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Comment by _2zip | Hacker News Reader

When I was around 15, I used to hang out with a guy who was much senior to me, and he would bully us sometimes. One day, when we were bantering, I cracked a joke that a third guy with us (who was my age) found funny and crackled. The bully grabbed my neck and choked me till I lost consciousness. I remember having memory flashbacks related to missing a train, and someone waiting at the wagon door, waving at me to hurry and jump in before it is too late. I remember feeling stressed about missing the train. The next thing I remember is slowly regaining consciousness to see the bully and the 3rd guy splashing water at my face, looking very amused.

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I'm sorry that happened to you. That's so horrible. Wanna make me beat up bullies, man. Got damn bullies.

Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.

I understand this knee-jerk reaction very well, but it just feeds the neverending spiral of aggression. We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.

What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line. I am not saying love can fix it all, it can fix many things but sometimes once people become broken they just stay broken and there is no real way back.

> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line

oh you need to convince them that more beatings would be forthcoming if they step out of line again.

This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research.

Closely related, corporal punishment results in kids who are more likely to try to get their way through violence. Though they'll also take care not to be caught doing so. This is one of the big reasons why psychologists argue against using corporal punishment.

I do believe there's a difference where the punishment comes from.

Aggressors[0] generally attack others one of or a combination of these reasons:

1) Pleasure/amusement/entertainment. Some people simply enjoy seeing others (everyone, specific subgroups or specific individuals) suffer.

2) Personal benefit/gain. Very often this is simply social status among peers. As aggressors grow, they refine these strategies (both consciously and unconsciously) to also gain social status in the eyes of people in positions of power (e.g. superiors/supervisors/managers), often with a resulting material benefit. Sometimes the material benefit is more direct - e.g. scammers.

A) If the punishment comes from people in positions of power:

With reason 1) it offsets the pleasure they get but quick corporal punishment is probably less effective than longer punishments such as exclusion from activities or having to perform laborious tasks.

However, with reason 2) any punishment, corporal or not, creates or reinforces a persecution complex (after all, they are just doing what they think everyone should be doing - climbing the social ladder) and often even helps them gain status because they are doing what their peers secretly also want to do - break the rules and stick it to the people in positions of power.

B) If the punishment comes from peers or especially the target, it defeats both reasons. Very few aggressors get pleasure from betting beat up by their target or other peers. And with reason 2 especially, they now risk losing social status if the target wins or it's a signal that this the behavior is not accepted by the group if it comes from peers.

The issue with B often is that to onlookers who don't know how it started, it looks like 2 people fighting, instead of one being the aggressor and the other being the target mounting a successful defense. But that can be solved through better education of people in positions of power.

What I find especially concerning are all these zero tolerance policies which actively encourage people to not defend others and sometimes even themselves.

[0]: I generally don't call them bullies because that conjures an image of children in a schoolyard but these people grow up to become adults and their behavior is driven by the same urges and incentives, it just manifests slightly differently. Being an aggressor is a mentality and a personality trait.

its bad science. I can name zero times when the victim reacting with aggression in an effective way (i.e. hurting or shaming the bully) did not result in better behavior from the aggressor in the following confrontations. I have worked with children and adolescents a lot of years and people standing up for themselves are usually better off.

Now, there are some side notes: the standing up must be timely and appropriate. The revenge shouldnt be served cold and the revenge shouldn't raise sympathy for the bully.

> This idea is naively appealing, but is not backed up by research

Anecdotally, it worked for me :shrug:

Fighting back worked a hell of a lot better than anything the "responsible" adults could ever suggest. School teachers, councilors, my mother, etc, all gave useless advice. My dad told me to fight back. When I finally listened to him, that's when the bullying stopped. I lost that fight, but won the war so to speak.

Telling kids not to fight back is a terrible cowardly thing to do, the adults who do that are either oblivious idealists or are just cynically covering their own ass because they don't want to get in trouble for encouraging a confrontation.

Sure, if you fight back, the bully is less likely to pick on you. They’ll just pick on the next weakest kid instead.

So what, I'm supposed to let myself get beat up so the bully doesn't pick somebody else instead?

Your theory is bullshit anyway, the more times the bully encounters resistance, the more opportunities that bully has to learn to be better.

I don't think you've thought this through.

You should volunteer yourself as a victim to save others! You sound like you're very noble.

I'm glad your dad told you to fight back. It's good for a child's development to stick up for themselves, using violence as a last resort if needed.

As a kid, yes. As an adult protecting your kid, also yes. As a way to discourage bullies from bullying? Unless you are willing to escalate to jail, no. And even then it isn't that you have dissuaded them, it is that you are physically restraining them.

