Victims of school bullying are at a higher risk of developing violent behavior
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Until I was about 10-11, at which point I decided I had enough and snapped with all the pent-up rage of someone with nothing left to lose. I began starting a fight the moment others would belittle me. Didn't always win, but eventually other kids decided being a dick wasn't worth the physical confrontation and learned to leave me well enough alone.
Reflecting on this as an adult, I think that living through violence and abuse typically ends in one of two ways for most people.
Either they normalize the behavior, and perpetuate the cycle against their spouses and own children, or having lived through it themselves they can't imagine ever doing something like that to another human, let alone someone they care about.
I fall firmly into the second camp, but that doesn't seem to be the rule.
You forgot suicide and self-harm.
>One in 10 teenagers bullied at school have attempted to commit suicide, according to research published today. In addition, a further 30 per cent go on to self-harm.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
This sucks but.. from personal experience, there's absolutely no question in my mind that this is by far the most effective way to deal with assholes in middle school. I'd love to be wrong, but if there's a better way, I certainly didn't find it when I daily had to deal with that kind of shit.
That's the kind of thing that's not true for almost any situation exception school, where the other option is potentially years of physical and emotional abuse.
The sad part is a lot of the people who were bullied (who I witnessed) were quite large children, who probably would have easily handed the the bully his own arse, but because of fear he didn't physically defend himself.
I got bullied at the next couple schools I went to, and the only way anyone would stop was the few times I (or somebody else on my behalf) fought back. But of course then I would get in trouble for fighting.
I was later told many times I had a "problem with authority". Who wouldn't? How do you learn fairness, justice, or to respect authority if it treats you like crap?
I'm very sorry to hear this. Unfortunately, what you described is common with regards to bullying. Even if you get bullied with words, snap out, and are the first to enter physically violent you might reasonably have gotten provoked (trolled) into that situation. A school who then says "you started the violence" while ignoring (not taking into account) everything which happened before that, is turning a blind eye to the problem and ultimately not putting in the effort they should be responsible and accountable for. They should get to the root of the problem: the bullying. And that happens for a good reason; usually insecurity within the bullies, a leader who has servants, etc.
On the other hand, it is a valuable lesson to punish the person who started physical violence. This is because (at least here) the law works in such a way that whoever starts with physical behavior (including 'pushing') is the one who started, and allows the other person to defend themselves. I experienced this roughly 5 years ago myself (though also in other situations). One time I was walking through downtown Amsterdam to work (evening shift) and I bought some food for on the go. I was eating it, when suddenly 3 guys stand around me and ask if they can have some of my food. Well, actually, no. It was my dinner before my shift at work, and there was no easy/cheap way to get decent food at work, besides it cost me enough, and I had to be there on time. These guys circled around me, wouldn't let me go, and eventually got me near a store/wall/corner (I had a MBP in my backpack which was my primary concern). If at any point I had pushed them to get out of there, I would have started, so there's not much you can do at such point but argue. They kept 'begging'. Within a minute they insulted me one final time (called me a pig) and then walked away. I didn't understand WTF just happened but I asked my partner later, and she told me these guys weren't interested in my food; they were just looking for a fight. Had I pushed them away, I'd have started.
It doesn’t work if watching you try and fight back is funny for the bullies. Seeing you flail about is a blast for them.
I tried already before I was six. Kept trying until I was sixteen. It never worked. It only got worse.
I ignored them, they pushed me down a flight of stairs and then beat me when I was trying to catch myself. I didn't respond to them trying to pick a fight, they swept my legs so my head hit the stone floor and then sat on top of me hitting me.
Luckily, at sixteen I started upper secondary school and got away from the problem children. It was a technology programme and people were there because they'd actually chosen it. But it took years before I could be at least a bit less withdrawn and socially awkward.
Maybe (?) the problem there was not having developed the skills to fight back effectively, before doing so.
For myself, I was able to start training in martial arts (starting with a reasonable Taekwondo place) after I'd been bullied for a while.
Personally, I was still a complete wimp for at least the first few years after I started training.
But at some point (maybe 3-4 years into training?) I did the "snap" thing and had the skills + physique for it to be effective. Plus I wasn't stupid enough to "snap" in a public place where I'd be caught.
