I was bullied pretty badly too. I think I have borderline PTSD. If I hear people laughing behind me on the street I freak out and get ready for a fight. If anybody smirks anywhere around me I lose it. That our president is one of these assholes makes me hate America.

I think us grown up victims of bullies ought to get together over the internet and assassinate our former tormentors, Strangers on a Train style.

oops, if you read that the wrong way it sounds like trouble. somebody delete that, please? :)

It's true though, I hate bullies.

I guess this is a example of "socialization" that defenders of the Teacher's union say is missing from students that are homeschooled and why homeschooling is bad and should be banned.

I was bullied, though since I was a girl it was emotional, rather than physical. My best friend in high school got constant, unrelenting comments on her breast size. I think we were all damaged by it.

I do wish the reporter had asked Billy's parents why they hadn't considered switching schools. I sure as hell would have after the first or second ignored incident.

There is only one way to stop bullying. That is to fight back. I speak from experience. Most bullies are all bark and no bite. They taunt and call you names because they can get away with it. Most kids are too frightened to fight back. Once you get the courage to stand up for yourself and fight back, you'll find it a totally different world. In my case, the word got around quick once you stand up to the bully because then people are afraid of you, and the other kids in school perceive you to be a bad ass. Weird how that works.

Persia:
There is only so much parents can do. I know it is different for girls then guys. Guys don't have much choice except to fight back. I don't know what choice girls have.

Yes,JKc, if only those kids would stand up and punch the bigger, stronger, more numerous kids who are bullying them, the world would be a wonderful place for them.

JKc actually has a bit of a point, although not in the way that he thinks. I worked at a social agency for children with learning difficulties (Aspergers, ADD, depression, socialization issues, et cetera) and for the boys the program that was easily far and away the most successful and the most beloved by kid and parent alike was the martial arts program, which combined kung fu training with meditation techniques and temper control methods. It produced kids who could defend themselves and who wouldn't go looking for an excuse to do it. I'd love to see it go widespread.

The weirdest thing was when I got accepted to a private high school, some of the kids at my public middle school tried to start fights with me because this apparently meant I thought I was better than them. And while it's true the best thing to do is punch your tormentor square in the nose, at my school that got you arrested. Which would have meant no private school - I'd have been red-flagged. There's really no easy solution, it wasn't uncommon for me to have panic attacks when I woke up on a schoolday. And I think that might be a relatively common thing.

JKC's point is silly. Most bullying isn't especially violent, just carrying the threat of intimidation and social ostracism. The only encounter I had with violence in my years of being bullied is when the aggressors convinced another nerdy insecure kid to get in a fight with me. It's a lose lose situation where playing along only just gives your tormentors even more amusement.

Not to mention for parts of America where the violent part of bullying is real, it can be legitimately dangerous to get into blows. Kids do die these days you know.

Fortunately I was only nerdy and awkward. God help me if I was gay. The gay teen suicide rate in this country is a national tragedy.

JoePo has a point. Responding with violence is kind of like when Democrats try to respond to Republican smear campaigns with their own smears. Democrats aren't as good at it, so they get called out on it more, and it just crashes against them.

Same with bullying. A group of bullies knows how to intimidate violent or practice it without getting caught. A nervous, insecure outsider is more likely to strike back at a bad time or place, and get in much more trouble or do something stupid that leads to embarassment. Embarassment isn't the worst thing in the world, but you've hardly improved the situation now.

it is terrible.
terrible to watch.
terrible to endure.
especially to a young child.
.....most of the children that i know who are relentlessly brutal to other children dont know how to feel whole within themselves, peaceful in their own skin and so they act out and inflict their rage, jealously and insecurity on others.
and then the second tier bullies participate to feel accepted and for group approval.
it is pretty horrific to watch this kind of juvenile grouphate manifested on one undefended child.
there is some disconnect in a bully's ability to receive and give love at the most intimate levels of childhood.
to be the parent of a bullied child is to feel helpless in the system and frightened for the sake and safety of your child's physical and mental health.
........i am amazed at the numbers of parents who are in denial over the frailties and the problems of children who act out or are in pain.
many parents dont want to accept responsibility or acknowledge when something is wrong.

love is the duct tape that holds the universe together, and without it, there is only chaos.

