It seems to be very hard to distinguish between bullying and rough play. Rough play is a developmental requirement (particularly for young boys) across the hominoid clade (and likely wider). Being denied it also has real and lifelong consequences. For further reading, Frans de Waal has done a lot of work in this area.
Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.
Rough play is voluntary, being a victim of bullying isn't. I say this as someone who engaged in rough play, got bullied, and was a bully, at different times.
Learning how to respond to antisocial behaviour by a peer, and being able to resolve conflict independently, are two very important skills that it's critical to learn. Being seen as someone who needs adult help to resolve peer conflict is socially disastrous for young people. We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.
"Solve the problem yourself". Yeah, you've never had to deal with being chased by bullies and having the shit kicked out of you for no reason. Bullying is not a conflict between peers anymore than a woman getting raped is a conflict between peers.
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.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I was bullied as a child, and honestly, the problem is hard to deal with. I was not good at socialising, I found it difficult to read social cues, and I was kind of irritating a lot of the time. None of that excuses bullying, of course, but ultimately a large part of what caused that bullying was my own behaviour. If I'd have been more socially adept, if I'd realised that the social group I'd found wasn't supporting me and if I'd put more effort into making worthwhile friends, I wouldn't have been in that situation.
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.
But isn't one really useful way to learn by having people older and wiser than you step in and explain the situation to everyone involved? You don't just throw a bunch of math symbols at a child and say, "learn how to do arithmetic." You teach them what numbers and numerals are and how to manipulate them. You teach them easier concepts first, and then build on them. That needs to be done for both bullies and their victims, too. Most people will not "just figure it out." That's abusive in itself.
That's definitely true, but I think you've got to know what you're teaching. You can't just teach that bullying is bad, because - while it definitely is - that's not solving the underlying problem. Instead, I think you've got to take an active role in teaching healthy social interactions, especially to those kids who are struggling to figure things out. We need to embrace emotional intelligence as a taught intelligence, where I think all too often we just ignore it with excuses like "that's just who they are".
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.
"The ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of the victim" is the reality that people who are pushing for anti-bullying measures are trying to change.
Well, bullying is many things, and I think the exact issue is that the conversation lacks nuance. As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not. If you are attacked by a group of people, or someone substantially larger than you, then intervention is warranted. Ideally this intervention is carried out by older peers. If you're being bullied by one of your peers, you need to learn the skills to resolve that conflict. Sometimes escalation is the best tool, sometimes avoidance is. There's no panacea, but it's something we all need to learn.
If one of your classmates takes to pushing you around, taking your stuff, embarrassing you, calling you names, etc. This is normal behaviour in apes who are trying to establish a dominance hierarchy. The bully likely sees you as a soft target who is easy to dominate. The best course is to correct that assumption - escalate conflict - fight back, fight dirty. It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. The best way to avoid that is to make friends and be more trouble than you are worth.
In adulthood I’ve never had to resolve a problematic interaction through physical violence, and I hope to never have to. The methods I have used—distancing myself from the bully, reporting to management/HR/oversight agencies—are quite like the methods I used to avoid bullying in childhood. I never used violence back then either.
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.
Good response. Toxic organisations (at whatever scale) fail to maintain an atmosphere where bullying is rejected and people are helped to be their best. Children should be taught to recognise toxic organisations and be given courage to exit them. And internalize that you do this as an adult too. There are situations where assault or battery could arise, and it is good to have some training in how to deal with those situations. Bullying, assault, battery are all abusive: it’s just bullying is legal and the others are not.
Given that my interactions with adults outside of school (and later, when I was pulled out of public school to be homeschooled) were almost always positive, I’m willing to specifically blame school administration and/or their techniques.
I think you problably have some sampling bias in your adult interactions.
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.
"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.
The original assertion I disputed was that we should accept that the social dynamics in a school match those of a prison.
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.
> should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly
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.
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.
Right, I'm suggesting that adults are sufficiently cognitively developed to take personal responsibility for their actions. Children clearly are not. I'm not suggesting we stop punishing bullies, I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment. Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies. Lord of the flies is deemed chillingly instructive for a reason. Children typically age out of this behaviour by their late teens and go on to become functional, peaceful adults. The ones that do not are indeed destined for prison.
Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality.
>Lord of the flies is deemed chillingly instructive for a reason
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?
You can hold schools to any standard you want, but that does not mean it is actually achievable. My point was that being able to meet high standards with functioning adults is not evidence that it can be met with non-functioning children
> It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.
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...
That's just not true. There are many kinds of social relations, dominance being just one particularity nasty one. Other apes also exhibit a whole range of social relations. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog world out there, and most of the time it actually isn't.
Absolutely, and there are many kinds of social interactions at school besides bullying. My point was only that "bullying" is an expression of normal hierarchy negotiation/construction in children and should be treated as such.
> As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not.
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).
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
There seems to be a disconnect between what you think bullying is and how it actually manifests. Between adults, the behavior would be classified as unprovoked assault & battery. Someone punching you in the back of your head while you weren't looking, without a word being said between either of you, because the other person's peer group dared them to is not a failure of the victim's conflict resolution skills.
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 we all read stories about bullied kids, or even this study above, not having help to resolve peer conflict isn't especially useful to kids' development either. So, how exactly should they handle it by themselves? Gang up? Outgun the bullies? I'm sorry but I can't even imagine a good way, any good way, how a bullied nerd kid can get out of bullying by themselves.
