Bullies: Classic Or Dud

It is with such reason'd logic as this that I was the terror of the playground.

And you can have my sangers if you like, but they've got spam in them - and its been proved by science that I am the only kid in the school who likes the Pork and Ham Product.

Mr. Daniels doesn't frighten me at all, I'm telling you. He's a tosser pervert, show him a bit of leg and he leaves you be. He certainly didn't bother me when I set off the firecracker in art class, boy.

I'm not eating spam, go make me something else.

*The but seriously bit* Emotional bullying (I was only actually hit once) for eight years left me with a rather fucked up self image and scars I'm still dealing with today.

Doc Reid could beat the crap out of Mr Daniels. He threw test tubes full of acid across the class room. Rock!

If this was really occuring at my school (and how did you know that not only did we have pre-fab drama classrooms but that I had a drama teacher called Mr Wilson stalker) this would possibly be the point when you might have wrestled me to the ground ankicks to the ribs. However people watching would snigger behind your back in the knowledge that sometime in the next three days - when you least expect it - I would smash you round the back of the head with a chair.

I think we should bully Pete about his WW2 eating habits now. Powdered egg boy. Spam fan (etc etc)

In sixth grade, two people annoyed me throughout the school day and wracked my self-esteem enough to the point where I actually got scheduled to meet a psychiatrist. I didn't mind, interesting sessions, actually. My vengeance was finally achieved at my high school class ten year reunion where one of them, who turned into a very friendly fellow, admitted he only did it because he was jealous of my intellect (ego-feeding ahoy!), while the other turned out to have died from a drug overdose, apparently. Ha.

That's what I mean about intellectual superiority. Anyway, you're only four inches taller than me. You're not exactly Gargantua.

I suppose if we are going to reign this back into seriousness: is it better to bully than be bullies (what with emotional scarring knock about)? And do you find yourself bullying people now, even if you were bullied as a child and find it abhorent. Remember emotional and intellectual bullying counts almost double.

I also used to tell people who wanted to fight me that it wouldn't be a good idea because I would try my hardest to kill or maim them and I didn't really want to go to jail. After a certain age, people tended to leave me alone.

Should we be doing this in a serious manner, this question? I wouldn't consider myself a victim of bullies but...*shrugs* You know what, fuck this, I don't want to talk about it. I was never really bullied any more than I bullied anyone else in general, it's just that once you get to dating age boys can be very vicious, combined with other things in my life, that convince you you are well worse than you are and are what they say, and it's not good at all.

Which is why I'm glad I'm too tall to be hit with chairs.

Ever been to classmates.com? It's depressing.

Pete - that beating up the bully with chairs thing (if it really did happen)... wouldn't the bully and his buddies just retaliate with *bigger chairs* ??

I don't know, I'm over 30, and this thread *still* provokes a reaction. This shit never leaves you.

I also did some bullying. Again, nothing extreme, joining-in stuff rather than instigating. Nothing I'm at all proud of. I tried actually in the school years afterwards to make friends with and hang out with the kids involved, and with some degree of success but - here's the awful thing - I still didnt like them very much. So on the one hand I was being honest about my reactions, but evil, and on the other hand I was being dishonest about my reactions. Which is still I suppose evil but everyone's life was more bearable because of it.

I'd also be interested to read about anyone who wasnt bullied, but knew bullying was happening, and what they thought of it. Did they want to intervene? Did they condone it? Did they not care? Are they the ones most likely to have gone on to be good professionals? ;)

I went to school with the same kids from K-12; some of them were also children of my mother's classmates. When I started, I was in the middle of having chemotherapy and radiation, had a blonde wig and the highest IQ in the school. Therefore I was Freak with a capital F as far as classmates were concerned, with my excused absences, thinness, vocabulary, etc. Lots of nasty shit happened, made worse by a school rule which punished anyone who actually complained they were being mistreated.

Of course, I discovered sharp-tongued lateral bullying because I don't have 'ignore' in my DNA. Things settled down when the local primary shut and we were mixed with the nearest one; bullying was purely small- scale and two-girls-on-one stuff. Occasionally someone would mortify me by reminding people I'd been BALD, and I had one teacher who seemed to have it in for me who made things worse. I let the nails on one hand grow and managed to scratch the fuck out of anyone who hit me and used the 'act crazy' defence while bagging my A's. However, I didn't turn on people who hadn't been horrible to me.

