1) 13% just doesn't seem like a lot to me
2) I wonder what those other studies showed.
it's never too late
> deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists...
which is answered by O'Brien (in part III):
> ...How does a man assert his power over another, Winston?" Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.
* Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)
And of course the goal is to prevent bullying from being reported so this is an absolute win for educators.
Nietzsche had written extensively about this way before.
Nowadays we know that humans (and other animals) bully because they derive immense health benefits from being the aggressor.
Those benefits are trivial to detect many decades after the fact.
Until those benefits are offset by a hefty price to pay, nothing will change.
They showed one elementary school where the entire organization (teachers, students, staff etc) implemented some kind of holistic approach to bullying that actually worked. They even interviewed a group of kids where they said "Oh yeah, Tom used to be the bully and we were all afraid of him but now we're all best friends".
I don't remember the exact plan implemented but it struck me as both simple and common sense with excellent outcomes.
Despite much searching on IMDB, Twitter, Google and even using LLMs, I have yet to find the exact episode. Now that I have kids of my own, I'm even more interested in finding it. Any suggestions from the HN crowd?
I don't mean to say bullying is good but I personally am thankful to my high school bully for keeping me focused on computers (Thanks Fred, I owe you a beer next time we run into each other).
I would guess it's a combination of "nobody sees the first hit" (since your attention is elsewhere, of course) and that bullies get quite good at testing boundaries and thus know how to avoid detection.
But, really, it's truly frustrating that as I child I was bullied relentlessly, and when I finally took my parents advice and stood my ground, I was expelled from school (due to zero tolerance). Those bullies continued to torment some other kids, of course.
This is far from an uncommon situation, over the years I've heard many more scenarios like this.
It’s good to be satisfied with where your life has taken you, but that’s because you can’t actually change what’s happened and you can’t know how it might have gone otherwise.
How did you stand your ground?
When I got the paperwork saying I was out, my parents sent back all the correspondence with the school, the dates the bully bothered me, and the responses (or lack thereof) from the school. I was reinstated and the bully went to another district.
Bullying in my day was at least bearable because it was confined to times when I was physically near the bully. Kids today have it so much worse with social media. It's genuinely terrifying. I don't wonder why many teens are anxious. Everything they do is documented.
Students all want the same thing: status, popularity, etc. Not everyone can these things though. Their scarcity is their value. The competition over this finite resource creates conflict and hostility. This pent up hostility has to be channeled to avoid chaos. A scapegoat is informally agreed upon: the oddball, the misfit, the outcast. These people are all the more obvious due to the extreme herding that happens in schools. The bully acts as the "executioner" of this "sacrifice". The boundaries of group unity are enforced, the shared complicity enforcing cohesion, and group identity and control are upheld.
I remember from my school days how much hostility was directed toward people who wouldn't or couldn't "fit in". I even internalized those feelings. "Why won't he/she just act normal?"
I'm not fully sold on Gerard, but his theories are kind of mesmerizing in their pat explanation of group dynamics.
I should add that this was after the day before when they had caught me walking home and pushed me into the local pond (during winter) and that the necklace was given to me by my great grandfather that had died very recently (and the bully knew that). In hindsight, I shouldn't have been wearing it.
So I punched him in the face, he reeled a little and his friends went to work on me before a teacher stepped in- as they were the other side of the play-ground and needed to close the distance.
Unfortunately all they'd seen was me hitting the bully.
So, expelled.
Maybe there are many more people who got bullied and got negative effects of their self-worth and confidence which lead to them struggle in one way or another professionally and socially. Maybe there isn't that many too.
According to popular science that is.
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...).
Overly harsh consequences are only fair if detection of the responsible/initiating party is foolproof.
Some tolerance and considering circumstances is actually the sensible way to handle most anything. But that sounds like being "soft on crime", and the PR side is usually more important than the actual problem.
I disagree. I think that the person who is bullied is primarily selected by the bully, and the only influence that others have is that the bullied person doesn't have enough (or large enough) others around them in order to defend them. Others may then pile in once the target has been selected, but it's not in any way a collective decision.
You could just as well say that society chooses the people who get mugged, or the people whose houses are burglarized, or the people who are raped or murdered. I'm sure you could come up with some neo-Freudian way to convince somebody that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense. It's generalization to the point of uselessness if not complete absurdity.