Hmmm . . . chunky, bespectacled bookworm picked on by schoolmates -- sounds a lot like my (wretched) childhood and adolescence. It was verbal abuse rather than physical, but it left deep psychic wounds that I never have and (I'm sure) never will recover from -- even after years of therapy.

About the only helpful thing the bullying ever did for me was to help me develop empathy for others. And in this way, I think it was one of the things that caused me to become a liberal. Always having been an outsider myself, I instinctively side with the outcasts, the bullied, and various other wretched of the earth.

I think the experience of being an outsider picked on by others is one reason so many gay people are liberal. And also a reason why so many nerds become liberal as well.

And honestly -- I often see politics as the schoolyard writ large. C'mon -- is so hard to imagine George W. Bush obnoxiously taunting his smarter (but less rich and less popular) schoolmates? Rush Limbaugh beating kids up for their lunch money? Ann Coulter egging on the pack of mean girls to sneer at the nerd girl's uncool clothes?

And on the other side, I imagine us uncool nerds who were being picked on making productive use of the our rage at the bullies' dehumanization of us to become passionate advocates for social justice.

Of course, we could also become media wankers who are pathologically inclined to suck up to those above us on the social ladder and viciously attack those below. But as a sentimental sort, I like to think that we former schoolyard outcasts use that traumatic experience to become better human beings, with better politics.

Good post. Yeah, I got it a lot as a kid, almost all verbal. Along with what Chris said, here's an experiment: think back to your childhood. Try to imaginine any of those bullies growing up to be a liberal Democrat. Can you? I didn't think so.

It is the parent's duty to get that kid out of the school and out of the neighborhood. I know they don't want to be pushed out of their home/job, etc. It doesn't matter - get the kid out! It's an evil place.

I was bullied in elementary school. Then, in middle school, I slammed the fingers of one of those kids in my locker and broke one of his fingers. I got suspended, but the next day the kid sought me out and groveled for forgiveness for his past sins. I never got harassed again, and most people treated me like a total bad-ass until I was moved from the area at 16.

I learned a valuable lesson that day: Most bullies just need to be hurt so bad they'd never dream of challenging you again. It would be nice if school systems would treat bullying as a serious problem, but they don't seem to give a fuck. It doesn't help that most school administrators are petty tyrants who agree with the 'might makes right' philosophy of life.

Hand-wringing and (strictly) self-defense classes are giving up (what's to prevent bullies from being better at kung fu?). We have to educate children, and that includes teaching them how to behave decently to each other. If bullying is a problem it's because we don't value social skills enough to devote time and resources to teaching and intervention.

Some bullies are simply oblivious, some are abused and thus abusive, some are just taking advantage of size or strength and getting away with it. There are various types of counseling and/or consequences that could be used in those situations, if we were willing to demand it. Teachers, of course, resent being saddled with yet another impossible task, which is why we need trained school counselors with the power to mandate counseling (or suspension if their parents refuse) for kids who are harassing others. And sadly, it is only the continued threat of lawsuits that will make this happen. But whatever works.

When adults go to work, they don't have to accept being beaten up by coworkers and having their money stolen, because most employers fear legal action and don't want the disruption. Kids should have the same protection.

I was bullied badly as a child and I consider it the biggest failing of the government schools. Nobody seemed to try to address it. I am convinced that it would be easy to greatly reduce bulling but no one seems to care.

Keeping the children from damage in school should be job 1.

I like this by Paul L:

I guess this is a example of "socialization" that defenders of the Teacher's union say is missing from students that are homeschooled and why homeschooling is bad and should be banned.

It seems like getting lots of children together is often a bad idea.

