As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.
The only meaningful difference between now and then is that in adulthood I have more such avenues and they are much more effective. The fact that they were less effective in childhood is an indictment of the administrative and social structure we have constructed schools to have, not of nonviolent methods themselves. I reject your assertion that it’s helpful for a bullied child to model behavior on chimpanzees in the jungle or criminals in prison. Becoming violent in childhood would have had negative long‐term effects on me, and I’m glad nobody back then gave me the “advice” you’re sharing now.
Im guessing most of them don't involve the lowest functioning portion of the population, eg, people who regularly comment violence, rape, and beat their wives, or are currently incarcerated. Public schools cut across the entire population spectrum and include children with legitimate social and cognitive deficiencies.
Adults also have more developed brains and better incentives to obey. a hostile worker might still care about losing their income, car, or house. It is hard to find comparable incentives for children and young adults.
Is there anyone who doesn't have 'sampling bias' in their adult interactions? This seems like a misapplication of a technical term.
"the well adjusted adults I know easily resolve issues without violence" does not mean that you should expect the same results for all adults, or for all children.
Certainly I don’t pretend there aren’t environments where adults are violent and unreasonable. Such as prisons, or other places with “people who regularly commit violence, rape, and beat their wives.”
If your argument is that school environments must be similarly unpleasant because they take students from all strata of society, I counter: we do not take teachers and administrators from all strata of society, and society should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly, because we can take lessons from environments where such things are not normal.
This seems harmfully naïve to me. In pursuing this aspiration we ignore the realities that exacerbate conflict. Children and teenagers are literally not cognitively developed enough (on average) to function to this standard. This remains true no matter how much we wish it weren't.
More effective policy comes from embracing this reality. "Violence and mental abuse" are inevitable consequences of the construction of hominid dominance hierarchies. Instead of fighting their construction, we should create environments where they can occur most naturally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795206
Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved?
Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish the perpetrators.
Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality.
It tells you what children might do if left to their own devices without adult supervision – i.e. in an environment completely unlike a school. The Lord of the Flies is also a work of fiction that's not based on any real life events, as far as I'm aware. In any actual instances of kids being stranded on an island that I've been able to find, the results were rather different: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
>Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies
In my school there was an effective intervention: you got punished if you beat someone up, and excluded from the school if you kept doing it. I guess no-one had told us that we were required to form 'hominid dominance hierarchies' and that we were cognitively incapable of responding to simple incentives.
>I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment
And what would this mean, exactly, beyond just accepting the inevitability of violence?
The simple fact that you think it's not a problem to somewhat approvingly compare schools to prisons is already a bad sign. Schools shouldn't be like prisons. Prisons shouldn't be like prisons either, but that's another story...
This was covered by the paper. You are talking about Peer Victimization without bullying. Bullying is a form of peer victimization in which there is a power imbalance (size, numbers, status, etc).
In the end, I needed to change for the issue to be resolved - which I did, and, along with moving to a new environment which helped reset a lot of my social interactions, that helped a lot. Obviously that's not some instant magic wand solution - I went through five long years of this experience, with various teachers and other adults trying to help me before things started clicking and I started being able to move on - but in my experience there aren't really many better solutions.
So, while I can't reiterate enough how unacceptable bullying is, and what a negative impact it had on those years of my life, I do agree with the previous poster: the ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of victim (n.b. not literally: I never found violence helped me), and trying to resolve the situation via visible external intervention may well have little impact. For me at least, a better social education would have made me much more prepared to deal with the issues that I faced.
And that's not going to work for everyone, so obviously there still needs to be repercussions for people who do bully others, and we should make it clear that bullying is never acceptable, but I think we need to concentrate more on helping the people being bullied to grow, rather than stopping the bullies themselves. To come back to your maths analogy, if someone's struggling with arithmetic, you can't just make the subject easier and tell them they don't need to worry about it, they still need to actually learn the subject, even if it's hard for them.
A shame sometimes the best way to resolve a conflict is eye gouging the aggressor before they permanently break a part of your body
The thing that stuck with me the most by getting the "resolve your conflicts by yourself" treatment was that no matter how much someone is being a piece of shit, the only one you can count on is yourself
Everyone else will watch as you break, and only intervene if you fight back. And punishment is only ever dished out in equal measures between aggressor and victim
Noticing that was probably the start of considering people to be rotten by default, reasons are needed to assume someone isn't
To be clear, as a victim, I was subject to unprovoled physical battery like this more time than I can count between the start of middle school and my second year of high school. As a bully, in my senior year, I never engaged in any kind of physical violence, just name calling and verbally provoking someone prone to emotional outbursts.
As you point out unprovoked battery and name calling fall under the same terminology, but the appropriate responses are obviously not the same.
1) If you're roughly evenly matched, you should fight
2) If you're not, your peers should intervene - "pick on someone your own size"
3) If this doesn't work, escalate to older peers
4) If that doesn't work, escalate to adults
This relies on children being taught and encouraged to intervene in unfair conflict, which the research indicates they are naturally inclined to do.
I'm suggesting that the current "zero tolerance" approach practiced in North America does more harm than good by halting this process before it can resolve conflict - thus harming both the bullied and the bully.
So in rural areas if a child in school grabs another child, throws them on the ground, and starts beating them in the middle of math class, the teacher will not attempt to intervene?
Sorry but I don't believe this.
Will you do the same when your child is being bullied? How do you think that may affect them and their relationship with you? How do you think a child feels when they realize that the adults around them do not have their back? What does it do to their sense of safety and their self-esteem?
I have lived through this and have my personal take on these questions, but I'd love to learn about yours.