I was bullied as a child. I was picked because I was an easy, bookish target without many friends, and definitely without tough friends. The bullying ended when I hurt a bully in a way that everyone found out about, and that state was maintained when I made a group of friends who would have defended me if a bully had approached me. The cause of all of this was obvious, not subtle or mysterious.
If you look at the suicide rate of children under 14 month-to-month, they only stop killing themselves when they're not forced to go to school (Summer and Winter vacation).
Probably the only place in your entire life that you'll be subject to physical and emotional violence.
Calls to "abolish the department of education" are going to get louder and louder.
All without addressing the underlying problem that made people afraid of Tom in the first place?
> with excellent outcomes.
Apparently excellent short term outcomes. The real question is does this actually solve the long term problem and is it possible that the strategies used to create this outcome actually aggravate long term outcomes?
"Assert" implies O'Brien has already chosen the punitive route. In other words, O'Brien is not revealing some deep secret of human power dynamics. Instead, O'Brien is giving a self congratulatory self justifying explanation for his wrong doing.
I don't get it. Anything a bully can do to you over social media, they can also do to you without using the internet at all. Anything they needed to be near you to do, they still need to be near you to do.
Maybe it’s a feature of industrial education - enable creation of compliant adults where bullying is disproportionately allowed by tolerating it, and also build bullies to manage future compliant adults.
Bullying is everywhere including in the ranks of teachers and leadership in a school. Those who play the game of bureaucracy (bureaucracy must survive at any costs) must concede to enabling a system of too often failing upwards while standing on the capable folks.
Too many schools abdicate their responsibility and hide behind doing their job and turn it into a daycare of expecting children to figure it out on their own.
Bullying too often is toxic parenting coming to school.
Standing up for one’s self in the right circumstance, especially when the leaders, institutions and experts in our lives, especially as children intentionally traumatizes children that the world is like this, and because it doesn’t bother teachers or affect them it will only get so much attention.
Are you sure? Your assessment is probably specific to regional experience; I'd probably have agreed with you at another point in my life. It's not something I was familiar with before living here, and it's not the same kind of (hierarchical/organizational/bureaucratic) power alluded to in the quoted passage, but in Austin I'm acutely aware that a not-insignificant subset of "normal" people here seem to be driven to seek enough power in whatever position they occupy that will allow them to make others miserable. I see it in people here who are nasty to me for no reason, and I see it in people here who are nice to me but nasty to others for no reason.
It's a shame that "the cruelty is the point" is so tightly bound to politics, because it captures in a few words a perfect description of the phenomenon.
Yes, this is how the crowd selects the target. It's implicit in the fact that the crowd has indicated they won't defend the target
"Having no friends" is a signal that the herd isn't going to do anything to help you
the reason I said assume there is because I went to school before social media - but my biggest bully was my dad, so it was impossible to completely escape the bullying. in fact I loved going to school, because those bullies I could handle. I gave them as much grief as I took. but the one at home I was stuck with, because he controlled all my movements and time with people outside school hours.
I expect cyberbullying isn't very different, traumatically speaking.
But "disciplining" someone that is acting weird on the other hand is the right thing to do, that is not "bullying" to them. But for the person that becomes the subject of this it becomes, "you sit wrong", "you talk wrong", "you eat wrong", "your sense of humor is wrong" until it feels like you can't do anything right. Some people even think they can fix your "wrong" behavior by hitting you, and then it becomes physical bullying.
A lot of people wanna believe that bullying is like the fist scenario because that is easier than actually having to start accepting people the way they are - even if they are a little "weird".
The ”bullies” who beat me up in elementary school all went ahead to have careers in things like dealing kilos of meth and torturing people to death.
Not hyperbole, btw.
This perpetuates the myth that "real" bullying is physical and that psychological abuse is not bullying. Most of the bullying i've seen was psychological and partially material (usually taking things from the target or damaging them).
The only instances where i've seen physical bullying were in low grades where the children had not yet developed the mental capacity for creative verbal abuse or in higher grades where bullying was left unchecked for so long that the aggressors felt confident they could get away with it.
If you're going to rely on this dynamic, then you're going to have this consideration.
In the past, it was normal and encouraged to use any tools available to you to defend yourself. Psychological abuse is still abuse and you have the right to defend yourself, the most natural, available and effective immediate defensive tool being violence.
In recent years, violence has become a massive taboo. It's a tool that is universally labelled as bad no matter the circumstances. Instead, everyone is encouraged to portray a "good victim" by demonstrating helplessness and waiting/hoping for people in positions of power to help.
