Is bullying in schools acceptable?

[Connor Bible]

This is coming from a guy who experienced a lot of harassment and insults growing up. What should the appropriate response to bullying victims be? Would you help them, or tell them to buck up?

 

[tomgirl4life]

This is coming from a guy who experienced a lot of harassment and insults growing up. What should the appropriate response to bullying victims be? Would you help them, or tell them to buck up?

Coming from someone in a very similar situation, in most cases it's probably a little of both. What helped me was someone who was rather popular started acting as a friend to me and stuck up for me. Each person is different though, and may need for things to be handled slightly differently. Sometimes, the people doing the bullying may not even realize the negative impact they have. There's no one right answer.

 

[ASoulMan]

Bullying in schools will always happen regardless of how many rules are made against it.

I feel like the best course of action aside from just reporting bullying is also to teach kids how to stand up for themselves and for others too.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

I've been harassed at school before (even been called a nigger once, even though I'm white). And honestly, no matter how many times you tell the principal (or vice principal, in my case), they're not going to do jack shit about it.

It's just how life works sometimes. Best you can do is try to ignore it lest you also get into trouble.

As for other victims, as @tomgirl4life said, some people work differently. I needed to get the lessons pounded into my head before I learned something. That might be the case with someone else too. But it also might not be either. It all depends.

 

[Picklechu]

As someone who was bullied daily from kindergarten through seventh grade, I think everyone needs to be bullied (not in the shoving into lockers/constant verbal harassment sense, of course) at least a tiny bit. The world isn't a magical hugbox, everyone isn't going to like you, some people are just shitty, and the sooner that kids learn things like that, the better off they'll be in the long run.

 

[CatParty]

it is appropriate. it builds character. no one wants to stay a fat fucking pussy

 

[HG 400]

If you get bullied you're clearly doing something wrong and should change your looks and personality to accommodate the people bullying you.

 

[CatParty]

 

[Ian Brandon Anderson]

The fault (at least in my area) falls a lot on parents and the educational association. A lot of parents teach their kids to go running to an adult at the slightest wrong against them. I'm not saying that five year olds shouldn't reach out for help if they get hurt or are in serious trouble, but once kids start going to adults for retribution against things like name-calling and funny faces, the problem arises.

This kind of thinking, that the system will stand up for you, invariably leads to trouble. It fails to produce problem solving in the individual, and when they reach an age (ie, high-school) where the system can no longer afford to coddle them as much, they find themselves unable to deal with the situation themselves.

I grew up as the youngest in a group of siblings, and pretty early on my parents got tired of me trying to tattle and told me to "figure it out yourself." While I'm sure that infuriated my younger self in the heat of the moment, I'm very glad for how well it taught me to diffuse situations with other people. It's tough love, but I do think that children do need to be taught that tattle-tailing should be a last resort, not a cure-all.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Bullying can be an artifact of late or lackluster sense of judgement, though I'm sure it depends on the level of bullying.

Judgement isn't fully cemented in adolescent minds, and while you can tell from right to wrong, it's easily warped through negative influences or generally negative behavior during early childhood. I don't think the sense of judgement in anyone is fully cemented until the mid-twenties, right?

 

[Educated Stupid]

Morally, I don't see bullying as "acceptable." However, it is a necessary evil and a necessary part of growing up. After all, without bullying, humanity would all just be weak, we'd be people who react way over-the-top to one negative thing and we'd all want to remain in a positive atmosphere. Personally, I believe that telling your children to "never be negative, always be positive" and "always report bullying" can actually harm them in the long run by making them incapable of dealing with people who have negative opinions about them or any otherwise non-positive events. And I say this as someone who actually has comparatively thin skin.

Of course, a line has to be drawn somewhere with bullying. It's not reasonable to have no bound to the bullying and expect children to just be able to "deal with it" even when it gets to a point where they physically cannot deal with it at all (and by that I mean when it gets too extreme, like if the bully physically attacks the person just whenever they see them.)

 

[Philosophy Zombie]

can't believe I'm being serious in a Connor thread, but I want to clear some things up about bullying and the student food chain

Seconding that even though schools encourage bullying to be reported they have never been known to do anything about that behavior. When I was in school, whenever someone would report another student to a teacher, nine times out of ten the situation resumed without change. At best a guidance counselor might sit down with the bully and give them a lecture or give them a slap on the wrist (or better yet, both the bully and the victim).