So basically you advocate not only educating the own kid, but also educating their peers to intervene, and also educating the older ones to police the area, and educating the adults in the end. Do you really think this is a realistic policy, over the lifetime of your school kid? In an ideal world, no idea, but in this real world Id say zero chance. However I can tell you how it works around here (Switzerland, by no means perfect either) where school personal will usually intervene - and somehow the bullied kids manage to learn their social skills as well. Yes we might be apes but even among apes the social structures are so different that the comparison is mostly meaningless.
This was basically how things have worked and continue to work in (particularly rural) areas where policymaking is lacking and people are left to their own devices. "Bullied" kids seek help from their immediate peers, from their/their peers older siblings, and from adults, roughly in that order. Parents typically do not hesitate to suggest aggressive escalation as a conflict resolution strategy. This strategy is often applied successfully.
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.
My own experience growing up in rural America is not so romantic. Bullies were sometimes those who had a numeric advantage when it came to having relatives who were peers and adults at the school. Their victims, often, outsiders who were not physically strong, had no big siblings to protect them, and were not “favorites” of the teachers. Such children would not benefit from your strategy.
"This was basically how things have worked and continue to work in (particularly rural) areas where policymaking is lacking and people are left to their own devices."
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?
The problem with American zero tolerance policies is not that they attempt to stop violence, but that they find the bullied to be as culpable as the bully, because “participating” in violence is what’s considered wrong, not instigating it.
There isn’t one of these steps that bullied children are not doing that they could do to resolve their issue. If your point is that their issue could be solved with education; well maybe, maybe they need parenting also…
> We do children no favours by intervening in this developmental process.
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.
Like with most things, I think the right move for an adult is to help the child solve the problem themselves, rather than do it for them. As other posts have mentioned, learning when and how to apply violence is a critical skill. We (particularly children) do not live in a post-violence society. Children should of course not feel abandoned by those closest to them, but being overprotective can have its own negative consequences for development.
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.
I got pretty good at avoiding fights with bullies and dumbasses. And I never started a fight. I always made an effort to avoid fighting.
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.
Homicide and suicide are the second and third leading causes of death for teens and young adults following accidents (primarily motor vehicle). (If it matters to you, males are much more likely to die and females are more likely to report bullying.)
Putting aside outliers like kids wity cancer, there is what is diplomatically called "death by misadventure". Or less diplomatically winning a Darwin award.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, if that was everyone's experience being bullied no one would care.
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.
Problem: "Existing research indicates that (a) being bullied in childhood is associated with distress and symptoms of mental health problems...; (b) the consequences of childhood bullying victimisation can persist up to midlife and, in addition to mental health, can impact physical and socioeconomic outcomes."
I don't see how this research controls for the zero tolerance policies which have been in place for a long time, and which lots of research suggests serve to prolong and escalate conflict.
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.
Do you hold this same view about adults and police?
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?
I'm simply pointing to a body of research that shows we have this area of development in common with our ape relations, and that the strategies juvenile apes use to resolve conflict largely apply to children too.
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.
An interesting approach I read - I think it was a novel, honestly, but may have been an autobiography - was that fights were not just tolerated but sanctioned, with one big proviso: In the gym, with boxing gloves and headgear on, and fists only. Going down or taking a knee ends the fight.
Let 'em work out the tension, but with very minimal chance of hurting anything.
I am here for safe and supervised middle school duels. It would have helped me a lot.
I went to a strict religious school and a kid who bullied me over years pushed me too far one day and I started after him, got maybe one kick to his leg in. Teachers stopped me immediately, but never did the same for the years of verbal abuse mocking me for my weight though. I ended up getting spanked by the principal with a thick wooden paddle in front of my teacher that day. This was the mid to late 90s. I heard once the kid who bullied me is in prison now.
You should get the straight facts on that kid and what he did and confront the school over it. They obviously failed across the board with him and probably someone got hurt for him to get time. They could have done things to correct his behavior, instead they punished you for lashing out against his abuse. This needs to show up when people search that school so other parents know how they really are and avoid sending their kids there.
I wonder how many people would be still willing to fight if they were forced to delay for some amount of time (hours?). My hunch is it'd be very few, which would be a win.
I was a peaceful kid and no good at gym class, which played some part in why I was bullied. What benefit would I have received from officially sanctioning my regular physical humiliation?
The bully comes up and shoves a kid around, doing some minor injuries.
The bullied raises the matter to school authorities.
Their solution is "would you like to fight the bully some more?"
---
At what point did the victim want to get involved in this? The victim didn't instigate violence, the victim didn't want to participate in violence, the victim wants the violence to stop and to feel safe at school.
And you propose to instead offer them "would you like to risk more bodily injury engaging in violence?"
Depends, if it becomes chronic rough play you know something might be wrong. If you're close enough and can see that it's asymmetrical and the victim is always the same, someone should intervene.
There is also "rough teasing" which isn't quite bullying --but can turn into bullying sometimes. It often calls for take but give. This typically can happen within your in-group.
Educational policy informed by this research usually looks not to intervene in physical conflict between equally matched (by size/age) peers. It also looks at conflict management and resolution as a primary responsibility of the peer group, rather than the adults/teachers, with the escalation path being to older peers before adults.