Maybe the other important thing is learning to pick your opportune moment(s) for pay back. ;)
If you physically fight back, you need to do it effectively. Perhaps follow some martial arts lessons. My partner got bullied by one person (very hard), and practiced kickboxing. Yet when they got in a fight, she got blamed. All the, literally years, of bullying be damned. That's a blow in face from adults who are supposed to protect you, and it hurts.
I snapped a few times too. It's super dangerous.
I think about Columbine and everything since all the time. That could have been me.
Most of our oversteer since has made things worse. My son's middle and high schools were pressure cookers. Seemingly optimized for drama and trauma.
My high school was and is extremely highly regarded and was a torture chamber for some people. My kids have grown up with the oversteer and their experiences were much better (in other schools) thankfully.
But you can do this to a child for 6 hours and it's often considered acceptable. Why would people be surprised when a human child's natural reaction to horrifying abuse mirrors what any other living animal would do?
Teachers always just said to ignore them and they'll stop. That never worked for me. They also said you had to tell them if someone was being a bully. I did, they didn't really believe me and took no action. When it got too bad my parents reported the assault to the police. The police warned that kind of case was not a priority and then dropped it.
Eventually the bully was called to the principal and given a stern talking to. He was told next time there would be consequences. A few weeks later he punched another classmate in the eye so he temporarily lost eyesight on that eye. The bully was given a stern talking to and told that next time there really would be consequences.
-- often going unnoticed and/or unreported I might add.
TIL Wikipedia seems to agree with your assessment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...
My understanding has long been the FBI profilers determined that spree shooters are begging for help, hoping someone will stop them. I'm pretty sure I got this from interviews in the movie Bowling for Columbine.
So it'd make sense to be alert for warning signs. Like most everything, all the well intentioned anti bullying measures were implemented terribly by noobs and proved counter productive.
But mostly, no one bothered to check to see if any of the remedies were helping.
Well, some measures are known failures. Like zero tolerance policies.
This is a recurring theme. DARE boosted drug use. Promoting abstinence boosted teenage pregnancy. Aggressive pain management led to opioid epidemic. Etc.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
This isn't what I got from staying informed on that epidemic, so I'm curious where you got this from. My impression is the Sacklers lied intensely about Oxycontin, and those lies are what did most of the harm.
https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16270370/atul-gawande-opioid-we...
In my version of the story, Sacklers were opportunists who helped bury the evidence (a la Merchants of Doubt).
The "cycle of abuse" refers to the different repeating stages an abuse victim and abuser go through together in an abusive relationship[1]. It does not refer to victims of abuse going on to further abuse others or their abuser.
This is something that research also backs up: victims of abuse are no more likely to turn around abuse others than people who did not experience abuse.
It's an important distinction because the popular conception of what the "cycle of abuse" entails matches yours. That misconception leads to outcomes where victims of abuse are painted as abusers when they stand up for themselves or attempt to escape the abuse, and some are even prosecuted for domestic abuse after doing so, or after seeking help from law enforcement.
The research I have read, and googled for, seems to dispute your claim. There appears to be a strong correlation between childhood victims of abuse then abusing others: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/24/science/sad-legacy-of-abu... as well as being more likely to be involved in abuse and violence (giving and receiving) as adults: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
As an older teen, this person rebelled against their parents, smoked a lot of weed to self-medicate, but also had serious self-image problems and attempted suicide. Eventually got into programming and earned a decent living in a different country. But when I knew them as an adult, I always found them cranky, critical, and anxious. I later found out from an ex-partner that they were manipulative and needy, threatening to leave or even kill themselves when they didn't get their way.
I was friends with this ex-partner who told me it looked like a mild case of borderline personality disorder: and the symptoms and actions seemed to fit. It's often caused by childhood emotional trauma, leads to emotional abuse of others in vain attempt to get the affection they were missing as children (that's a very rough summary). And it can lead to their own children missing the critical affection they need and thus perpetuate. And that made me think that perhaps this person's parents were also emotionally abusive because of a similar situation. And I even wonder if borderline personality disorder isn't a social comorbidity with autism spectrum, not medically related but a social situation that can happen more frequently.
Similar experience to your acquaintance growing up (high function autism and related experiences), except my parents only really had academic goals for me, which I was unable to meet completely due to down stream emotional effects of my poor social aptitude and comorbid ADHD(none of this was diagnosed until my 20s). Additionally my parents are very accepting and provided me with little surface to rebel against as a teen, and I've come to realize as an adult (~30 now) that they were very distant compared to the norm, for whatever thats worth.
