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A boy the bullies love to beat up
- mynameishere 19y agoTime for Catholic school, maybe. At any rate, you will see this time and again in any institution that has an internal disciplinary system. The effect is twofold: 1. Small infractions are amplified in importance. Thus, it is possible to be socially humiliated for...writing on a desk, talking out of line, chewing gum. 2. Large infractions are covered up. Thus, beatings, which in the real world could result in prison, are punished with 3 day suspensions. Both of the above are designed to preserve the power structure. Minor infractions are punished for the sake of exercising that power, reminding people of it, to prevent cracks from forming, etc etc. Meanwhile, large infractions are covered up so that the outside world doesn't realize that it needs to intervene.
- strey 19y agoI think bullying in public school is also a symptom of schools being co-ed. Take away the girls, and guys have much less motivation to show off their dominance. However, they do need an opportunity to interact with girls, which is why single gender boarding schools are also bad news. In boarding schools, guys will become more homosexually oriented, and again motivated to show off their dominance.
- tsuru 19y ago> (not (hacker-news-p)) T :(
- tim2 19y agoBad voters, bad.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- lisper 19y agoMaybe time to add down-arrows.
- far33d 19y agoI can't help but think, over and over again, that the "we need a down-arrow" and "take it to reddit" comments are more polluting than the occasional non-programming/startup related stories. The comments don't appear on the front page, however, they do have a much lower information content. This article and xkcd are both more informative than "time to add a down arrow," no matter how much I may agree.
- strey 19y agoYes, it's more about the community than whether we can regulate submissions.
- admoin 19y agoThe consensus seems to be that this doesn't qualify as Hacker News, but I tend to think that a large percentage of the users of this board can empathize with this boy. I certainly went through some of this (though not nearly as much, and at a much younger age), and I'm sure a pretty large percentage of today's startup founders and programmers went through similar tormenting at some point for being smart, different, or just unlucky. Thus, this gets a well deserved up vote from me.
- qaexl 19y agoEnder's Game.
- xlnt 19y agoThat's different: Ender won his fights.
- qaexl 19y agoEnder didn't win all of his fights. He gets regularly beaten up by his older brother. Remember this? Ender didn't like how his bullies fought, strong versus weak. He didn't like how he fought, smart versus stupid. And none of it worked with his brother, who is just as smart and much more ruthless. Ender just wanted to be left alone. What about the Buggers? Weren't they bullying the humans? What happened later when Ender found out the Buggers didn't even know they were killing sentient beings? What was the human response? To get a bigger stick. What are Billy's parents doing? They are doing what Ender realized couldn't happen in Battle School. He couldn't go to the authorities. He had to finish it on his own. Why did Billy's sister stopped him from finishing the fight? To win, you have to to win all the fights that come after -- that was what Ender saw. What happened in the trial at the end of the book? Those kids had died. If Billy did that, he would win that fight, and it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Instead of a New York Times article about bullying, we'd have a media fest about another Columbine. Ender won almost all his fights, but it nearly destroyed him. To win, he had to empathize with the enemy until he loved them. Then he annihilated them. He kept seeing Peter's face in the mirror, until he realized his sister Valentine was always with him. He beat the Giant who kept killing him with those poisoned drinks ... by cheating. And that's when he came to the End of the World. My point with Ender's Game is not to say that Ender had the solution to this, but rather that the book discussed all the issues people are bringing up here in these comments. In detail. It is too bad it seems so few people have read it or regarded my comment as pointless enough to downmod it. Too bad for them.