BTW
Redistribution: Blocking the Revenge of the Nerds?
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/redistribution_1.html
One of my pet ideas is the Jock/Nerd Theory of History. If you're reading this, you probably got a taste of it during your K-12 education, when your high grades and book smarts somehow failed to put you at the top of the social pyramid. Jocks ruled the school. If the nerds were lucky, they did the jocks' homework in exchange for decent treatment.

According to the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, most historical human societies bore a striking resemblance to K-12 education. In primitive tribes, for instance, the best hunters are on top. If the the village brain knows what's good for him, he keeps his mouth shut if the best hunter says something stupid. The rise of civilization gave the nerds a better deal, but as long as almost everyone worked in agriculture, brawn continued to pay well.

But then something amazing happened: Nerds got enough breathing room to develop and implement amazing wealth-producing ideas. The process fed on itself, devaluing physical ability and elevating mental ability. Nerds built the modern world - and won handsome financial rewards in the process. (Yes, I'm painting with broad strokes, but bear with me).

I'd say you got the last laugh, Ezra.
I bet none of your childhood tormenters regularly get their kuhl kid faces on the teevee.

I was teased and bullied, and even beaten up as a tween. Maybe I should have fought back, but it's terrifying to be physically attacked by people who are bigger and older than you, frankly I was too scared to ever think of it.

I suppose I should have tried harder to stop it, but I was just a shy, awkward girl who didn't understand why everyone hated her. And I certainly didn't understand why people hated me so much they wanted to hit me.

Maybe that makes me a bad person, for not standing up to them. Maybe I was asking for it. I don't know.

Most bullies just need to be hurt so bad they'd never dream of challenging you again.

We should really fuck-up Chavez.

If I could go back and do it again I would have fought back. It would have been better to have endured the physical beatings if it meant I could have made them pay even a little bit. Nobody tells the bullied that. Nobody tells you that you've got to make them hurt even a little bit.

From my experience, it wasn't the jocks who did the bullying; they usually had enough self-confidence not to get their kicks from picking on others. It was that small group of losers who weren't good enough athletes to make the varsity, and didn't have enough smarts to do well academically, so they put down those who did.

Ezra: Right after you get done stating all you've done since HS, get medieval on them at your ten-year. That's what those things are for.

OK, don't do that. The first part feels good, though (on the other hand, given the HS you went to (my ex GF went there), you'll have a number of pretty successful people--still, surely the bullies haven't done what you have).

I was never bullied as a child because I, in pretty short order, earned a reputation as a mean little bastard.

I always nipped the bullying in the bud. And being gay like the poor kid in the article.

Like everyone else on this thread, I have no magical answer for the bullying problem. I am a teacher, gay, and while I was bullied as a kid, I do think it's my responsibility now to be a role model for how one can be "different" and "ok" at the same time. Our adult culture is pretty mean, and even in our politics, we provide some horrible examples for kids in terms of how to treat people who are not exactly like us.

There's no easy answer, and the linked-to story is particularly violent/heart breaking.

I was teased plenty, mainly in elementary and junior high school, with only one "fight" thrown in there. I wish I had fought back to.

The one time I did was the time we all got taken to the principles office. Of course I got in trouble, but my father got to see the parents of the other guys act like complete assholes (explains why those kids picked on me). And the principle "got it" a bit more after being unjustly berated by the asshole parents.

Just having that kind of validation was worth it (even though I certainly didn't win the fight).

Who cares if it "solves" anything. Beatings, beatings, and more beatings is what a lot of these bullies deserve.

Emjay, you'd have a point except for one thing 'en loco parentis'. Schools fought many hard legal battles to enshrine their right to act as parents when parents aren't unavailable.

They regularly use this discretion to physically discipline children, even when parents specifically tell them not to. They gave up any right to be resentful of having to raise kids when they started arguing that they should have the rights of parents over the children in their care.

Anonymous, picking on the powerful doesn't make you a bully, it makes you a hero.

Reading that story is heart wrenching. I second emjaybee's notion of protection.

