.  Not only did turning the tables on him, but also the fact the principal ended up TELLING HIM AND HIS FAMILY OFF as she knew about the bullying and tried to stop it to little avail made me feel there was some fairness in the world. 

Also, winning the last fight right before graduating junior high by kicking the biggest bully hard in the nads along with my friends going off to finish off his lackeys helped.  Considering the trajectory of their life and attitudes, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re now serving time in Rikers Island….

In high school, the physically violent bullying ceased as the type of kids who were admitted to my magnet school were not the violent types.  Unfortunately, there was plenty of bullying that some admins/teachers encouraged where those with the highest GPAs and SAT scores (Most are shocked that a pre-1995 SAT score of 1300/1600 would cause those types to label you a “retard”) would pick on the kids who didn’t measure up…..like me.  Fortunately, many of the worst bullies in this regard ended up having serious issues with employment after undergrad after the dot-com bust despite graduating with topflight grades from places like MIT, Cornell, Stanford, etc….and pissed that someone like me who attended a “lower” national first-tier private liberal arts college with a history degree was still gainfully employed in the same industry. 

While many of the Marxist/Maoist college classmates attempted to use the same tactics to silence me in and out of class, it wasn’t very effective as they were not only so ill-informed in their arguments as to be laughable…especially to someone with family who actually grew up/lived in a Maoist-run country, but also such poor students overall that they were gone by sophomore year or did so poorly that they ended up being a great source of comic relief….

I don’t want my kids to have to hurt people like that to get the peace that I found after those incidents.

The way I look at it, if someone’s attacking you…..the attacker has no right to expect any consideration from you beyond not killing him/her unless s(he)‘s actually trying to kill you.  Moreover, when one is being attacked, that’s probably not the best time to be concerned about being considerate to the attacker.

More simply, exholt: I don’t want my kids to have to live in such a constant state of alert, ready to counterattack instantly.  Very stressful, to say the least.

“Yes, it is, but it is still actionable.”

If its done in a certain way it is.  What you describe would constitute sexual harassment, which after years of protest and costly lawsuits, companies take seriously.

I always wonder what happened to the kids who were bullies. You can’t find any adult who’s going to admit that they were a bully when they were a kid.

I imagine that it’s relatively hard to find people who were *exclusively* bullies, and who were never on the receiving end. That false “reciprocity” of being picked on as you pick on others probably makes a lot of people dismiss their own behavior as normal or relatively innocent. If you weren’t the absolutely *worst* bully around then you’re just a cog in the machine and none of it’s your fault.

Comment #99: mythago on 04/01 at 10:01 AM

A manager who walks around snapping female workers’ bra straps is opening himself and the company up to lawsuits - and possibly criminal charges. When a 13-year-old does the same thing to his female classmates, it’s only quite recently that any school treated that as more than “oh, he just does that because he likes you”.

It is true that children are often allowed to get away with behaviors that adults wouldn’t, but you’re passing over the whole non-physical domain of bullying: scapegoating, humiliation, objectification, imposition of marked subordination, denial of autonomy, capricious and arbitrary punishment, isolation from others and emotional abuse in general.

There are many, many avenues open for an employee in a position of power to emotionally abuse another that don’t involve anything like bra-snapping.  The link that jackie@92 provided has some good examples if you click around (and if you don’t, well, here’s a more direct link).

But, when I was a kid, bullying did not seem to cross gender lines.

That was not my experience. I always got bullied by boys. Other girls didn’t always like me, but mostly they just ignored me. Boys, on the other hand, seemed to delight in picking on me. And yeah, I always got the “it’s because they like you” and “ignore them” advice. Never worked.

We got to talking, and his recollection of sixth grade was that we got into “a couple” of fights, but only because I was bullying him.  He identified things I did—always raising my hand when the teacher asked a question, answering the question correctly, using words like “Kafkaesque” in the answer—as having been calculated to make him feel inferior and hurt his feelings.

This sounds like Republican kvetching about those big bully scientists daring to humiliate them with *facts* and *evidence*.

The way I look at it, if someone’s attacking you…..the attacker has no right to expect any consideration from you beyond not killing him/her unless s(he)’s actually trying to kill you.