Sped kids generally aren't bullied as long as they keep to themselves; in middle and high school everybody knows to be nice to an obvious downs or autistic kid and will either ignore them or be nice to them occasionally out of pity. Even spergs probably won't be publicly mocked as long as they keep their head down and stay out of the way. The problems come if they do things that non-spergs would be made fun of for like acting mean or obnoxious, squeezing into groups where they aren't wanted, or acting up in class (although obviously that is a very large portion of those kids). I'm guessing that Chris pulled shit like that a lot when he was in school.

It does really have to be emphasized that being left alone doesn't mean that they aren't unhappy. A year ago there was a story of an autistic boy in Maryland who befriended two girls who did things like press a knife to his throat and didn't help him when he fell into an icy pond but didn't want to press charges against them because they paid attention to him and he preferred that to being alone. (One of the girls, who was 17, was almost charged as an adult but ended up going to juvy for a few years.) It's very important to train these kids socially early so they are able to form appropriate social contacts and do not become miserable due to ostracism.

I actually saw the stereotypical popular bitches made fun of more than the weird kids, both by people lower than them and the other popular kids. The majority of bullying is mean girl backstabbing to people who are in your social circle but who you don't like for whatever reason. Also the most popular people are usually polite at least on a surface level—that's how you get people to like you, after all. The "medium popular" cliques below that are more outwardly bitchy.

I think that whether it's "acceptable" or not really depends on the nature and type of bullying (ex. locker room taunts versus being followed and beat up every single day after school), and that includes if the victim also has a lot of positive social interaction to balance the bullying out. In most of the cases of bullying I have heard of that ended in suicide the victim had few or no friends—they were a transfer student or shunned by the other students for one reason or another. If the bullying is targeted at a group of people instead of an individual, at least the group can commiserate with one another and the bullying is distributed so it affects each individual person less.

 

[Dr. Meme]

yes, when its towards connor

 

[NostalgiaJazzAdmirer]

I don't think it ever is, it might "help toughen up" individuals but that doesn't make it right.

 

[Null]

bullies are typically the victims of physical, emotionally, or sexual abuse. if a kid is bullying they probably need a little extra attention from instructors.

not gonna happen in the us tho. education system is shit.

 

[CatParty]

I don't think it ever is, it might "help toughen up" individuals but that doesn't make it right.

Were you bullied because you are a raging autistic?

 

[HypeBeast]

Depends on the nature of the bullying. Like other people have said, the employees of the school can't usually do shit and you need to learn to stand up for yourself. People need to step in when things are unnecessarily cruel though. There was an older boy in my HS that was bullied by this other dickish guy and it was kind of fucked up. He would get robbed all the time and they would do things like hold him down and break eggs on him. The guy that was getting bullied was annoying as hell but it's still wrong that nothing happened even though everyone knew and we had surveillance cameras in most of the school. He never tried to do anything about it though.

 

[Dudeofteenage]

Some serious social darwinism in this thread.

Bullying is not OK. It might be impossible to totally eradicate it, but let's not try to pretend it's some kind of positive experience for the victim.

 

[Zeorus]

I don't think that those who have taken up this crusade to eradicate bullying from our schools in its entirety are doing much that's particularly productive. While many kids who bully other kids are doing it as a way of taking out their own frustrations on others, a lot of others who harass their classmates really are just horrid little shits who don't care about other people. Activism won't help that - better parenting and administration of justice for those little twats will.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Even spergs probably won't be publicly mocked as long as they keep their head down and stay out of the way. The problems come if they do things that non-spergs would be made fun of for like acting mean or obnoxious, squeezing into groups where they aren't wanted, or acting up in class (although obviously that is a very large portion of those kids).

Wanna know something odd about my school- I was usually the one not acting out in class all that much (well, in high school at least). It was usually the other classmates that kept making the noise. They were told off about it, but nah, there were times where they disrupt it to the point where nothing would happen.

Then again, the school system I was a part of never got a good rep, so who am I to say.