The school administration most certainly deserves to be sued in this case. Any proper administrator would have laid out EXPULSION rules if anyone is caught bullying. One bully gets expelled, for actions in OR out of school, the rest get the message. Not to go to far off topic, but I've heard too many second-hand accounts of school administrators who are just plain incompetent. Kids shouldn't suffer because of it.

(BTW, if I were a bully, I would beat the crap out of your damn Captcha, Ezra.)

Arrggg! If it weren't for the captcha, that last comment would have said it was from me...

Okay, I read the article, and after it was done, I asked myself, could I remember anything like that from my school experience, already starting to fade into misty memory? And the answer was yes, back in junior high, and I was one of the ones holding the line, and the kid totally fucking had it coming.

He was just incredibly annoying, and he would just show up and inflict himself upon people without invitation regularly. And as a member of the "smart outcasts" clique, which you would have thought was his natural home, we had to deal with him more than others. Dealing with meaning constantly driving him off.

It was a vicious cycle, really: he had no friends, so he had to find random people to seek attention from, and he didn't have the training to develop the social skills to do it well; because of these things, he was incredibly annoying; because he was incredibly annoying, he had no friends. And I can see how that would suck, but it wasn't really realistic to expect us to do anything about it - an attempt to "bring him into the fold" would just amount to having to suffer through him constantly for weeks if not months, while he drove all your friends off, and if, in the end, you managed to rehabilitate him to something approaching functionality, well congratulations, you'd have a friend who wasn't really any better than any of the other friends you lost in the process, and of a radically lower status besides. Screw that.

I guess this is a example of "socialization" that defenders of the Teacher's union say is missing from students that are homeschooled and why homeschooling is bad and should be banned.

Honestly? I'm tempted to say yes. I knew some ex-homeschoolers in college, and there were a few of them that could have really benefited from getting the self-regard beaten out of them at some point.

I mean, what bullying really does is forces kids to abandon non-viable social stances. I wouldn't be surprised if the issue with this kid is that he's internalized the line passed down from his mom that all people are equally worthy, disagreements should be resolved through reason and compromise, and people should be nice to each other and judge each other on neutral principles, if at all, and he stubbornly acts as if these are actual operating principles of society; when other kids confront him and demand the appropriate propitiation an omega owes an alpha, or hell, a beta, delta, gamma, so on, he responds by trying to live out the fantasy and demanding the same of his tormentors, maybe pointing out that his mom and other forces of Institutionalized Adulthood agree with him, don't you know. At which point he predictably gets the shit beaten out of him.

And the thing is? The lesson he's being taught, that actions are taken not in accordance with abstract ideology, and certainly not his abstract ideology, but rather in keeping with established human power hierarchies? That's an important thing to learn! Easily five times more important than the Water Cycle and the Battle of Trenton put together.

You have to fight back, Ender's game style. Adults won't step in at school, and you better get your kids ready to fight if they are likely to be bullied. Martial arts really helps, not even because of the fighting but because it develops awareness skills so you don't get into fights you can't win.

Right in the article, I believe it said that the parents would not consider moving school districts. It didn't say why, so we can only speculate. As a result, although the parents are clearly concerned, the tools they can use to the fix the problem (complaining to the school and other parents) don't seem to work. That they feel like they should work, but don't seems a little beside the point when their son is still being bullied.

A lot of this stuff is about context, though. Kids who are different, or have poor social skills seem most likely to be bullied. Still, I feel for this kid. Kids who are bullied because they are seen as "too smart" can usually find a way out of that situation by the time they go to college and can find like-minded peers to hang around with. But where's he going to go after high school?

I mean, what bullying really does is forces kids to abandon non-viable social stances

Correct. Like being gay. Or being uninterested in the interests of the group. Or, as you say, failure to propitiate/participate in the rituals demanded by the savages.

You've told us that this is what bullying does, but you haven't made a case that what it does is valuable or worth encouraging.