That’s how I look at it, too. I’m nowhere near badass enough to be able to defend myself *and* be gentle with the attacker—just getting myself to respond at all during a physical attack would probably max out my badassitude for about a year, me being relatively sheltered. If they end up hurt or even killed it’s not something I’m going to worry about until later when I have the privilege of not being in immediate danger.

When I was a kid (and even now, thinking back) I want to hurt the people who bullied me so, so badly that they would never step outside their houses. I wanted them to be disabled so thoroughly that they would never be a threat again. I never acted on this, but then again my parents never owned a gun… 9.9

And yeah, Ms. Kate, I agree 100%. While I say all of the above, I say it knowing that it’s a sad and damaged way of thinking. Even bad people shouldn’t die (or have their eyes gouged out, or their windpipe hit.) But I still kinda want to kill them.

We got to talking, and his recollection of sixth grade was that we got into “a couple” of fights, but only because I was bullying him.  He identified things I did—always raising my hand when the teacher asked a question, answering the question correctly, using words like “Kafkaesque” in the answer—as having been calculated to make him feel inferior and hurt his feelings.

And unfortunately, the prevailing anti-intellectualism within US society approves of this very argument to justify getting back at the more intellectual/serious student. 

One reason why I feel the intellectual highly performing students in K-12 do need to have separate classes or even schools just so there is a safe space for them to fully express their inclinations rather than having to hide it shamefully because mainstream K-12 education, whether public or private, tends to prize mediocrity and punish anyone who stands out….especially those who are intellectually inclined and academic achievers. 

Moreover, I do wish violent bullies of the sort who contributed to Phoebe Prince’s death were not only punished, but immediately and permanently separated out of the mainstream school population into reformatory schools for the protection of other students.

In some cases it’s because the teachers are barely out of high school themselves, and still identify with those kids. In some cases it’s because bullies are expert flatters who typically come from “good” people, and teachers instinctively sympathize. In other cases it’s because they’re religious wackos who think weakness is basically proof of lack of worth, the same way poverty is seen as proof of lack of character. And in others, they think it builds character and makes things orderly if there’s a clear heirarchy for kids to fall into. It helps them know their place.

Add to this possible anger over the unpopular kid being reflective of what the teachers/educrats were when they were in school or their fear of being upstaged by that kid….especially if said kid excels academically or otherwise demonstrates talents said teacher/educrat lacks.  Not too surprising considering how K-12 education is often seen by many high performing college undergrads I’ve encountered as either a career for a minority of high achieving starry-eyed idealists and mostly a dumping ground for mediocre undergrads whose grades precluded more prestigious career paths. 

Unfortunately, this is borne out by how IME students in graduate Ed schools are often looked down upon by grad students in other divisions within the same campus….even at places like Harvard.

I got in touch with some of my old bullies via facebook.  Same self-important schmucks they always were, except a little older.  I got similar responses.

Had one bullying high school teacher who never tired of saying “College is the big-time and if you cannot make it in my class, you’ll never make it into college, much less survive it.”  Upon a chance meeting with him during a visit to my high school, all I needed to do was to say that I was a junior at [well-respected private liberal arts college] and that his talk about college being harder than high school was 100% garbage and he fled as if he saw a ghost. 

As several high school friends who knew of our history were present, they joined in the laughter which followed.

I enormously support replacing “bullying” with abuse, harassment, etc. The stuff I went through, and the stuff I’ve seen others go through, deserves a more serious name. Maybe if there had been one, I would have felt more comfortable calling it out. As it was, I was terrified to let anyone know how much I was suffering. I didn’t want adult intervention. I knew the consequences for the bullies would be pretty much meaningless, and I’d be a bigger target than ever. So I pretended to be sick for months and months at a time, and I’ve talked to very few people in the decade since graduation.

@ 54 - I couldn’t agree more with your point that school resembles incarceration more than enrollment. I’m pretty much resolved that if my children ever want out of public schools for awhile, I’ll do anything I can to provide an alternative. The only good thing which came out of those years is an empathy for anyone undergoing such treatment. I’m utterly grateful to have come of age before the age of facebook. It was bad enough as it was without the aid of technology making your humiliations quicker and more public.