Junior High was the pits. I wrote manuscripts, people would steal them and I'd be embarrassed and paranoid. Gym was a complete nightmare. A group of very dodgy girls started harrassing me with the usual 'what are you looking at, ugly, we're kicking your ass' crap and I went major pompous with comeback-proof answers like:

"Nothing of any significance whatsoever."

"Future teen pregnancy/suicide/welfare statistics."

"That great big zit you have, with its own pulse. Does it eat the doughnuts for you?"

"The results of Lutheran inbreeding."

"Bad fashion...again."

"You'll miss, mine's so much smaller than yours."

Two things happened to turn the tide. One, the high school punk girls liked me as their own baby Dorothy Parker and started to look out for me. Two, one of my friends was a cousin of a Manson Family member and her locker was opposite the one male bully who messed with girls. One day we took a red lipstick and scrawled SQUEAKY SAYS YOU'RE GOING TO DIE! all over his locker. We were never caught and he never bothered anyone again. I'm sure I must have caused some psych-trauma amongst the bullies, but when people are threatening violence daily I think stymie tactics are perfectly legit.

School, like the rest of life, is tons nicer when you've got a few cool people to sit with on the bus. I'm glad they were intelligent, stylish and pretty unflappable in the face of so much tiny-minded suburban antagonism.

Anyway, I decided to read the film as a left wing critique of society's attitudes to criminality, because I am an idiot.

The sort of people who might have bullied me, ie jock rugby types in the up its arse private school I was in, ended up sort of liking me, which I wasn't too comfortable with, cos they would bully some people I thought were genuinely nice.

I don't think I ever bullied anyone, in the sense that I never focussed attention on anyone really much. But I imagine I came out with the odd mean joke at peoples expenses all the time.

I had a perception of myself as being bullied at school (quite short, wore glasses, above average intelligence, had moved to Cheshire just before secondary school so spoke with a "posh" Home Counties accent). In retrospect, I think I was always an outsider at school because I didn't really *want* to join in - there is a thin line, I believe, between coming across as shy and coming across as superior. I remember wanting to fit in but not finding anything I wanted to fit into. Got teased a bit but wasn't particularly bothered.

It's bullying I've encountered/witnessed in the workplace that bothers me the most. It's genuinely disturbing that office bullies are basically arrested teenagers still in the playground, who haven't learnt any basic communication skills and are still so devolved and inadequate they're desperate to assert alpha male/female status to boost their worryingly expanded but oh so fragile egos.

I worked in an office where there was a clear dividing line between the majority of forty/fifty something mature "ladies" and a minority of revolving-door twentysomething staff (myself included). It became pretty clear that certain supervisors thoroughly revelled in abusing their positions in being rude to people - e.g. two minutes after lunch "If you can't get back here on time, that's your problem." In school, you could have a fight or answer back, in an office you've no real comeback due to a poor complaints procedure and backward staff culture. "They think they can speak to you anyway they like, and they think you'll stay," said one poor girl I worked with who appeared to be on the verge of clinical depression. There is a nice twist in the tale - about a year after I quit I bumped into another ex-colleague who informed that most of them had been made redundant and all their pension plans had gone gratifyingly pear-shaped. What goes around usually does come around but I'm still carrying a bit of baggage.

Classroom bullying is, rightly or wrongly, an intrinsic part of school life. Whilst I have the deepest sympathy for people who've been on the receiving end of bullying, I've also known people who admit to bullying at school who've learnt valuable skills (i.e. this is not acceptable behaviour), grown up and developed into great human beings. Workplace bullying on the other hand is utterly vile and obscene.

I'd like to think it hasn't affected me, but of course it has- I get overtly agressive even at the slightest hint of good-natured teasing, and my Do Nothing attitude towards bullies in the past might be a part of my near catatonic Do Nothing attitude towards a lot of things in life right now. Don't think I would wish much harm upon any of my former bullies (this might have to do with the fact that I seldom had "a" bully per se, it was more of a community thang); hell, I know some of them now and we're more or less friends. Still, err, bullies are kinda dud (is it just me or are some of these "classic or dud" threads just using that format out of habit?)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7714072.stm

Bullies' brains may be hardwired to have sadistic tendencies, US imaging research suggests.

An area of the brain associated with reward lit up in scans when aggressive boys watched a video of someone inflicting pain or posting zings on www.ilxor.com.

Boys without a history of unusual aggression had no such response, the study in Biological Psychology found.