- Hexstream 19y agoBah, I've been a loser from ~7 to ~18 (I'm 22) and I see right through the BS. I've been bullied repeatedly during that time. Fortunately it was "only" words in my case but the ravages and dynamics are mostly the same, I think. Here are some couple points, in random order: - Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy. He will never get out of this hell if he doesn't accept a big part of responsibility. There's a reason he's the only one that gets beat so much and so hard. I'm sure his mother is well-meaning, but she's not helping him by putting all the blame on the other kids and the authorities which don't do squat. Which brings me to my next point. - Trying to get Billy out of hell by counting on authorities or throwing lawsuits is mostly pointless. The perpetrators are mostly untouchable and they're fully aware of it. Those that push for the authorities to enforce Billy's safety are only taking his destiny out of his hands and giving him a good excuse to blame others for his predicament. "It's not my fault if I'm not safe, it's the authorities that don't protect me enough". There will always be waves and waves of people that will attack Billy, verbally or physically, because guess what, there are tons of people in this world that are in dire need of better status and self-esteem and a lot of them will opt to pray on easy targets to make themselves feel superior. - I'm sure Billy thinks he can't reverse the tide because everyone knows him and how he gets beat. But throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur. That's because he's projecting a bloody image of himself that the sharks will no doubt sniff real quick. When I was bullied, when people I had never even seen called me names I thought the word somehow had got around. But what I should have understood is that it's just the blood and shark thing. It's not that everyone knows you, it's that everyone can picture you in the generic loser template. Those days, I can recognize the "old me's" at a glance, and it's painfully obvious I could become a bully if I hadn't matured properly. - Trying to find external motivations like "he's too tall" or "he wears glasses" or "he has learning disabilities" is BS. When I was a loser, I was indeed "too tall", and there always was "something wrong with me" (ex: unfashionable clothes), but now I'm as tall as ever and I still have unfashionable clothes but nobody notices that anymore. Weird, eh? No, it's just my attitude that's changed.
- zeantsoi 19y ago"Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy." Do you have any unsubstantiated claims that DON'T come from "The Secret"?
- Tichy 19y agoThose not hacker news comments are so tiresome. I was curious about the article, but it didn't seem to have a punchline. But then I was still curious about the comments on Hacker News. After all, it seems to be a system with a problem. Billy most definitely seems to not have managed to hack the system to his advantage. It seems unlikely that there could be a technological answer to those problems, but who knows?
- Prrometheus 19y agoI agree that this is not Hacker News. On the other hand, this relates to one of my pet causes. It is a shame that the boy’s parents have no options except to A) petition the school board for relief B) mount a political campaign to unseat the school board incumbents and then reform the school system (a large undertaking) or C) move to another school district. Why can’t they just take their money to a better run competitor? School choice doesn’t answer every school quality problem, but there is a certain perverse anti-logic in bureaucratic monopolies that pervades much of what goes on in primary education. Hopefully my rising to the bait won’t pollute Hacker News discourse too much, as only those who click on this comment thread will read my comment.
- xlnt 19y agoD) Home School
- Prrometheus 19y agoThe problem with home schooling is that one cannot benefit from specialization and the division of labor as one can in a school-institution. While the average parent might be a better teacher than the average public school employee, there are probably others out there who are even better teachers than they. Still, a step in the right direction.
- strey 19y agoSome homeschoolers form communities and share their strengths. Also, the benefit of the division of labor at a public school has to be balanced against the teachers not being able to pay attention to the particular needs of each child. It's been shown that the colleges with smaller student to teacher ratios do much better than the converse. Personally, I'd say most of the classes I've ever attended have been a waste of my time. For jr high, I switched from homeschool to public school, and I was quite ahead of the rest of the students. I hardly had to try to get an A. Then I went to British grammar school for high school and got my butt kicked.
- xlnt 19y ago
- daniel-cussen 19y agoI disagree with claims it's his fault.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- daniel-cussen 19y agoReminds me of La Ciudad y los Perros (The Time of the Hero). http://www.enotes.com/time-hero/ http://www.enotes.com/time-hero/
- mooneater 19y agoLearn karate.
- qaexl 19y agoThat might not be a great idea, not because of the violence involved, but because that twists the training. If the kid lucks out, he'd find a training group willing to work out whatever it is that is attracting bullies to him. If he doesn't luck out, he ends up being the guy getting beaten up in the dojo. I actually know of a guy who didn't luck out. His father forced the guy to go learn karate as a kid. Because he was getting picked on. His father yelled at him when he sucked. I imagine his teachers then yelled at him too. The worst part of it was that after he grew up, he is still taking some form of martial arts. He is still getting picked on by his training group, even though he switched to a different art, twice. He is so desperate for friends, he whines about the verbal abuse of his current teacher yet refuses to quit because the training group and the teacher are the only friends he has. These are not the reasons to go learn a martial art. That's not to say Karate won't work. The main thing is to get him around people who act like sane, socially-healthy adults -- people who takes initiative in a civilized society yet have not lost touch with their survival instincts. That may or may not be karate.