We can pretty reliably do better than that now. And yes, schoolyard bullying is way down from what it used to be. (A fact somewhat hidden by our calling out milder forms of bullying.)

Bullying is unrelated to corporal punishment - Self-defence is ok.

Please do not conflate those two things.

If a bully has never felt what they dish out, they may not like it.

Self-defence is ok.

For the young people in my life, I always advise to not escalate, be clear it's not ok, seek an adult's help, and if all reasonable attempts have failed, it's a-ok to stand up for yourself and neutralize a threat when the people and systems around you aren't.

I don't condone violence. But I also see we live in a world where the world fights to force it's way on others.

I take massive grains of salt on such opinions someone is from a group more likely to be a bully or not.

No, they are related. Corporal punishment of children predicts later bullying. Here are two random links into the research.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37267760/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/...

punishing by adults in charge. fighting back and a promise to always pay back more is very different.

My comment has nothing to do with corporal punishment causing bullying.

I'm referring to children being left to deal with bullying directly, however it arrives inside the bully.

Whether bullying arises from home, adults at school, or otherwise is secondary.

Teachers today can often tell kids to sort it out themselves.

The strategy is to remain respectful, firmly ask for it to stop, tell an adult, and if all of those things have failed, self-defence is a last resort to the point of stopping the current and future level of bullying.

There is a reason parents put their kids into martial arts, etc.

So what is your suggested solution? Myself and several other commenters know an effective solution that you’ve poop-pooed, so offer something better.

from figures in authority, yes. but in practise, bullies respond very well to a bigger bully. it's the entire basis of government - the monopoly on violence.

> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act, passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them.

The exact same can be said for good ole Adi. And many of his ilk currently alive.

What you're saying isn't a straightforward universal truth. There's no one right answer. Some of the time, what you're saying is very true. Other times it's very much not. GP's reaction as such isn't "knee-jerk". The equation doesn't suddenly change the second the "evildoer" in question turns 18, or 21.

IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.

It's possible that they do it because they learned pathological systems of behaviour from pathological family/social experiences, but even if fighting back against them is also shitty, it beats enabling them to keep doing it (especially to you)

No, that is absolutely not a misconception, and is backed by peer reviewed research such as https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/why-stigmatized-ado....

What you may be thinking of is research showing that when kids get to know each other, the ones who will become socially dominant tend to be aggressive early. But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer. With further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance.

The most common scenario for continued aggression is someone near the social bottom, who is attempting to reinforce that there is someone who is still firmly below them.

The study seems to use self-reported perception of being a bully as the main metric. They didn't even bother making the children rate each other.

> But once they achieve social status, they usually turn around and become far nicer

This sounds to me that their (unprovoked) aggression worked and that counter-aggression should have been encouraged earlier to make it a less viable strategy.

---

This also does not describe any kind of bullying I've seen or heard about. It was always those with a high social status, usually a group, though often with a clear leader, targeting one or two children with a low social status.

Some of this bullying was not even driven by the need to gain social status but simple pleasure - see my other comments - pleasure/amusement/entertainment is a major reason for bullying.

I've literally never seen a low-social status child bully a high-social status one. How would that even work? Wouldn't the supposed target be defended by his group?

> I've literally never seen a low-social status child bully a high-social status one. How would that even work? Wouldn't the supposed target be defended by his group?

classical case is someone strategically using violence to attack people

What is stopping you from beating up bullies every time they bully others as well?

"further aggression limited to those who have not accepted their dominance" doesn't sound anything at all like "turning around" to me.

Social mean girl bullies maybe. A guy who chokes a 15 yr old til they lose consciousness is not trying to climb the social ladder though

Not until he becomes a cop or local politician that is.

>IIRC this is a misconception and bullies bully strategically to climb the social ladder and benefit from it.

pretty much any human social phenomenon can have multiple causes.

I don't think fighting back is shitty in any way.

a) Either there is no objective morality and then anyone can do anything they can justify using their personal moral system, as long as it's internally consistent (it blatantly isn't for most people and perhaps subtly isn't for the rest)

b) or there is objective morality and then anyone can dispense punishment (for example by fighting back) because there's no reason the objective morality would favor a given person over any other.

The idea that people should not solve their own problems or other people's problems stems from:

- People in positions of power wanting to justify their power, thus indoctrinating everyone into believing they need protection. The more authoritarian the state, the more restrictive guns laws. Authoritarian teachers demanding absolute order and children punishing each other is disorder.

- The difficulty of ascertaining who the original aggressor is and who is just fighting back.

- The likelihood of people making mistakes and punishing the wrong person of overshooting the level of appropriate punishment.

- Internal conflict weakening the whole groups, making it more susceptible to outside aggression - better to punish both sides fighting to keep order and appear strong.