The aggressive teenagers also reacted more strongly to pain that was accidentally caused.

The small study of 16-18 year olds - eight with a "conduct disorder" and eight with no aggressive tendency - suggests in some boys, natural empathetic impulses may be disrupted in ways that increase aggression, the researchers said.

A better understanding of the biological basis of these things is good to have but the danger is it causes people to leap to biological solutions - drugs - rather than other behavioural solutions
Professor Jean Decety

Those with the conduct disorder had exhibited disruptive behaviour such as starting a fight, using a weapon and stealing after confronting a victim.

Tests were done using functional MRI scans while the participants looked at video clips in which people endured pain accidentally, such as when a heavy bowl was dropped on their hands, and intentionally, such as when a person stepped on another's foot.

Strong response

Aggressive adolescents showed "a specific and very strong" activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum - areas of the brain that respond to feeling rewarded - when watching pain inflicted on others, suggesting they enjoyed watching pain, the researchers said.

And unlike the control group, the boys with conduct disorder did not show activation of the parts of the area of the brain involved in self-regulation - known as the the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction.

Using the same type of research, study leader Jean Decety, professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, has previously shown that seven to 12 year olds have naturally empathy for people in pain.

This is the first study to use fMRI to study situations which would normally prompt people to be sympathetic.

"This work will help us better understand ways to work with juveniles inclined to aggression and violence."

Dr Michael Eslea, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire said the research was interesting but needed to be repeated in a larger sample.

"A better understanding of the biological basis of these things is good to have but the danger is it causes people to leap to biological solutions - drugs - rather than other behavioural solutions."

When will they do the study on girl bullies? Our local paper used to be full of stories about girl bullies being worse than the boys at some schools.

The girl bullies kicked the scientists' asses before they could stick them in the MRI.

i think beeps is being bullied by a girl bully at daycare :(

Actually the girls just undermined the researchers' confidence by whispering about their ties within view, and offering to braid the female researchers' hair and share their mothers' lipstick if the women would turn against their male peers.

I wonder if Suzy's comeback-proof answers up there really are comeback-proof

don't wonder too long

I wonder who Ally C was bullying

RJG

i wonder if bullying in school helps you prepare for life.

like, if nobody gets bullied in school, but then suddenly you go to a workplace thinking everyone's hunky dory and suddenly everyone's knives out at you would you be even more scarred than if all this happened in childhood?

i don't know the answer to this by the way!

Because you're a bully?

Har @ your new username, Ken.

Oh Sunny, that sucks about Beeps. If you know who the child is, have a word with the teacher. At least at this age they can nip it in the bud.

Mencap, they were pretty comeback-proof FOR SEVENTH GRADERS. At a reunion event a cheerleader type (nice person) reminded me that some girl in her clique had scoffed at me for using a 'big word' and I shot back with 'don't worry your head, MAYBELLINE is the longest word you'll ever learn to spell.' The cheerleader told me that everyone laughed at her because everyone in that clique hated each other.

hahaha

The teacher knows and said to me " oh she has older brothers and sisters" which is the case im sure but im scared beats will grow to think of herself as the kid that gets pushed around

What about a word with the parents? Mind you, my cousins wee boy got bitten last year in nursery by a wee boy. My cousin tried to speak with the boys parents but they werent interested. I dont even think the boy was excluded.

i dont know how you can stop your kid from doing that stuff before you can properly communicate with them. these are toddlers that can say maybe 30 words in total. if someone came up to me and told me my kid was biting other kids i would have no idea what to do. i dont think the other kid is being deliberately mean, in fact i think shes trying to play, but beats crys every time it happens. not like shes physically hurt, more like her feelings are hurt

note: she also cries when the cats walk away from her so im probably worrying about nothing

Oh sunny, I'm sorry. I think pushiness/strength of will comes out so much at that age, it hasn't been moderated by anything yet, so kids who are bossy and over-managing or stubborn or whatever...it's all right there on the outside. (I'm afraid I was one of them.)

If it's any help, it seems like a very small thing to worry about Beats taking her persona from? There's SO MUCH yet to come that she can build on, including her parents being there to talk through things and adjust her perspective as these things come up.

