10 ms·

I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this: > These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on support

• wutheringh 4y ago
  The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression. Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration. If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you. I recently wrote a letter to the alumni development office of the undergraduate school I went to about why I don't give money to them when I was re-traumatized by receiving the first alumni newsletter I had received in a long time. We had a student who waged a war against gays but this was the 1980s and people like that were so afraid of AIDS that instead they'd bash straight people who showed the slightest amount of support for gays. I couldn't leave my room without the risk of being assaulted. It only ended when he hit a resident assistant in the face with a rock from a catapult at point blank range. A gay man and a lesbian woman committed suicide because of this nonsense. This person had support from many groups of people at tech including religious people, drug users (this guy was the drug dealer who would take the biggest chances to get supply) and the school administration. What I found was so wounding was that I lost many of my friends over this. The person I blame most of all was the very popular dean of students who told me repeatedly that his "hands were tied" but I am sure he would have found something he could have done if his daughter was the victim. The ringleader of this group went to prison a few years later because he was caught on tape selling 3 kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop. If I heard he was still alive and had gone straight I would would forgive him and actually celebrate him because he has paid for his crimes and it is such a hard thing to go straight. I would have a very hard time forgiving the dean of students because he has received so many accolades from people and is seen as a hero (for many good reasons), I grieve more for the people who were victims of suicide than I do for my own suffering which was minor in comparison. I wonder how many other victims there are from before and after I was there. It is all the more wounding for me because otherwise college would have been a respite and chance to heal from the abuse I received in the public schools.
    • jancsika 4y ago
      > The ringleader of this group Group? What university was this? Who was the resident assistant? Was that particular incident with the rock written up somewhere? What you've written here isn't run-of-the-mill college bullying anecdata-- it is the beginning of a serious piece of investigative journalism.
      • PaulHoule 4y ago
        The year was 1990. The school was the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The leader of the group was Chris Cater. The resident assistant who was battered was Steve Dyker and this happened in front of South Hall, the dorm I lived in, although I wasn't there when that incident happened. When Chris did this in front of witnesses he was expelled immediately although I did see him come back to sell drugs on campus a year later. Before that incident the dean of students, Frank Etscorn, told me that it was just "my word against his" and that he could not press charges. Chris was criminally minded and he certainly inspired a group of students into more criminal behavior than they would have done on their own. I don't believe that New Mexico Tech was much worse than other schools at this time, in fact around this time there were high profile incidents involving bullying and suicides of gay students at other schools.
        • jancsika 4y ago
          I'm reticent to ask more questions given that you said receiving the newsletter was retraumatizing. But one of the people who witnessed the behavior you described should consider documenting it.
    • howaboutnope 4y ago
      > It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you. And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.
  • thewebcount 4y ago
    I'm not sure how getting to the root of the problem instead of treating the symptoms is "trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics." If the topics are more complex, let's address those complexities. I feel like when they say, "We should teach kids how to survive bullying better," they're the ones trying to apply feels-right reasoning to a complex situation. That's a short-term solution. If the real, long-term solution is medical intervention of some sort, then do that! But don't let the bullying continue and put all of the work on the victim of the bullying. Sure, we can help them be more resilient, as I said above. But the actual problem needs to be addressed no matter how hard or complex it is.
    • aidenn0 4y ago
      Bullying is enabled by a power imbalance. For those without the ability to rectify the power imbalance, teaching resilience both helps in the short-term and is a useful skill for the large fraction of the population who will one day end up in a job where there is a n abuse of a power imbalance, but they can't quit if they also want to eat. As the parent of both a bully and a victim (two different kids), I can say that correcting the bullying behavior is not as easy as it might seem. Many (most?) bullies are charming and manipulative and most victims are not, so convincing those who have the ability to correct the power imbalance is quite challenging. I could make a laundry list of examples just from my own direct experience, but I'll limit it to one: (Pre COVID, as it does involve tech in the class room, which changed a lot in 2020). We refused the school-issued Chromebook for my daughter and the administration agreed that she could do all of her work on paper. One of her teachers "didn't feel right singling her out" and "she is such a good kid" so without telling us gave our daughter the classroom Chromebook to do in-class assignments, which she used to cyber-bully a classmate to the point that the child left the school and the child's parents, who were previously friends with my wife, will no longer talk to us.
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  >Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. It is entirely possible that the want to bully can be reduced but cannot be prevented. Of course people should do what they can to prevent it on the bully side, but it is reasonable to also consider other factors.
• hateful 4y ago
  There's a term for this: Victim Blaming. It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have. A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement). I was bullied when I was a child and it was BAD. I can't really express how EVIL the bullies were. Like something out of a horror film. Edit: I'm a little confused by the replies - I re-read my comment to see if anything was ambiguous. I'm saying that bulling is way worse than people think. Maybe it was unclear that I am agreeing with the comment I was replying to, not opposing it?
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it? If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?
    • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      I would take it 1 step farther, if you're not teaching your children how to deal with bullies themselves then you're harming them for life. There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to.
      • mypalmike 4y ago
        "Stop being weird looking and small. Ah there you go, problem fixed." The only thing you can teach a bullied child to do is to fight back. They will lose the fight but the bully will usually move on to an easier target.
      • anonymousDan 4y ago
        What would you suggest to teach them? I was never really bullied but worry now about my own son and what to do if he is.
• P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  > Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't. My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong. One of my favorite lines: > Bullies don't stop being bullies when they graduate, they just get lawyers.