With regards to violence, the bullying I received wasn't super physical and I received little if any corporal punishment as a kid. Escalating a verbal argument to a physical altercation is something I stopped doing when I was 7 or 8, and I had learned to cope with people enough by that time to just avoid fights entirely.
It took me years to develop my social skills to the degree of being able to get into a steady relationship, and I think if you talked to the first few people I dated they would have described me as needy, unfortunately. However, I would say in retrospect I wasn't terribly needy, just too inexperienced to know when I'm not clicking with someone, and still idealizing the person I'm dating.
Then I got into a relationship with someone who was physically abusive. This didn't have the effect of causing me to become violent, I was a fully functioning adult by this time well into my 20s, however it gave me a profound respect for how far society has come wrt animal training and the treatment of children. Every time I got hit my mind became a little more confused, fearful and upset. Often times I wouldn't even know what I did to get hit when it happened. Eventually I involuntarily grabbed their wrist as they were about to hit me and it managed to leave a bruise, that they then threatened me with and held over my head (my skin doesn't mark, and my ex was nearly a foot shorter than me, a tall fit male). As a result I became extremely fearful of being hit, fearing my own reaction more than anything. Until then I'd have people try and convince me from time to time that I had some underlying anxiety that I just didn't recognize, but this put that to rest, as for the first time in my life I was experiencing visceral anxiety and its symptoms, waking up with with terrible stomach aches everyday and depersonalization being chief among them. During all this I truly believed that if I put up with it long enough and worked on their problems they would get over it. I ended up just being damaged, not to the extent of partaking in direct violence, but by the end of it I was breaking things and slamming around, something I never would have done before, and even now seems like it was done by another person.
Anywho, the relationship and how it developed and ended, along with losing my business about halfway through gave me a severe bout of depression that I'm still struggling to overcome a couple years later. Even with good diet and exercise I'm barely functional (without it I will literally do nothing) and while I could really use medication for the ADHD to help me start getting enough things done that my depression also goes away, and probably some therapy at this point, the type of energy it takes to sign up for social medicine in my country/state is the same type I need for almost every other thing in my life, like a job in software, and the type I'm most short on. It really sucks.
Um. * hug *.
There's not anything I can personally do to help. But, I do hope you solve the situation somehow, in a way that leads to a good result for yourself. :)
You're right, I tend to not include people in my friendship group who are arseholes or treat others badly.
If you were to strait up ask do I want my neighbors 9 year old to be the most influential person in my kids growth the answer would be obviously no, but thats essentially where were at for efficiency
Contemporary society puts much more effort and individual attention toward raising individual kids then majority of past societies used to. Partly simply because we have those resource, partly because we have less kids and partly because ideas about childraising changed.
The "kids raise each other" complain is very modern, precisely because we expect more from childraising.
The 10 years old kids who also used to work in factories were not "raised" by any contemporary meaning of word.
Back to small villages and families with many kids, all adults had to work very hard to just create necessities for everyone. Once the kids were past toddler plus a bit stage, adults simply could not tweak them individually people do with kids now.
Aristocratic kids were routinely sent to boarding schools.
I could continue on and on as I go through time periods, but kids spent a lot of time literally raising themselves. They also died a lot and were beaten a lot.
> we put so much less effort [...] See how many people are baffled by what to do when they actually have to be around their kids for most of the day because of the pandemic.
This is definitely not true. And yeah, I found out during pandemic that school teacher is significantly better teacher then me. Triple so while I cant send the kid just outside to play alone as was completely normal generations ago (with exception of isolated periods).
I just think our current school system is vastly ineffective and borderline cruel. But it frees up everyone for 8 hours a day so fuck it!
And look nobody is denying the world used to be a way worse place. But if you look at the history of school systems, it was created by oil tycoons that were angry that the working class was a little too opinionated. This has all been normal for 100 years, but it doesn't make it actually normal.
Your parents educating you is not an argument about child raising in the past by average past family. Your gifted program was not school of the past and neither was your high school environment copy of past high school.
You are projecting contemporary experience in the past, but history does not work like that. In most likelyhood you would not had high school in part and would not be educated by parents at such high age either.
Lastly, we have actual historical books written about past, about families, childhood and ideas about childhood. That is part of historical research. It differed by class and place, obviously, but neither modern schools nor modern homeschooling are mimicking average historical familly.