All of these have some merit in some situations and to some extent but IMO none of them justify their logical conclusion - total submission to a supposedly unerring position of power.

---

But back to fighting back:

I've seen two groups of children - those who were encouraged to fight back and those who were encouraged to endure it or ask teachers for help.

You don't see the first group bullied much so you might not even identify the group as a target of (potential) bullying.

Meanwhile I have never seen the second group's strategy working out - the bullying always escalated until a breaking point.

Additionally, from what I've seen, when the second group changed strategies to fighting back, the bullying stopped.

---

Finally, another pattern I see emerging from personal experience is that the parents of the children involved often know each other because they went to school with each other, even if not necessarily one class. And the parents of aggressors ("bullies") behaved the same way. The behavior absolutely is transmissible and I don't believe it's solely through social means. Some anti-social personality traits have a large genetic component and these traits are often a major cause of the need to hurt others.

This is a really good post that people should reflect on.

There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.

Imagine telling kids that not only should they not defend themselves, but that they should also pay for the bullies groceries and electricity.

> There is something particularly dark and unjust about supporting the persistance of tyranny through the blaming of (solely or not) those who defend themselves.

The right to defend one's self is a critical requirement for freedom, and all that goes with it.

If you were assaulted, why not sue the person who assaulted you?

I don't agree. Most of the bullies I dealt with growing up were privileged shits who had never had anyone cut them down a notch.

Somehow others experience shit situations without needing to self-sooth by inflicting similar pain on others.

Bullying is not a form of innocently misguided, or sympathy deserving, coping.

I think that view is best interpreted as an inaccurate but well meaning rationalization offered to bullied people, to suggest more passive karma is present than there is. Often by those uncomfortable with the pervasive element of real-politik physical negotiation throughout nature.

Bullies are cruel because they are getting something psychological and practical from the practice. Usually both. Violence exists because it is a very effective tool.

And just as easily a tool for good. Bullies’ behavior is famously responsive to people who vigorously retaliate or are strongly defended. Even to the point of genuinely respecting those strong enough to give back punishment, as well as they can take.

Bullies are also famously quick to offer their subservience to bigger bullies. Suddenly pliable “lambs” in that context, offering up their own power. These are rational choices for those that operate in the violence economy, not the flailings of broken souls.

Which makes standing up to all bullies in the world dramatically more important, than the calculus of any individual situation might seem to suggest.

Like all economic realms, norms that bend to lower the costs of applying bullying, violence, threat and fear power, only incentivize further expansion, investment and innovation.

> you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up

Beating up a bully as self defence is categorically different from beating up a random bully. Neither is also necessary for the next step, which is involving authorities to establish a path to rehabiliation or incapacitation.

> Their life is shit already, that's why they act as they act (...) you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line

human social life is complex and such overgeneralization are almost never right

in some cases self-defense entirely fixes the problem

> We humans act like storage of both good and bad, it then comes back up in various situations.

that is an utter nonsense, in some cases endless hugging and patting just leaves you exploited

> passing aggression on to others in vain effort to get rid of some of that 'evil' in them

well, sadly sometimes violence is right or least bad solution

Sometimes. I had a kid who’d get his buddies together and ambush me in the way out of school. His mom was an employee and the school staff would mysteriously not see anything involving him.

He then came at me by himself with a stick when I was walking my sister home far from school. I beat the shit out of him, broke his nose, bruised a rib and he sprained his ankle. My sister told her friends, and all of those little shits stayed away. He’s lucky - a year or two later I would have been stronger and probably hurt him pretty bad.

I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now. I’m sure the kid had problems, but it wasn’t my responsibility as a 10/11 year old to hug it out, and none of the 1980s adults seemed to give a shit.

> I will say that schools are much better at dealing with this behavior now.

As a father of five, with the youngest now in high school, my recent experience is we've moved from physical violence to using the system to bully victims.

Stunningly weak mentality. Not surprised to see it on display here, HN is polluted with broken dorks.

If you don't fight back you will be the victim of further abuse. If there's no countervailing force against sadistic psychopaths, they will continue their destructive behavior.

You should absolutely beat the shit out of bullies. To idly stand by out of some misguided slave morality, you permit their evil, and allow the world to become worse.

I've only been bullied once, so it's hard for me to really talk outside of that single time. I'm different and I've never given too many fucks about social norms or hierarchies, and I guess a bully from two grades above me took that as a sign I would be a good victim. Anyway, I knew what way he walked home, so the day after he had bullied me I hid in a bush. When he walked by I ambushed him with a stick and demanded he give me his school bagpack... I hoisted it into the school flagpole the next day... Like a total psychopath. Looking back on it, it's frigthening how few consequences there was for what was obviously way out of line. I guess the early 90ies were just a different time.