If anything, it might not be a bad idea for her to have playmates who toughen her up? It seems terrible to say that about a toddler but I think my younger life wd have been v different if I had understood a tougher language, because people that I thought of as tormenters later proved to actually like me but I was so kindly reared that their idea of teasing put me on the defensive BIG TIME. And I'm talking up into high school.

yeah. i know exactly what youre talking about. i could have used it too. also, to be fair, the beeps beats the shit out of PP and I. Right now I have black and purple bruises from being bitten and PP has a cut on his nose from being whacked with a plastic mallet. In the last month he has also had his head slammed into a bedframe and a hardcover book smashed into his face and ive been slapped across the face a bunch of times. I guess shes getting balanced out at home.

Maybe kids are like puppies: you have to leave them to the mercies of the pack at some point, or they don't learn that things they do to others might not feel TOTALLY AWESOME on the receiving end.

ha. yeah. my mom was on the phone enthusiastically encouraging me to bite beeps back when she does it 'because then she'll know how it feels!'Of course I was all "oh god Ill get thrown in jail if I do that!! .......wait, did you bite me when i was a baby?!?!'

I'm pretty sure my mom bit one of my siblings at one point. As I recall, it worked.

Also, when my brother kept throwing the baby kittens to watch them land funny, even after she tried the whole speech about how he was hurting them and should be gentle, REPEATEDLY, I distinctly recall her marching outside and throwing him. That worked, too.

hahaha

I know, I know...I did say "kindly", didn't I.

I'm pretty sure my mom was driven to bite one of us on the 'how does it feel' ticket.

Most kids in nursery are there once it's obvious they understand what 'no' means.

Much xposts! If you're being bitten it's simple: she's taking out what is happening at nursery on you, literally passing it on. um, It shouldn't matter whether the other kid has older siblings. I can't quite tell your tone, but the point, when meeting with a parental concern about bullies, is to tell the parent what you will do to address it. If the teacher is on top of it, she'll notice it happening and find some way to distract the child from Beeps or encourage B to play with others. The other way is to arrange a play date with the girls at the other parents' house, so if anything does happen, you both deal. Toughening her up might be good too, but not at the expense of getting whacked or you getting flailed at in the home. If the teacher's words in any way are an admission she can't improve the situation, that's a crap teacher, though.

xpost Dan I left out the part where I told the girl 'and that's the most expensive make-up you will ever be able to afford'. When they made fun of my clothes I told them there were these places called New York and London where clothes like mine got copied by ambitious fashion designers. Weirdly, a number of former cheerleaders approached me independently at reunion to offer thanks for many past zings of people they STILL hate, to confirm the latter policy position, or to tell me New Order and the Smiths *were* really good.

you probably cant read my tone because one part of me wants to push this bully kid right back when I pick up/drop off beats and another part feels bad for hating on a kid who isnt really to blame at all. I think this kid does it to other kids in the class. I dont think its solely on Beeps but from what I hear she a pretty constant target of other kids shitty behavior. One day earlier in the year I guess she'd had even because some kids were poking and prodding her and she suddenly yelled at the top of her voice "NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and then started dancing on the snack table. the playdate idea is really good.

even = enough, of course

No, your tone describing the teacher and what she said she'd do about it, if anything. I couldn't tell whether she actually gave a shit, TBH. I totally feel the ambivalence about the other kid.

oh shes a really soft spoken gentle kind of woman. not an enforcer by any means.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/30/massachusetts.bullying.suicide/index.html?hpt=T1

wasn't sure if there was a cyberbullying thread or not, but I just stumbled across this continuation of an ongoing story that's been happening up here

This is pretty terrible for everyone concerned but a large portion of me is doing the "this is how we learn about consequences" dance wrt to the kids who have been charged; I wish that poor girl hadn't had to kill herself in order for them to figure out that being abusive dicks to someone isn't a good idea.

this is a big news story over here too. American High Schools are scary places.

this is front page news over here at the moment, but i've not picked up on anything but the headlines just yet. (xp)

I'm sorta amazed that driving someone to suicide is in itself a prosecutable offense - separate from assault, battery, etc.

but ugh assholes bein assholes

I was bullied throughout pretty much all elementary school and junior high. What made it very hard for me was that I was very obviously the most bullied kid in the class. I am kind of surprised most people feel they were bullied at some point.

most people probably were! often, it only takes dealing with the same aggressor or being slightly outnumbered in a regular situation. and once you start getting bullied by somebody, it can spread once you've known to be a target. children are assholes.

this story in this article is pretty out there, though, like carrie/children of the corn-type shit

david graber dives into the idea: bullying as the core mechanic of civilization (sorta)

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit

The first thing this research reveals is that the overwhelming majority of bullying incidents take place in front of an audience. Lonely, private persecution is relatively rare. Much of bullying is about humiliation, and the effects cannot really be produced without someone to witness them. Sometimes, onlookers actively abet the bully, laughing, goading, or joining in. More often, the audience is passively acquiescent. Only rarely does anyone step in to defend a classmate being threatened, mocked, or physically attacked.