I also have to say that I experienced far more bullying from kids in the honors classes than I ever did with the so-called “mediocre” students. It was the kids with far less emphasis on achievement and competition who refused to engage in a school version of Social Darwinism. Maybe that’s why I continue to teach myself, shun grad school, and hang out with fellow underachievers. We have no need to shit all over anyone else to make ourselves feel good, or be part of a system whose silence implicitly condones such behavior.

Thank you Maria H. @#20 for the link.  I especially liked how they went straight to the root, placing the blame squarely on the adults:

By dismissing catfights, gossip, ridicule and other relational or “feminine” forms of aggression as “little bits of garbage” or even as that thing girls and women do to each other, we under-appreciate the power of the seductive and pleasurable rewards open to all girls who conform to sexist expectations, and we grossly underestimate the subtle ways we as adults reinforce and reproduce a sexist and racist culture.

I’m female, and most of my worse bullies were female as well. I have some brief knowledge of where they ended up as adults—all three of them are married to Republican politicians. In Illinois.

And this is another reason why women who are bullied are not believed.  “What?  You say you were bullied by the sweet flowers of joy and benevolence that is womankind?!  You must be insane!”

You know—gender stereotyping.

Even if the bullies aren’t convicted, arrest and trial could scare them. And as anecdata collected in previous bully threads have indicated, nothing causes a bully to reconsider like fear does.

Furthermore, if victims believe there is a chance to get something done, such as bully->defined as stalker-> restraining orders are possible, the next girls might call the cops instead of killing themselves.

And a worried school administration may start anti-bullying policies.

Phonecian, I never implied that bullying wasn’t “human” behavior. Sociopathy is a human problem. And bullying, especially widespread and violent bullying, is sociopathic, and should be treated as such.

No. I’m sorry, and no offense meant or anything, but that’s bullshit. Psychopathy is actual mental dysfunction. People with it are broken, in a way, and that’s that. They are certainly extremely unlikely to be popular, intelligent and articulate in the way that many (though by no means all) bullies are. There are WAY more bullies than there are psychopaths, and thank goodness for that. There’s no fix for psychopathy.

Unfortunately, being an asshole falls into the normal range of human behavior. Some people are assholes for life, but some people can be intercepted before it happens. That means that understanding the social forces that drive bullying behavior can help us figure out how to actually deal with it. There is a shortage of efforts on that front, but it can be done. Saying that bullying is “psychopathic” is absurd and false, and you might as well throw your hands in the air and accept bullying as an inescapable fact of life when you describe bullying that way. I prefer a more honest and productive approach.

Cola82, I went through the same thing. My mother, who was a teacher, told me my high school had strong anti-bullying policies. I didn’t realize it, because they weren’t intrusive. Now I can see that things like the Peer Counseling on conflicts helped (telling another student you’re a victim isn’t “ratting”, but they can rat for you)), as did the Vice Principle’s constant strolling during bus drops and pick ups.

In such a changed environment, the ones capable of reform will mature, I think. In my senior year, a tormentor from my middle school apologized and became a real friend.

Saying that bullying is “psychopathic” is absurd and false, and you might as well throw your hands in the air and accept bullying as an inescapable fact of life when you describe bullying that way.

I’m not a psychologist, but would it be possible to say that bullying can be a psychopathic behavior without the bully hirself being a psychopath? It really does seem like kids can easily put away their empathy, and very easily totally dehumanize another kid with absolutely no guilt or unease. (Adults, too, of course.) That seems “psychopathic” to me.

I found myself getting that way, too, sometimes, when I was really hurting. I gave absolutely not a flying fuck about anyone but myself, and if there was a chance to hurt people who hurt me I took it without feeling bad at all. I wouldn’t have been empathetic as a kid towards this girl, either; I would have thought she was weak and deserved it. That seems psychopathic, which is really not the kind of person I am in non-fucked up situations.

