Highest rates of teen bullying are between friends and friends-of-friends: study

Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.

In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested.

As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.

Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.

To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time."

Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world.

Edit: clarification

Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.

But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc.

In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker).

My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )

Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric

The reasons for this are deliberate.

1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships.

2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding.

3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.

I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.

And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.

One reason we chose a private girl's school for our daughter is that, along with traditional (horizontal) grades, it has "sister groups," which are vertical slices of girls from varying grade levels. These meet and socialize throughout the year.

And when I started bullying the younger kids I would hang out with, I was able to reflect on it later and stop being such an ass. Course, it would come out anyway, but not being trapped in one single group of friends and having to derive my social identity from that made it much easier to self-adjust. Looking back on those years, it's pretty obvious now just how much of what I experienced back then was that pecking order mindset.

Other point about cousin relationships: interaction typically happens in a context that includes other adults, another moderating influence. I think that also runs in favor of your point.

I suppose that's not the only parallel. Absentee authority figures is another one.

I don't think that's true but I agree with your other points if we agree that emotional maturity isn't a true false stage and that there are domains for which one isn't as mature as in another domain.

For instance, I learned at a very young age (3 or 4) that hurting others was actually painful for the other part. Not from receiving it myself but from giving it. From then I could never engage in confrontation/retaliation dynamics which put me at odds with others.

For instance, like many others, I was bullied every single day in middle and high school in the US. When I moved to NZ and went to high school(called "college" there), I was dumbstruck at how accepting people were of me, as someone who has been constantly bullied back in the US, that I had a hard time accepting it at first. I was so used to being an outcast that I didn't know how to handle it at first when normal kids would actually approach me in a non-confrontational way. By the end of the year, the most popular guy in the school was voluntarily helping me study for chemistry.

Now some of that experience may have been influenced by me being a foreigner, but my bullying was due to a combination of being nerdy and fat, so it would have made sense if at least some people bullied me in NZ. There was pretty much only one kid who didn't like me and had to make a show of it, but he was easily handled.

Put simply, I think that culture in the US and probably other western countries that are heavily US-influenced is woefully broken, but it isn't as apparent to the conscious mind because we've become very good at polishing turds. We love to paint over rot and create rules for ourselves that just sweep problems under the rug so that they only manifest in places out of our control, such as with the interactions between children.

To your point, though...

> Instead they spend all their time with other kids who are have they exact same emotionally immaturity as they do. You get feedback loops of bad behaviour, and put them in bubbles where their peers and their psychopathic games (like bullying) make up 100% of their reality.

This is true in more ways that you might have originally imagined. Young people, and really people of all ages IMO, should be learning from their elders. Instead, we put way too much emphasis on mere socialization and compatibility. In adulthood we're even worse in these categories in that we either socialize too much or too little, and fewer of us will tolerate anyone who doesn't tick off all our arbitrary boxes.

> The only consistent counterpoint I can think of are cousins, who are typically slightly older or younger, and are outside of kids' normal peer groups. As a result these are often very positive relationships.

Cousins, unlike siblings, aren't competing with their fellow cousins over the love of their own parents, so it makes sense that these relationships tend to be positive.

For adults, bullying, injustice, unfairness and exclusion is just standard, normal behaviour, especially at top leadership.

This social issue of adults using children like this is extremely rampant. It's a phenomenon you can't unsee.

[edit: the one ray of hope? the teacher who ever took my side? arrested for sexual assault on a minor while I was still in attendance.]

Then there’s the nasty ego side effect of us all thinking we’re smarter than everyone else because we assume we’re the only ones hiding our abilities.

US Teachers are grossly underpaid and have to deal with tremendous amounts of training already...and stress. Consider in many of our schools, you have one teacher to 20 or 25 students, many of whom have undiagnosed learning disabilities, developmental problems, social issues, familial problems, hunger, mental health issues...teachers are already working insanely hard for low pay. I worked exclusively in struggling schools and I had kids with cousins shot dead, kids who literally jumped onto the table and screamed how myself and other teachers were racists, it's insane what teachers have to handle.

So no, We can't lay everything at the feet of current parents and teachers, there's a lot of policy, politics, and history in the educational field that no current teacher or parent had anything to do with. They're struggling and vying for success just as they see the children suffering.

   * school
   * apprenticeship 
   * one parent (with near certainty the mother) must stay home
   * large extended families i.e. grandma raises the kids

It’s also important to consider that, for most of human history, a child who is with their parents 24/7/365 is an anomaly. Kids need socializing with other people, and parents need a break. The same way spouses in a healthy relationship need time apart.

Provide better support systems for poorer families - childcare, healthcare, food security, physical safety, and so on. Children from poorer, stressed-out families tend do worse in school.

> What can be better than what we do now?

HN threads on any education topic are always littered with oversimplified causes and "silver bullet" solutions. My guess is that it's mostly from the "nerds are cool" generation. Being on the cusp of the two generations, I'm not so willing to throw out the 100+ years of evolution in institutionalized education.