He probably had a shit life, but I never saw him bully anyone again.

>What I want to say - you just beating up a bully will mean some other kid(s) will get beaten up (or beaten up even more) further down the line.

I can tell you first hand this definitely isn't true in all cases.

We had a bully at my school who constantly picked on all sorts of people. Eventually he decided to pick on one of my best friends who got sick of it and took him to the ground and punched him in the face about 15 times.

It was like a light switch - the bully became one of the chillest, nicest kids in our grade after that. He figured out pretty quickly that getting punched in the face isn't much fun and decided it was probably better to stop being a dick to everyone around him because he didn't know who the next person was that would return his shenanigans with violence.

Most bullies just vent out what they suffer at home, school or workplace. They already punish themselves by not reacting against the real source of their problems.

A valid rationalization but never an excuse. At some point the buck has to stop being passed around. Standing up to all instances of violence is the only way to stop the endless cycles.

that is not a valid reason for others to suffer their cruelty and not apply effective self-defense

Clarification: I never justified what bullies do, just giving an explanation. I should have made more explicit that punishing alone accomplishes nothing if the source of the problem isn't addressed: they just go to the next easier victim.

I do have dreams of beating up bullies. Count me in.

There were times over the years I played the waiting game and got back at certain bullies. Each time I got in a heap of trouble, but always recovered my pound of flesh.

What I find aggravating is when people turn to the "grow up, what's past is past" after they faced no consequences for their actions. Now you're the bad guy for not letting it go.

Each time I was forced to fight a bully, I came away from it horrified by what I'd done. Violence never felt good to me.

Finally growing up big enough and successfully beating up a bully was one of the best memories of childhood I have...

I'm not saying you should forget it, but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.

Trying now to analyze the limit of this principle as the bully approaches POTUS.

I don't think this principle holds to this extreme.

In the case where you are still actively being bullied, you gotta do something to stop it first

> but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.

I agree with this and this is why I'm an advocate of fighting back on the spot, yelling, etc, if it's someone crossing a boundary such that it'll bother you forever. Because if you hold you ground, it's over and you held your ground, nothing to be upset about again.

Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. I tried that and gotten beaten up and punished by the school for starting a fight. Multiple times. The bullies never got punished. This happened at two different schools.

I had difficulty explaining what happened due to being neurodivergent, so I was always punished. And my parents weren’t able to help me.

On the other hand, every effort each of us makes to eliminate bullying from this world is another effort toward making this world a better place.

The trick is to have those thoughts, plans, and actions actually lead to results rather than just anxieties about the past.

How do you think that would work? People will just accuse you of interfering with their raising their children and that you shouldn't raise yours to be a snowflake -- not saying this is true but I can already hear their reasoning.

Maybe we should build laws to make parents more accountable, but then it's the other discussion where we are make the state police us even more and putting more power to the state.

I really don't see a way out other than to focus on other things and take care of ourselves.

Start with the simple. Don't be a bystander. "Next time I see somebody berating a retail worker, I will defend them"

Although it usually needs to start more introspectively: "Next time I am about to lose my temper, I will take a deep breath and consider if yelling is the best course of action or rather something less aggressive."

With children, there's something to be said about them learning to stand up for themselves; tattletales aren't something to admire. But at some point it is actually the correct course of action to interfere with children-raising, especially when it affects my children.

Dude, where I live a garbage truck worker got shot in the back the other say by a rich dude just because they got into an argument. You can't interfere and expect first that people will owe you a good response just because you intervened, and second that you will go through this unscathed.

We need to protect each other, but we need to know how to care. Sometimes what you see unraveling in front of you is the culmination of deep factors that you can't fight with enough attitude or willpower.

I know where you are coming from and I hope if I see something happen like this in front of me I'll have the courage and peace of mind to rightfully intervene, but that's not always the case and we can't hold bystanders in contempt because they chose to stay away. People are just nuts.

Essentially, the brain is doing a last-ditch systems check — replaying memories, emotional anchors, and learned survival cues to find any relevant information or pattern that might aid escape or coping.

This is my nightmare. That me dying will feel just like my regular nightmares that I have today, which are all about common day stressful situations like not finding my partner in a crowd, or constantly chasing the same person and never catching up to them.

An anxiety filled death is what I have coming.

Perhaps a peaceful and serene death doesn't exist despite what people would like to believe so you won't be missing out.

I feel for you INTPenis

My brother picked me up by the neck once. I still have nightmares about it. Kids are so insanely cruel.

Caught this podcast recently on near death experiences (NDE), which discusses some of the recent research as well as spiritual factors:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/godforbid/near-death-...

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