By the way that's not a grumpy opinion from me, those guys literally said that kind of thing out loud on record for history. They were like "how can we crush these uppity free thinkers". Do you really think it's an accident every school is named after like an oil tycoon? That wasn't philanthropy, they weren't nearly as nice as you think.
This thread literally started with claim that contemporary adults spend less effort on childraising then people in the past.
Also, teacher of the year is not historian. America is not only country in the world.
Not really. If you go back a century or two, that might be true. Parents went off to the office, and the kids were left to their own devices. Often, herded together with tens/hundreds of other kids, with less adult supervision than today.
But if you go back many thousands of years to tribal societies, it's the opposite. Caveman kids spent most of their life around adults, and a handful of other kids. It's the equivalent of going to the neighborhood bbq, where there's a wide variety of adults and youths hanging out. Packing hundreds of kids into a confined place with 1 adult for every 30 kids... that is a very modern phenomenon.
From rough memory, perhaps the Nordic countries?
It all started with that hazing and it has never gone away. It is something I would not wish on my worst enemy
I was bullied severely in junior high, and I didn't start seeing a therapist (for other reasons) until I was 35. By that time I thought I was totally "over" my bullying, if anything I felt shame that something that happened so long ago that I thought was behind me could have such a strong hold on my current behavior. Therapy has helped me immensely, and while I realize that talk therapy results are highly dependent on individual therapist and patient, my biggest regret is that I didn't start sooner.
This thread has made me consider getting therapy.
One of the initial steps in the process is to think about specific scenarios when you suffered a traumatic event (in my case, bullying) to bring up a physical, emotional response. In my case, even though this happened ~30 years ago, it's not hard for me get into the memory, to feel the same fear response and to start crying. The idea behind EMDR is to essentially "reprogram" you body's physical and neurological responses so that the memory no longer brings up the fearful/depressed automatic nervous system response.
Now, there is a lot of debate over the effectiveness of EMDR, but in my research it seemed most of the debate was really over whether you get just as much benefit doing everything except the eye movements. From my personal perspective, I honestly don't really care that much if the eye movements are the primary factor, but I will say that having to focus on something physical does feel more relaxing to me than just "normal" talk therapy about these experiences in the past. I'm really hopeful that, at least for now, it feels different, in a positive way, than what I've tried in the past.
Whatever you end up deciding, good luck!
And yes, I would very much recommend therapy in general. Here are some thoughts on this from a discussion a few months ago [1]. There are lots of good points in that Ask HN in general.
[0] If you like somewhat technical books I can recommend The Body Keeps The Score [0]. Very much not a self-help book but the observations of someone working with people's traumas.
https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-th...
I often (to generally good effect) out myself as a child abuser. This is narrowly possible because my abuse was strictly verbal - which is marginally allowed by society.
The benefits of being able to speak openly (with empathy and careful consideration) about my bad behavior are huge.
For starters, it encourages my children to speak and think about their mistreatment as a matter-of-fact aspect of their lives. Factoring that reality helps them be more self-aware.
Also, constantly keeping sunshine on my bad behavior degrades the ability of that behavior to exist in harmful, self-sustaining cycles.
This also gives me a good position to speak on the sexual, physical and emotional mistreatment I received. I can explain how the people who hurt me were themselves shaped by abuse - which is a deeply unpopular thing to consider.
The overall reality is this. By believing the only appropriate way to think of perpetrators is with shame and rage, we are insuring the creation of more perpetrators.
I mean, the anger itself is understandable. eg "person XYZ or people ABC kicked my teeth in every day of school".
But shouldn't the anger be directed to the people who did the bullying? Rather than just randomly spread out towards people who weren't even present.
Like, only one of those approaches goes some way to solving the problem or even "pay back".
Hmmm, I don't really buy it.
From the perspective of a bullied kid, those individual kids are the bullies.
What bullied kid really thinks "it's not those kids doing this, it's the system"?
Blaming the system is a much higher-level / abstract thought. Maybe from a more mature person's mind set, looking back over things?
All that being said, randomly going and shooting people doesn't really seem like an effective "attack on the system".