One thing we can do better now? Bring back and/or increase focus on civics, history, and social studies. This for obvious reasons, like the right-wing/populist political debacle, but also as a way to develop an inherent ambition as a result of a better understanding of our society and how it can be changed.

Sometime mid high school, my two friends and I went to pick up a friend from a raging house party. While waiting outside for them, a drunken footballer came over to us nerds and started to point at us, calling us losers. I, uncharacteristically, retorted back with false confidence, “yeah? I get laid more than you.” He was stunned and left me alone while he picked on the other two a bit more.

I had forgotten about that one. I don’t think verbal defense would always work, however. I don’t think it would have prevented the one asshole-psychopath who, years earlier, was a few grades older than me and locked me in an older refrigerator and when I finally got out, chased me and threw a hatchet at me.

This led to counselors and people telling me I had anger/emotional issues and I should just ignore the bullies. There's wisdom in ignoring haters and self-coping mechanisms but as a teenager in a forced social system it's not a great answer. This was the 90's.

I hope society/adults have better responses now but I doubt it.

Your anecdote is what popular attempts at curbing bullying have been trying to address.

Nobody is saying to excuse it or free adults from responsibility.

It is also not saying that adults are free from responsibility for addressing this. It is simply saying that existing anti-bullying programs are bound to be ineffective until they broaden their scope to include this category.

In reality, it's just shirking of responsibility. Schools neither care about creating an environment where bullying will be reduced nor about actually resolving cases fairly. Their attitude to bullying is to just close their eyes, plug their fingers into their ears and go laah-laah-laah

As such a bully can time their actions; hitting a student just before the teacher walks in. This is exactly how bullies can turn authority against their victims.

The stressors however, are often coming from relationships with adults.

Maybe people you don't have enough friends in common with feel like a different herd, and people have instict to bully the weakest member of their own herd, but don't care about other herds as much. Maybe it's because bullying a member of your herd allows you to rise to the top of your herd (which is the assumption of the article), while bullying a member of a different herd does not. Or maybe because when you start bullying a member of a different herd, the whole victim's herd may collectively turn against you ("yeah, he may be a loser, but he is our loser, so back off"), while bullying a member of your own herd is safe in this aspect. (Unless your herd has a strong leader who opposes internal fighting -- rarely happens with kids.)

So the testable prediction would be like: If you have a classroom with e.g. 29 white students and 1 black student, the white students will bully the black one. (Unless there is someone more visibly different, e.g. handicapped or speaking a foreign language.) But if you have 15 white students and 15 black students, more likely the white students will pick a white victim to bully, and the black students will pick a black victim to bully. (Unless the class is more split along some other trait than race. In which case e.g. the English-speaking students would pick an English-speaking victim, and the French-speaking students would pick a French-speaking victim.)

Teaching empathy is of course difficult and don't forget that the bullied peers are also teenagers that might behave "weirdly" (no victim blaming intended). But the whole thing still needs to be taught as it is a horrible thing that exists in reality.

Compare this to drugs, STD, or plain old reckless behavior. You tell your teenagers not to take pills, use condoms, and not dive headfirst into unknown waters, right? Not everyone does this successfully, but there is no reason not to talk about it, just because your teenager will Roll their eyes. If that's any criterion, most parents would probably not talk to their kids at all between 12 and 20...

For the last two years of my schooling I swapped to a coed public (yet highest scoring) special college literally just down the road. suddenly there was no bullying problem. I mean, compared to the other school it was practically zero. there was no uniform, kids could smoke outside if they wanted, you could not turn up to class, you were free to leave the grounds when you wanted. you could eat and drink when and where you wanted, and teachers were called by their first names. I couldn't even tell you if we had sports teams because no one cared, I literally don't remember.

whatever the difference, it's either not human nature, or it can be overcome. I've lived it, so I know it's true.

So clearly there is something (morale, social pressure, threat of punishment) that prevents them from doing it.

I've not heard of many teens (I'm sure there's a few) actively thinking of / planning bullying. Most of it is on a "why not, that's what I want to do now" level. The ones I've seen were actually kids on the very bottom of any hierarchy just acting out, not trying to achieve anything.

Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.

For the sake of international readers, in the US students in grades 7-9 are the ages of 12 through 15.

I don't know why you felt that this kind of pedophilia advocacy (or, to forestall one of the usual objections, ephebophilia advocacy) is a thing that you felt necessary to post on this forum, or indeed anywhere, and I wish that you had not.

You have a history of deleting comments when getting called out on them, and for that reason I have taken the precaution of a screenshot.

To the management here, I understand and appreciate that an ur-principle here is " don't say anything [on HN] you wouldn't say face to face". I would like to think that if I found myself in a face-to-face situation with a person who said, in all apparent sincerity, that middle-school girls are "attractive to any man that can still stand" I would have the basic decency to call them out right then and there.

Kept thinking it was a quantity or enumeration. Four friends? Four social hierarchies? The fourth group?

Really confusing change to change the headline.