...

A second surprising finding from recent research: bullies do not, in fact, suffer from low self-esteem. Psychologists had long assumed that mean kids were taking out their insecurities on others. No. It turns out that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness, absentmindedness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed.

lacks the detachment required, gonna say classic just to chide him

A huge part of my work in education surrounds bullying, school climate, and and pro-social learning. When I started my work about seven years ago, I had this idea of bullies as a unilaterally aggressive force, and their targets as mostly blameless weirdos who had funky interests, eyeglasses, and awkward humor. I saw bullying/school harassment as a culture of social capital flowing downhill from most privileged to least privileged, with a clear picture of perps and victims. I liked this story because it was the story I'd cast myself a part. As a kid I'd been bullied (like most of ILX, I'm sure) and I liked to believe that I'd been targeted for next-to-no-reason.

But as I'm learning more about these behaviors I'm coming to understand the culture very differently. Rather than permeating different social groups, most bullying occurs within the same social groups, as clingers-on grapple to gain or maintain status. Two students, both new to a school, are much more likely to harass 'or "bully" each other than they are to be harassed by "bully" kids who are already settled there – even by 'mean' kids. Often, students who report being targeted or express that they are experiencing unilateral bullying are blithe to the fact of their intrusion into a social system they did not realize existed. Or one they don't understand.

Imagine a scenario at (say) a summer-camp, where all campers are new to each other. Two reluctant, semi-misfit bookish nerds – Dot and Agnes – form an early friendship over fan-fiction while the rest of the kids canoe. But Dot, is (for whatever reason) able to integrate on a tentative basis into the larger group, and Agnes isn't. Over time the group relationship among the canoe-kids deepens. Dot goes canoeing with them every afternoon. And eventually (maybe....) Agnes two is pulled onto a canoeing trip or two. Or maybe Agnes isn't. Either way, the relationship between Dot and Agnes is a dangerous one for each kid, and there's huge potential for any misstep to become magnified. At this point Dot sees Agnes as a social liability, and may harass her for the purpose of distancing, because EWW FAN FICTION WHO DOES THAT or maybe because Agnes was just really annoying in the first place. OR Agnes may see Dot as a fast-track to an in-group, gets weird and clingy and then and construes hesitation as ostracizing/a series of micro-aggressions. Or she may try to prove to the canoe-group how tight she is to Dot with a little light teasing. And that, well...

At any rate, what I'm coming to realize is that the narratives are seldom clear-cut in long-term bullying situations. I mean, yeah, there are some straight-up psychos out there, and there's nothing to be done but try and survive them. But for the most part if things are (or appear) pointed one-way, so-called aggressor --> so-called victim, it's often just because said so-called victim is unaware of a privilege or line they may have crossed. Very frequently rich students report long-term, on-going bullying by slightly less wealthy students; disabled students report bullying by students with health disabilities, gay students report incidents by latinx classmates, smart girls being harassed by bubblehead bimbos. Instead of shit flowing downhill, a lot of bullying it's internecine social climbing, in which one side has social capital and some sense of security and the other is lashing out or trying to find a way in.

FYI This is a very hard idea to convey, because AS SOON as I type "sometimes the experience of bullying is based on misperception of a two-way antagonistic relationship" basically everybody says a reflexive "fuck you, stop victim-blaming" or "no, I was randomly tortured by that kid in sixth grade science, why are you invalidating my experience?" That ISN'T what I mean to do at all. Rather, I want to say that the idea of feral jerkbags just roaming the halls of high schools giving purple nurples to dweebs is NOT a regular part of my work with adolescents. Instead, I think that unawareness of relative privileges is a root cause of lots of really horrid experiences that, viewed in retrospect, seem unprovoked.

yup

well put and all true ime too

bullying is - dare i say it - intersectional

Great post

a lot of the underlying antagonisms you're talking about are created or exacerbated by putting children into such a tense, rigid environment. high school is proof that we have no idea what to do with teenagers.