Wouldn't attacking the system involve figuring out the responsible "system" people or components, so they'd be the focus of attack? Random shooting acts... isn't really that. :(
Me, I thought this. I wrote a long post explaining it and then erased it because this pattern exists everywhere and is essentially the foundation of all terrorism (which terrorists often believe works, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing: "McVeigh believed that the bomb attack had a positive impact on government policy. In evidence he cited the peaceful resolution of the Montana Freemen standoff in 1996, the government's $3.1 million settlement with Randy Weaver and his surviving children four months after the bombing, and April 2000 statements by Bill Clinton regretting his decision to storm the Branch Davidian compound."
Obviously I don't condone terrorism or agree with Timothy McVeigh about anything, but the idea "group X is neglecting their responsibility for this broken system, and they need to feel the pain of the brokenness so that they take the responsibility seriously" is common)
Would students not believe this because they're young? In middle school and high school I was definitely aware enough to see the ocean of people who didn't think the bad behavior of bullies was their responsibility (or were too timid to confront bullies' constant boundary-testing, or both) but loved the opportunity to repremand any victims who tried to escape their situation by escalating the conflict. In that case I think the argument that the bad behavior of bullies actually was their fault is credible, since they weren't forcing bullies to take responsibility for their own behavior and they were denying victims any tools to escape their situation. Likewise, we, as voters, know that schools all have this problem and yet few of us are taking any responsibility for it. Major school reform is rare.
Honestly for me the escape was a late growth spurt and an enthusiasm for weightlifting. A reality of human psychology is that if you're physically intimidating, both peers and teachers will give you some space. The magnetism of "might makes right" is powerful, even if it's unfair
edits: wording
Didn't realise some young people were that self aware. I don't think I was, when I was bullied as a kid (long time ago now ;>).
Society's compulsive responses to strong abusive scenarios do not initiate harmful cycles, but they do protect and help perpetuate them.
Please see my above post for a more direct explanation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24991788
Buy it.
You asked for the answer, you got it.
> What bullied kid really thinks "it's not those kids doing this, it's the system"?
Hello there. Me.
I was an alienated, disaffected youth. Do you know what a Bagger 288 is? I used to day dream about driving one of those through my city, ripping up entire neighborhoods. When society systematically fails you it's easy to feel that "Everyone deserves to suffer because everyone is to blame." (A line from Aeon Flux that haunted me for years. IIRC the character who says it has some sort of emotional breakthrough and winds up donating his arm to a little armless kid or something. Weird show.)
But you don't have to be a genius to figure out that kids mostly don't come prepackaged with severe mental and emotional problems.
Back in school, the hyperactive kid who rubbed his crotch on my head? It turns out he's a crack baby. That's why he acts that way. Blame the CIA!?
(> Webb conducted a year-long investigation during which he discovered that a San Francisco-based drug ring, which had ties to a CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan contra group called the FDN, sold cocaine to a dealer in South Central Los Angeles. The millions of dollars made from those sales were later used to fund a secret war against the leftist Sandinista regime. In short, Webb accused the CIA of being complicit in getting thousands of poor African-Americans addicted to crack in order to fund rebels in Central America.
https://time.com/3482909/this-is-the-real-story-behind-kill-... )
The system itself is the problem, and there's no effective attack on the system.
How do you fight Moloch? ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ )
Yes, but bear in mind the world does not necessarily pity the bullied. When it happened to me and my friends in school, we were shunned and snickered at by seemingly "everyone" at the time, girls especially. Teachers didn't care either.
That kind of confuses me. Not sure why it's relevant? :)
People are not perfectly tuned machines. Yes, people should exercise self control over emotions and acts and direct that anger appropriately.
The result is that both bullies and earlier abusers work together, to shape a persistent state of helplessness within the child.
Is there a way to deal with this?
My challenge was that I was disconnected from the consequences of lashing out. I had to create a strong sense of empathy with those I was lashing out at. I did this by visualizing being on the receiving end (lots of exp to draw on) of my own mistreatment.
I did this for an hour or so most nights (usually with the bath running so no one could hear the sobbing). It took well over a year for a better state to settle in.
Also, I came from a generation where most parents believed in "spare the rod and spoil the child". So, I learned from an early age that it was ok for adults to beat the tar out of you - and you weren't supposed to fight back.
I also suffered from the anxiety, and probably some ptsd. But through martial arts I got it under control and as I said, the confidence of knowing that I'd be able to fight back or defend myself goes a long way.