- dfranke 19y agoIt worked for me. I stopped getting bullied after a couple months of martial arts, even though the closest I ever came during that time to getting into a fight was one incident of locking a guy's arm behind his back and then letting him go when he tried to shove me in the lunch line. Simply projecting greater physical confidence was enough to make the bullies leave me alone.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- edw519 19y agoI read this story, too, wondering why it was here. But I kept reading anyway because I had already noticed 18 comments and I was curious to see what my fellow hackers had to say about this. (I'm a hacker news addict; I value your comments as much as the original content.) I expected my fellow hackers to condemn this bullying behavior and support the bullyee. But instead I was very surprised (more like stunned) to read some of these responses. I empathized with the boy in the story because it could have been my story. And probably the story of many people here. Just because you're not a jock or a ladies man, then something must be wrong with you. The attacks on this boy were unacceptable and inexcusable. I don't know the answer to this problem, but blaming the victim is NOT.
- qaexl 19y agoThe funny thing about hackers is that they have the intellectual capability to hack their own life, and rarely try. Users who merely use a computer system don't get that feeling hackers get when they are able to push into that creative realm, to shape and mold a system, often ideas that had not been anywhere. It's that experience of bringing something out of nothing, I think, is what makes coding so much fun. You get to make choices when you code. But just as you can make these choices when you code, you can do the same for your life. Why else would people flock to Hacker News? Sure, it is about Paul Graham's ideas on startups. I think, though, we flock here because we want to take control of your financial situation. What about your social life? What about that bully in high school ... or that asshole boss of your's that keeps taking advantage of you? In this civilized society, physical abuse is grounds for punishment by the community. Verbal abuse leaves a lot of room to seriously damage someone without leaving a mark. The question I have to ask is, are you going to depend on the civilization's operating system, or are you going to use the skills learned from hacking code to really understand how the social OS works? It may seem like blaming the "user", but you protect users from themselves because they don't know how to hack. I too empathize with the boy, but I also think he already has a lot of the tools he needs to get himself out.
- edw519 19y agoSome of us just need a little more time than others. What concerns me most in this case is whether so much damage has been done to cripple the boy for life. Hard for us to imagine but still easy enough to happen.
- sohail 19y agoWhy are you modding up this article
- nazgulnarsil 19y agoI miss being a minor. I hung out with a lot of other nerdy kids, so it was always fun to walk up behind a guy who was hassling one of my friends, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face.
- xlnt 19y agoSo when Billy says, "Mom, I don't want to go to school today. I fear I'll be badly hurt," his parents make him go anyway? Awful story :(
- huherto 19y agoIMHO there is something wrong with the boy: 1.- Not being able to physically defend himself. 2.- Not being alert of his surroundings. 3.- Not being able to have friends who would look after him. 4.- Even having a behavior that exasperates other students. I may even ask the question: What is he getting out of this? Is he getting more attention? Is he getting to feel like a victim? Is he getting the right to feel sorry about himself? Is he able to justify his low grades?
- Kaizyn 19y agoYou would think that the parents would have enrolled the child in some sort of self defense class or program. Teaching the kid how to defend himself from the bullies would have been the most effective way to handle the situation.
- mattmaroon 19y agoIt seems highly unlikely that this happened as randomly as the kids parents seem to think. Kids are brutal, but they are also inconsistent. The fact that they are all beating up on the same kid, day after day, means there is something more to it than typical teenager douchebaggery. Everyone thinks their child is sweet and innocent, but in reality the kids who get beat up repeatedly are doing something to cause it. They may not deserve the end result, but their actions do encourage it.