Had one bullying high school teacher who never tired of saying “College is the big-time and if you cannot make it in my class, you’ll never make it into college, much less survive it.” Upon a chance meeting with him during a visit to my high school, all I needed to do was to say that I was a junior at [well-respected private liberal arts college] and that his talk about college being harder than high school was 100% garbage and he fled as if he saw a ghost. 

Well that is the philanthropic justification: that bullying is just to “toughen you up”.  But actually those who speak this way always recoil at real toughness.  My skin became really thick through years of bullying; and then, these types would go, “well you need to sympathise with my little misfortune..” and I would go, “What the hell?!  I’m toughened up!”

At the end of the article:

Unveiling the indictments, Scheibel said numerous faculty members, staff members and administrators at South Hadley High School were aware of the bullying - some even witnessed physical abuse - and did nothing.

She said the investigation looked at whether the adults’ failure to help Phoebe amounted to criminal behavior.

“In our opinion, it did not,” she said. “Nevertheless, the actions - or inactions - of some adults at the school are troublesome.”

Charge the private, leave the general in power.

I find it difficult to believe that the prosecutor couldn’t find a way to prosecute an adult who is charged with looking after a child for abuse suffered on their watch.  But I’m not a prosecutor, so what do I know.

<blockquote>Phonecian, I never implied that bullying wasn’t “human” behavior. Sociopathy is a human problem. And bullying, especially widespread and violent bullying, is sociopathic, and should be treated as such.

No. I’m sorry, and no offense meant or anything, but that’s bullshit. Psychopathy is actual mental dysfunction. People with it are broken, in a way, and that’s that. They are certainly extremely unlikely to be popular, intelligent and articulate in the way that many (though by no means all) bullies are. There are WAY more bullies than there are psychopaths, and thank goodness for that. There’s no fix for psychopathy.</blockquote>

Psychopaths may have trouble integrating, but sociopaths are often extremely charming.  And while there are no known “fixes” for it, there are quite a few sociopaths who stay on the right side on the law (and I don’t just mean they don’t get caught being on the wrong side).

Also, one may engage in sociopathic patterns of behavior without being an actual sociopath.  Much as one can exhibit empathy without actually giving a shit.  So yes, there are many more assholes than there are people who are clinically sociopaths or psychopaths.

We’re somewhat fortunate in that there was a huge national scandal about a bullying incident in my kids’ school district, so they’re hypervigilant now. We also had a new principal come into the middle school the year we moved here, and I am 99% positive she was bullied as a kid, because she got livid whenever the subject came up.

My principal in elementary hauled me in one day when she saw me taking on two of my classmates.  When she found out the reason we were fighting was that I’d seen them picking on my little brother, she sternly warned me that fighting wasn’t allowed.  And sent me on my way.  She had a *long* talk with the other two.  Bullying stopped, and they actually quite quickly grew out of it.  Looking back, we didn’t have too much of a problem with bullying at that school, and I think it was because she insisted on zero-tolerance for people caught bullying.  A straight up fight, a week’s worth of detention for both participants.  People defending themselves against a bully, they might not be allowed out at recess the next day.  A bully?  Well, as far as she was concerned they’d started the fight and would be dealt with accordingly.

It was in junior high, grade seven, that bullying really started.  I played soccer, so was sort-of one of the jocks depsite my glasses and nerd cred, so I didn’t get it as bad as others.  There was one guy, though…spitting on me from time to time, just being a complete jerkass.  I’d tried doing the “ignore him and he’ll go away” thing, obviously unsuccessfully.  He eventually stopped, again not by ignoring him but by scaring him off.  In my case, it was by proxy.  A bunch of us were goofing off on a newly-piled snowbank and I accidentally caused a good friend of mine to fall off pretty hard.  He was pissed, actually crying with rage, and wanted to go at it.  We circled, and I apologized and talked him down, while the older kids did the “circle the gladiators” thing and urged the fight on.  Said bully was there, and in retrospect would made him stop bugging me was when I told my friend that I was sorry, it was my fault, and I didn’t want to fight because I didn’t want to hurt him.  Freaked the bully right out that I was confident enough that I didn’t want to fight because I was worried about the other guy’s safety that he had second thoughts about how far he wanted to push me just in case I wasn’t as concerned about his well being.