Since Columbine there's at least been some efforts to take bullying seriously. When there was a problem, I was very encouraged by the principal in my son's elementary school calling all the boys from his class in and telling them that bullying and exclusion wouldn't be accepted. It made a difference.

See this website for a gov't program that makes some materials available:
http://stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/index.asp

You've told us that this is what bullying does, but you haven't made a case that what it does is valuable or worth encouraging.

Prepares people to operate in fields dominated by humans.

C'mon. Fighting back is not an option for 98% of bullying situations. Bullies are older, larger and run in packs. The only real solutions are serious intervention, leaving the situation or managing to grow large enough to avoid the situation. Back in the '60s the first two options were not typically available. I was lucky and grew out of my problem.

But as a 90lb freshman in HS I was in no position to deal with a pack when cornered. The leader of the pack was a punk in a 6' adult's body. Primary bullies are not emotionally insecure. They bully because they are self assured and they can get away with it. It is a blood sport. The lesser members of the pack are vulnerable and I was able to deal with them the few times they miscalculated and tried it on their own. But bullying is typically a pack phenomenon and the bullied individual has few viable options.

I mean, I guess I should clarify, I'm not suggesting that the ideal response to "learning your lesson" is submission - though as a strategy, that would probably be more functional than running into that wall again. More preferred would be to attempt to claim a better place in the hierarchy, and a lot of people's responses here are really suggestions on how to do that - make allies, pick your battles, act with an eye towards spectacle and creating an impression - but first you have to realize that the hierarchy is the venue of the battle.

Senescent, the hierarchy is:

Teachers on top
Students below

Bullying is an attempt for the students below to claim their own power, based in the delusion that they are better than anyone else, and the job of the teacher is to stop that from happening, because it interferes with the school's learning process and school's mission.

Tyro -

That's cute.

I should note that certainly there are personalities that gravitate towards wanting to be a part of social hierarchies, and these are the sort of people who go on to join corporate law firms and learn to enjoy office politics. That's fine, but schools have an academic mission, and I while certainly plenty of students enjoy forming these mini-hierarchies on their own time, it's the job of the school to basically create a large enough space where anyone who wants to opt out of the anti-curricular games can do so in peace. And, not to mention, not enable it.

I'm of the opinion, contra Senescent, that letting kids figure out how to deal with social dynamics between themselves, demon-beings that they are is probably a bad idea, in the same way that we don't put kids behind the wheel of a car and just let them drive unsupervised. Otherwise, you just end up with the "kick down" phenomenon.

Senescent - blaming the victim, particularly when the victim is a child, is ugly.

Okay. And it's human. And if you're unable to sympathize with it and understand it from within, that's no less a blind spot in your understanding of humanity as an inability to sympathize with victims.

You can win a fight with a bigger guy if you are mean enough. After a few swirlies at my lord of the flies middle school I learned that knees, head butts and going for the balls right away will get people to leave you alone even if you are giving up 100 lbs. And, like I said, martial arts teaches you to pick your fights.

These are good lessons for progressives. FDR and LBJ played hardball and that's how they got progress. Progressives have to learn not to bring knives to gun fights.

When adults go to work, they don't have to accept being beaten up by coworkers and having their money stolen, because most employers fear legal action and don't want the disruption. Kids should have the same protection.

Easy to say, but companies can fire people; schools are strongly discouraged from expelling kids, and even if they do expel them, that just passes the problem to the next school. And if you think that in all schools getting one of the bully's expelled has any effect on the other kids...well, you're talking about kids at a middle/upper middle class school, not *all* schools.

I am surprised at the responce from the mostly Democrat audience here, as they seem quite anti-bully.

Since most bullies are stupid thugs and not jocks and so end up at the bottom of society and earnings. So why do you want to take money from the nerds and give it indescriminatly to the lower class (which includes the bullies)?

BTW in my case after the 6th grade most of the bullies stoped going to school. I think that was a good thing.

I mean, what bullying really does is forces kids to abandon non-viable social stances.