Learn no-gi jiu jitsu and tame that fear down; there’s some research that both journaling and (less so) efficacy can have physiological effects such as reductions in blood pressure, lowering of skin temp/sweat/conductivity and improvements in immune resistance.
Obviously getting the lowest jiu jitsu belt will take you one to two years so not ideal...but....maybe on top of counseling it is positive ROI based on how severe your symptoms are.
If you can find a therapist offering Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-behavior-ther...
Or just even if you yourself looked into it and started practicing the techniques.
Honestly, I feel like it's something anyone and everyone can benefit from, but especially people looking to change a pattern of behaviour they're unhappy with.
At the point that therapy becomes far less effective because too many people want it, what is left to do? Say "tough luck, but you have to be patient?" In the three months I've ended up waiting in between I feel like I've been spiraling or trapped in a shell with nobody that will listen to my problems. The friends I usually rely on have long since gotten tired of listening to me, because it isn't their job to do so, and I feel as if our relationships will not be the same going forward because I could not get help elsewhere fast enough.
I may have other problems managing my executive function, or false convictions that I do, and either way my attention is constantly taken away by trivial things. I couldn't even focus on the MOOC homework I was taking even though I felt terrible for putting it off. But in order to even try and see if stimulants will help, I have to get an appointment - and I still have another month to wait for it.
Our pleas for help are being swallowed up, and there seems to be no real recourse.
I would also echo what some of the other people have said about strength training or a martial art. You might get some peace from knowing that you can't change the past, but what happened to you won't recur. You'd be surprised at the number of bodybuilder, powerlifters, martial artists etc that talk about starting their sport after being bullied.
Remember that the other product of abuse is broken judgment.
On a side note there were always guys in my martial arts classes who were there to learn the skills that would help them bully more effectively.
In my experience, it's not at all uncommon for bullies to use martial arts classes to prepare them for positions of authority - particularly law enforcement.
To be clear, this doesn't throw the least bit of shade on martial arts nor does it implicate instructors in any way. It's just an unfortunate reality.
Also, I really believe the better opportunities to address bullies are before and after this point.
Something to note: you may not get along with your first therapist, it's honestly very similar to any personal relationship you have, if that's the case, it's totally fine to let them know it's not working out and find someone else. BUT: don't make that decision after your first meeting, especially if you've never tried therapy before you're gonna find it weird and off putting, if you can power through that and you still find you're not gelling with the therapist that's when it's ok to pull the plug.
(I think mass schooling has normalized bullying in people's lives for centuries)
I wish psychology would move beyond these lazy methods. Perhaps use school records with documented evidence of bullying by a third party or something. such studies based on subjective evaluations are blended with the behavioral and character traits of each participant
Bullies are highly manipulative and work the system. Constant, low-level harassment makes the victim a squeaky wheel that the local authorities ignore, or even makes the authority figures appear to the victim as working with the bully. Undermining trust in the system is part of how bullies operate in general.
I was systematically bullied in grades 3-4 by a group of about a half-dozen classmates in a NYC Public School. I never struck and rarely spoke up -- in fact I was terrified to go to school, and would invent illnesses or hide in the bathroom to avoid lunch. Guess who had a disciplinary record? Me. One time I literally ambushed -- a kid jumped on me from on top of an iron fence and beat me with a metal bar. 2 "witnesses" said I attacked him and I was suspended. My parents were called to some bureaucrat's office and threatened them with expulsion. They don't like squeaky wheels.
I was fortunate that a science teacher took notice and was skeptical. He took me under his wing, arranged for me to eat lunch in the science room, and did something to get those kids away from me. In some ways, he saved my life and I am eternally grateful for that man caring enough and sticking his head up to do the right thing when he didn't have to.
Relying on institutional records with active counter incentives for accuracy and/or completeness is also problematic, probably more so.
It has some error margin and bias that must be corrected, just like any kind of measurement.
It measures some things better than others, just like any kind of measurement.
It must be applied with a serious and conscious understanding of its limitations, just like any kind of measurement.
The underlying fact is that social sciences are hard. And science reporting sucks even for the easy stuff. Society would lose a lot if social scientists just placed a universal block on self-reported data, but maybe we would gain if journalists did it.
Who ends up in detention, suspended from school or sent home? The victim. The abuser will have a sob story to tell, will claim their victim "started it", and then through various effects such as the Othello error the authorities will come to view the victim as the person who needs behavioural adjustment.