Never had any more trouble.

  When I looked back on it, I realized what a complete load of crap that advice is.

The “ignore them and they’ll go away” advice, I mean.

I’m not a psychologist, but would it be possible to say that bullying can be a psychopathic behavior without the bully hirself being a psychopath? It really does seem like kids can easily put away their empathy, and very easily totally dehumanize another kid with absolutely no guilt or unease. (Adults, too, of course.) That seems “psychopathic” to me.

The problem is that there is an important distinction to be made between disordered behavior and wrong behavior. It might make some kind of sense to describe a behavior as “psychopathic” but that doesn’t mean that’s where it’s coming from.

Psychopaths may have trouble integrating, but sociopaths are often extremely charming.  And while there are no known “fixes” for it, there are quite a few sociopaths who stay on the right side on the law (and I don’t just mean they don’t get caught being on the wrong side).

That’s true, and that’s another problem with defining bad behavior that way.

As for the distinction between psychopathy and sociopathy, you’ve lost me there; I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. These aren’t DSM-IV disorders, here. And of course, that’s yet another problem with calling bullying behaviors psychopathic. Most bullies do NOT have anti-social tendencies.

And of course, that’s yet another problem with calling bullying behaviors psychopathic. Most bullies do NOT have anti-social tendencies.

Which, you know, would be why no one has called bullying behaviors psychopathic.*  *headdesk*

(also, 1) didn’t realize that we had to check with the APA before using words in common usage elsewhere**,  2) it’s called google, and 3) your are totally missing that it actually matters to sociopaths if certain behaviors are characterized as dysfunctional - not because they care in general but because they care about appearances - and therefore it is sometimes actually useful to do so in terms of curtailing their abuses.)

In any case, my whole fucking point (and, I’m guessing, emjaybee’s as well) is that defining such behavior as “normal” and “human” isn’t an improvement over characterizing all bullies as lacking social skills.

*ok, technically one person called a particular bully a psychopath thug, but that isn’t any of the people you are arguing with, so whatever.

**I mean, really.  It’s one thing to argue that people are not making sense to you because they aren’t using the terms you are used to/agree with/the technical terms, it’s completely another to start putting words into people’s mouths (whether because they aren’t using the technical terms or not) and then continue to argue with them based on what you are pretending they said and not what they actually said.  Even after they’ve fucking clarified that you mixed up the words.

1) Psychopath vs Sociopath == Geek vs Dork vs Nerds.  No genuine definition besides word context and the people who use them.

2)Piator was absolutely wrong @ 68

a)  The general variety of sociopaths have as much competence as those who suffer from other psychological disorders such as autism.  Lack of empathy can be crippling in needed social interactions.

b)  Socially competent psychopaths are generally agressive, and oh yes, they’ll hurt just for the pleasure of hurting because oftentimes, it’s a central tenent of their malformed and malicious narcissism.  Their issue, like people with ADDH, is with restraint and anticipation.  People with ADD have their thinking short-cutted.  Psychopaths don’t have empathy to care about thinking what happens afterwards.

One definition I’ve heard for psychopath vs. sociopath is that the former doesn’t know that what they’re doing is wrong, while the latter knows but doesn’t care (or actively enjoys it.) I don’t know how accurate this is, at all, but I think it’s an interesting distinction.

When humans are little they don’t have much concern for the people around them—very small children don’t really seem to get that other people have feelings, that their actions have consequences, etc. As kids get older, they are supposed to gain a better understanding of other people and to likewise develop empathy, so that they can recognize antisocial behavior and also want to stop it. Bullies seem to be those kids who missed some piece of that empathy process: maybe they don’t see their victims as fully human, or maybe they genuinely find hurting other people pleasurable. Or maybe they’re just good at justifying their behavior to themselves and pretend it’s an “equal” fight. I dunno.

But I definitely see a value in saying “hey, that behavior is fucked up and shows a disturbing lack of empathy. You are acting like a sociopath” while also realizing that that behavior is also super common and discrete instances of it (or more casual, apathetic examples of it, like uncaring bystanders) are not outside of the “normal” human capacity at all.