This is the real "trouble with boys", the real reason why lower-income males fall so far behind lower-income females. It's not because of boy-hating female teachers, it's because the social stances that are "viable" in stupid high-school status game world are complete dead-ends in the marketplace.

The lesson he's being taught, that actions are taken not in accordance with abstract ideology, and certainly not his abstract ideology, but rather in keeping with established human power hierarchies?

Yeah, but it's the wrong hierarchy. What we have is a competition among hierarchies--an achievement/creativity ranking that will serve them well throughout their lives, or a ranking of who sprouts facial hair first that looks really stupid in retrospect.

Take off and nuke the place from orbit. I mean, move to another district and leave twenty lawsuits in your wake. That's what a grownup would--and ought--to do if they found themselves being bullied. The only true victory is choosing the game. If you want your kids to grow up to be criminals, then by all means encourage them to actually fight their bullies. If you actually respect your children, you'll make sure they know that they're too important to be bothered with unworthy bullshit like schoolyard bullying.

And if you're unable to sympathize with it and understand it from within, that's no less a blind spot in your understanding of humanity as an inability to sympathize with victims.

Oh, I sympathize. I understand the world today is a complicated place, and it's easy to miss the limited amount of power you might have had as a kid. Now you have to put up with meetings, paperwork, lawyers--if only we could just knock people back into line when they're acting "non-viable"--it was so much easier! Those were the days.

So, yeah, I sympathize with your delusion as I sympathize with all victims of disease.

Get well soon.

Eh, I oversold some points in caffeinated argument-seeking, trying to catch Great Themes by their very corners.

What it really was was I read the article, sympathized totally with the kid, thought "no one deserves something like that", and then thought "except that kid I knew who totally deserved it", and both thoughts were compelling and diametric and I used you to work that through in words.

That's more reasonable, but I hope you learned from your experience that when it comes to attention-seeking behavior, there's no such thing as negative attention.

It's a Catch 22, the only ones who you'd deem to "deserve" bullying may have actually wanted it.

Since most bullies are stupid thugs and not jocks and so end up at the bottom of society and earnings. So why do you want to take money from the nerds and give it indescriminatly to the lower class (which includes the bullies)?

Well, the bullies I ran into were NOT stupid thugs. When I went to a diverse public school, never ran into bullying. My parents moved to an upper middle class, lily white neighborhood where I ended up picked on because I didn't have top of the line clothes, mother worked, etc. Those people are now the captains of industry and I want to see them bled dry.

As noted by several posters, the admonition to fight back assumes a sufficiently even match of fighters. More typically, however, the bully is bigger, stronger, more aggressive, has been in lots of fights, and, by definition, has less inhibition about hurting other people. Not to mention, often having plenty of back up mouthpiece assholes wanting to share the bully's power.

Instead of "fighting back," the only physical recourse that would be effective is to get the advantage of surprise and weaponry, and press that advantage until the balance of physical power is permanently changed -- I'm talking here about the bully turning a corner and having his face meet a baseball bat, and then being beaten until he is so permantly crippled that he is physically incapable of being a threat to anybody ever again.

Since this approach has obvious drawbacks (loss of future), I am no closer to a solution. I was lucky -- between 9th and 10th grade, I grew a lot physically, started dressing like the other kids, got back into sports, and fit in with a new, less marginalized crowd. The memories of being bullied can still trigger pretty deep anger, as I assume shows through in this post.

This is the best essay I've seem on bullying. I hope everyone's read it already, but just in case:

www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

The Paul Graham essay is a good read but it is not really about bullying. It is about HS popularity, and especially the unpopularity of the nerd. It is a related topic, but not really the same thing. Not all nerds are bullied and those bullied are not all nerds.

A comment above referenced the unpopular kid who tries to join a popular group and is rejected. This is not the same thing either. Bullying occurs when a group actively seeks out an individual for the purpose of entertainment by cruelty. The bullying I experienced and witnessed was always public and was always by a group. Individual efforts tended to be by those lesser members of the pack who really did not understand the process.