  • onemoresoop 4y ago
    This is a good point. Policing bullying in school (when young) may work if one can catch it in the act but this bully behavior never stops in adulthood, it starts taking different forms. Being aware of bullies and not being affected by their actions helps but they will only find a different target.
    • magicpin 4y ago
      I think the point the OP is trying to make isn't to police bullies, but to figure out the influences on the child to be a bully, and to correct for that, so that the kid doesn't bully in the first place.
      • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        And if everyone practiced abstinence, teenage pregnancy wouldn't be a thing. But, as it turns out, people fuck, and it's far more effective to teach people how to deal with sex than to argue the "real" solution is abstinence.
        • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
          Actually, sex education is an excellent metaphor here. Teenage pregnancy happens when you assume by not addressing how teen pregnancy happens, teenagers won't fuck. However, teenage pregnancy goes down when you give access to safe sex, robust sex education, and effectively take away the forbidden fruit of fucking. Similarly, teaching kids how bullying functions and a robust environment that prevents the causal factors of bullying can cut down on the actual bullying behavior.
• dionidium 4y ago
  This presupposes that bullying is always explained by something environmental or that it's learned behavior. But what if bullying is just fun for some people? What if human beings have differing innate levels of aggression, empathy, and tolerance? What if some people see bullying and feel a little pit in their stomach -- fear, disgust, anger -- and what if others simply don't? "The blank slate" conception of the world continues to mislead us about the domain of effective interventions.
  • creata 4y ago
    If you're going to make a claim like "'the blank slate' conception of the world continues to mislead us", it wouldn't hurt to have more than a series of what-ifs.
    • dionidium 4y ago
      "Nature vs. nurture" is in the public conception a live debate, but it really isn't. The data are in. If you're genuinely interested, Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a great overview of the argument for the layman.
  • MrVandemar 4y ago
    >But what if bullying is just fun for some people? We have a word for those people: "sociopath"
    • dionidium 4y ago
      Nah, that's too glib. The people at one extreme end of the spectrum might accurately be called sociopaths, but lots of more ordinary people fall to the right of center on the "enjoys bullying" bell curve.
      • MrVandemar 4y ago
        Enjoying and causing the suffering of others, especially as a power thing (and what is bullying about if not power) is sociopathy, plain and simple no matter how you adjust your spectrum. If "ordinary people" are on the right of centre of the bell curce, all you are arguing is that the culture you are in encourages sociopathic behavior.
• somethoughts 4y ago
  I would say in an ideal world yes, but the fact is that in the real world a lot of generalizable anti-bullying messaging/curriculum can start from a good place but can easily be mis-construed or willfully and purposefully construed or in fact morph into such things like critical race theory, etc. Society will probably need a lot of time to collectively figure out where to draw the line between the spectrum ranging from "let's not bully a distinct subgroup of people" and "why are we unnecessarily over-empowering a distinct subgroup over all other groups". In the meantime, those people in the subgroups need support.
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  A lot of bullies were bullied when they were younger. It's a chicken-and-egg problem
  • twiddling 4y ago
    Hurt people hurt people.
• olau 4y ago
  I read somewhere that to be successful you need to focus on the environment people are in, as in instead of trying to figure out who the bullies are, you need to figure out why a certain environment leads to bullying behaviour.
  • thewebcount 4y ago
    That sounds productive to me.
  • ryan93 4y ago
    Seems like a somewhat universal phenomenon.
• nine_k 4y ago
  Absolutely people try to make bullies not want to bully, from psychological counseling to suspending them from school. It sort of works, but any success is limited. Also bullies can attack outside the school premises. This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.
• GuB-42 4y ago
  > Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? Why not both? This is a research paper, not a political document. Here, researchers focus on the psychology of the bullied, and make a suggestion that may improve his condition. There are, I guess, other research papers that focus on the bully, and others that focus on the environment, each with their own conclusions. The job of policymakers is to take all the suggestions and build a policy based on what researchers consider effective, in addition to other considerations like ethics and cost. It is up to them do decide if it is more important to prevent bullies from bullying or if it is better to teach kids how not to be bullied. Researchers are just there to give facts, backed by evidence.
• jimkleiber 4y ago
  I teach people how to protect themselves from emotional attacks. What I've seen is that most of us who attack others often believe we were attacked first. So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc). So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.
• blitz_skull 4y ago
  I don’t think trying to fix a species-wide issue is a productive approach at all. The reason people bully is the same reason people kill is the same reason people commit genocide. If you’ve got a solution for that, I’d love to hear it. Seems to me that teaching resilience is a much more productive approach.
• antod 4y ago
  After watching how my kids schools deal with this, I think the a big part of the solution is not just thinking about bullies or the bullied, but the rest of the kids in the middle that aren't bullies or the bullied. The schools programs really focused on the middle kids showing them how to spot bullying, not tolerate it, report it and to stick up for other kids, and bullying seemed to become publicly seen as weak and uncool. One of my kids has/had some personal circumstances that they would've been flayed alive for at the schools I went to back in the day. I am so grateful for the change in culture, and how the other kids treat each other now compared to what I went through.
• lkrubner 4y ago
  Studies show that roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths, and these people are over-represented among CEOs of corporations. From that we can assume there are rewards for psychopathic behavior, and this includes bullying. Starting in school, the bullies are often rewarded by established authority figures. Some of this is generational perpetuation: a generation ago some bullies became leaders and now they want the new generation of bullies to also become leaders, as they associate their own behavior with ideal leadership. Therefore, to end bullying would require a full-going social, cultural, and economic revolution. The entire generation-to-generation cycle would have be broken.