It's clearly a fine line to walk, but if you're being bullied then what you need is to learn how to address/discourage that behaviour - not an intervention. Otherwise all you're doing is deferring the learning experience until next time. Past a certain window it's very hard to learn this skill, and you can be stuck with a helpless mentality for your whole life.
But I did become a "fan" of boxing at a very early age and studied how boxers fought. How they setup opponents, threw punches, and especially how they avoided getting hit. Most kids don't do that so it's pretty easy to gain an advantage. And bullies tend to leave kids alone who they know will fight back.
I grew up in some pretty rough neighborhoods so I was motivated to learn.
I grew up with 2 brothers and lots of cousins and learned how to fight by watching boxing on TV.
I fought my 2 year older brother to a draw when I was 6 years old. I dropped a 15 year old kid who was way bigger than me and bullying me by kicking him in the balls that same year and then stood over him while he was on the ground writhing and crying in pain and told him he was lucky I wasn't kicking his face in. He never came near me again.
By the time I started school kids in my neighborhood knew I would fight and when I started Jr. High kids in school already knew I would fight, and I was not a big kid, I was pretty small compared to most kids my age.
When I was 14 a kid I didn't know and was way bigger than me hit me in the head with a hockey stick at a city park and knocked me out cold. When I came to he was skating away from me. I skated as fast as I could, caught up to him and jumped on his back and knocked him down and I started wailing on him. I really don't remember how but I ended up sitting on his chest slugging him in the face as hard and fast as I could when I started hearing people yelling "Stop! Stop!" and realized there was a crowd of people watching me.
When I was in my late teens I started taking MMA classes. That taught me how to use an opponent's force against them and when I was 21 I literally bounced a guy who'd been pestering me for years to "wrestle" off his bedroom ceiling. He was in my face pestering me again so I gave him and little shove and he came back trying to shove me as hard as he could, so it was mostly his energy, I just redirected it. He was in shock because it happened so fast. I was stunned at how well it worked.
When people know you will fight back they tend to not mess with you and getting hit is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You'll heal up. Not fighting back sticks with you and hurts forever.
Bullies will only keep bullying kids who don't fight back. I taught my 5 kids this and none of them were bullied in school.
100%
I once had a kid walk up to me and tell me he had to show me something out in the recess yard. We get out to a certain spot, he bends down and picks up a screwdriver and throws it at me, slammed into the side of my head. To this day I have no idea why, didn't know the kid.
I chased him back into the school building, he turned a corner and the principal was standing there talking to a teacher. I remember very clearly he drew up next to the principal and had a shit eating grin on his face.
I removed that grin from his face very quickly, he thought I was afraid of the consequences of beating him in front of the principal. He learned otherwise.
To the principals credit, once I told him the story, saw the knot on my head, AND the screwdriver I got away with absolutely no punishment.
I've never been one to start things, and in fact often times I let them go too far, but I've never actually been afraid of a fight. I used to move a lot as a kid and at some point I just got used to having to fight atleast 1 person at a new school, once people realized you wouldn't take their shit, they didn't give it.
My bullies would tackle me, surround me, and kick me while I was down for minutes. Never less then 6 of them at a time. I had 3 concussions from being tackled and having my head smashed against the floor.
They would throw sand into my eyes. I remember not being able to see while being beat. I remember having to wear an eye patch for a week from the abrasions.
They would throw large sticks at me, I have numerous scars from being hit in the face.
They would break my things, I had multiple bikes smashed on the bike rack.
They would steal my things, if I had anything nice in my desk they would steal it when the teacher was out of the room.
They would shove dog shit in my face when they tackled me to the ground in their groups.
They would ostracize me from every other person at school, anyone I tried to talk to would have to ignore me for fear of being beaten up and treated the same. Even those that I was good friends with outside of school felt they couldn't let it be known in school.
I'd have my pants pulled down almost every single day while I was walking in crowds.
I stood up and fought for myself every single time. I never backed out. I always tried to fight back. I was larger then any of them individually. I had my dad take me to Taekwondo from the time I was in grade 2. I started lifting weights in grade 4.
My only recourse was to avoid them. From grade 2 to grade 11 I would pretend to be sick for weeks at a time in order to avoid going to school. Avoidance was my ONLY option, nothing else worked. I would use up every single sick day I could without getting expelled in high school. I'm not even sure about elementary school, they didn't have a max number of days, but I'm sure I missed at least half of every year.
Finally in grade 11 I managed to get the fight to stop by knocking four teeth out of my main bullies mouth and giving him 18 stitches. I was knocked out cold and barely remember the fight.
Standing up for yourself doesn't always work, everyone in this thread that thinks it does is extremely naive.
I'm glad that you punching your bully once solved the problem for you though.
This feels like it's missing context.
Solution: Let 'em work it out themselves.
I have a pretty low opinion of the zero tolerance policies because they seem to primarily operate to the benefit of the bullies in this case: the bullying is not readily visible as a problem to the adults and when it is, many of them think as you do, that kids will be kids and they should work out their problems themselves. However, a fight is an immediate problem and the obvious instigator is the victim of the bullying.
Working-it-out is an effective approach for two people who want to solve an issue - an issue that they're both fairly responsible for.
But where you have one child experiencing long-term and unearned mistreatment at the hands of many peers - attempts at working-it-out are such a mismatched response that more mistreatment seems likely.
Are we denying women a chance at personal development by having police arrest rapists rather than forcing women to develop the necessary skills of interpersonal violence to defend themselves?
…where is the line?
With regards to sexual assault - we surely should teach vulnerable people the necessary skills to avoid violence. It (used to be) common sense not to drink in the company of strangers, especially if you are physically vulnerable (regardless of your sex). None of this is exclusive to punishing perpetrators, which we should of course continue doing.