How do you determine the "behavioural and character traits" of someone you don't know?
You're asking an awful lot of a science you don't understand, in a field of social interaction you are clearly not familiar with.
That's actually less likely to be an accurate source, because it depends on the school documenting everything, which to be quite honest, a lot of schools do not do -- I remember when I was bullied it was a literal uphill battle with the school to get them to recognize it in the first place, let alone do anything about it.
How much of the bullying you saw in school, was documented by a third party? I would wager zero, but I'm up for being surprised.
Psychology has a bag of tools, questionnaires are useful tools that fit a specific purpose and objective. They are relatively simple to create, perform, and get a lot of reasonably accurate data from them.
And after all, what they're trying to assess here is the impact of bullying, so it doesn't actually matter what the exact bullying act is, in this case. They're simply trying to find a causal link between being bullied and negative behaviour.
I think it's always amusing when people on hacker news think they know more about fields than, you know, people who have spent decades studying and working in that field. It says a lot about this website that it attracts folk who have no respect for other professions.
I know a couple of people that have been bullied but haven't seen much violent behavior from them, but they in general are very uncooperative with any authority (police, social services) and have a pretty low trust in the system
Most likely because whatever system was supposed to protect them, failed to do so. Schools like government are authoritarian structured institutions, they're just another "system". In a sense, schools condition children to be obedient to authority preparing them for life in a society with a government and rules. If they cant trust that system then are they supposed to trust the system they are being conditioned for?
This is the same feeling of mistrust that evolves in minority groups who are bullied/oppressed (same thing really.)
Good luck to you if you ever say that out loud, but I do think that bullying victims are at least somewhat better equipped than the average person to empathize with victims of other types of discrimination.
IIRC often the process of grooming people who commit torture or engage in violence ... to actually do that to them in the first place. This seems common in both governmental groups and criminal organizations.
That gives us a pretty solid opportunity to verify the suppositions for ourselves.
Perhaps you could plug some of the topics of the study into it (eg: the mistreatment/violence cycle). That could help me see how it relates.
One human being does, however, contain core processes (reactions, motivations) and we can use those to help evaluate the study's findings.
Not even mentioning potential problems with school authorities or the law (if you're effective).
There's a persistent image of 'bad neighbourhoods' in the US. Will you suggest fighting back there too? Schools are like that but you can't move away.
It's not always comfortable or easy, but the boost in evidence-based confidence is remarkable.
― W. H. Auden
That shouldn't be possible, its completely at odds with how reward and punishment pathways of the brain function. See the Orbital Frontal Cortex, motor cortex, pre-motor cortex and Striatum for more details.
The idea that you can be elevated and even purified by your own anger is probably the most seductive idea of all. I'd posit there is almost no direct brutality committed by anyone who doesn't first think of themselves as a victim, and the person they commit it on is a symbol of their perceived bully.
If so, I think what doesn't clearly fit is this: Lasting suspicion of authority tends to be born from logic. However, abuse breaks judgment.
It could be that the process of overcoming victimhood makes one more skeptical of authority.
Whether or not they said it we'll never know, only going off of what her kid told us and said teacher denying it, but the teacher was fired months later after an investigation launched from other poor behavior on their part-reported to the school by several other parents, so there's weight to the kid's claims.
The worst example I can think of is one teacher who's poor judgment resulted in decisions that were indistinguishable from abuse.
-"teachers sometimes bully students." or
- "teachers are allowed to bully students." or
- something else.
I've never been bullied by a peer or near-peer. That is, I was never in a situation that I could not handle. In my entire life I've only seen one case where another child was bullied by older boys and I knew that was bad.
BUT when you mentioned teachers, I thought of a middle-and-high school teacher/coach who held a grudge for reasons unknown. In response I skated by in his freshman biology class and, in general, wouldn't give him the time of day.
So yes, teachers can indeed act like bullies. But I think most people don't think of bullying per se as being something teachers or other authority figures do but instead something that one's peers or near-age peers do.
But of course if coaches etc get away with it, they are setting an example that some students will follow.
This is one of several ways in which school causes bullying.
Do you think that the school might just be present in the equation and that this is a lazy and naive conclusion from a single correlation with no nuance or control statistics?
They leave large groups of children unsupervised for up to an hour at a time.
It should be obvious to any parent or anyone who’s had much to do with children what’s going to happen.