It is at the minimum of very different kind of self-justification than what you'd usually expect from a villain.
When Winston answers with the the expected "for your own good" narrative, O'Brien rejects it and punishes him for it:
> The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing.
One of my favourite stories is that my wife went to watch a court case and it was one of my childhood bullies. He was up for forcible confinement. She thought she recognized the name.
I also read in the news (with great satisfaction) that his brother, who was part of the group, had been tasered and beat for resisting arrest.
Sometimes you get what is coming to you. They’re all trash and I think I turned out alright. In a weird way, I think it does build character and resilience.
Even just as text, you can get dog-piled: we evolved to be social creatures, and for groups of 150-200; for most of us, if we're called names by that many people in quick succession, it breaks us. That's a small online mob, as these things go.
But bullies these days also have effectively zero marginal cost cameras, so they can take as much video as it takes waiting for you to mess up, then do a Cardinal Richelieu — "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
In my day, you could take up to about 24 pictures quickly before needing to take the film out and put new film in, and that would take a while to develop and actually cost money, so that just didn't happen (that I've heard of).
But it's not just taking photos of things that actually happened and misrepresenting them, even one picture is enough to put your classmates into AI generated porn… which is, as you may expect, a thing that kids these days are getting into trouble for doing. In my day, such image manipulation was manual and expensive* and therefore reserved for celebrities, though I doubt that's any real relief to Sarah Michelle Gellar in one example I remember, nor to GWB and (today the relatives of) bin Laden in the other.
* we had a single copy of Photoshop… donated to the art department, which had only one (old) Mac on which to run it. Hard to pirate that kind of software back then even if you knew how to use it, definitely couldn't get unsupervised access to that machine.
But it's not just still images these days, a brief audio recording of your voice and that can also be synthesised. Dictaphones were just starting to get affordable in my last year of mandatory education, and we pranked a teacher by mixing their last lesson with new age relaxation music, burning a CD of that, printed a cover saying something about curing insomnia, and giving it to them as a "last day gift". Now everyone has a dictaphone in their pocket, now you can synthesise anyone's voice saying anything, make images of them appearing to do anything. And a world where those things are, for now, still often treated as if they were real.
But even just text, the internet made it a different world than when I was at school. The psychological impact of being told you, personally, are Officially Bad, that's something that sticks with us and hurts us even when it comes from a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism caused by someone on the other side of the planet who had no business talking to us in the first place; and that distant person can be incited to form part of a mob by a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism.
The rules of the school no doubt forbid physical violence and expect children to use a process set up by the system to defend themselves against bullying / being wronged. That system failed and because you rightfully saw your son's right to self defense more important than following the rules, you encouraged him to defend himself outsides the confines of the system and its rules.
Later both you and your son were bullied / wronged by the principal. The rules of the state you live in ("laws") no doubt forbid physical violence / being wronged. That system failed...
Again, the other reply about not really knowing how you'd turn out applies to me, but it's hard not to think about it.
I don't want to come off like I'm shilling my blog, but last year I finally opened up about being bullied. The second post on the matter specifically talks about how I feel about it as an adult: https://callmeo.live/blog/childhood-bullying-ii-aftermath/
If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create photoshopped images of you with?", why would you attribute that to social media?
I said, to punish a nonviolent intervention would only incentivize future reactions would be violent, they had to think about their policy, because as I put it, “if grabbing their wrist for self defence was going to be punished the same as me punching them in the face” I’d settle for brutal violence in the hopes to persuade others not to hit me.
Children vs principals with masters degrees in a logic debate and the kids win. Sad
2. People here like to act like it didn’t happen to them. If you didn’t see it, it still happened. Nerds are hated in America because life imitates the shitty art of John Hughes et al.
There are internal and external norms and even norms within each category have different levels of importance.
External norms are typically of the nature of "no fighting" and are enforced without looking at the circumstances. Their goal is for somebody perceived as an authority to keep the group pacified and minimize visible conflict. They are typically not interested in invisible conflict because by its nature, the external power can't see it.
The goal is not justice, it's peace.
Internal norms are fuzzy because they're usually not codified and might not even be agreed upon by the members of the group because their goal is maintaining a social hierarchy within the group.
The hierarchy's goal is neither peace nor justice, it doesn't even have a goal, it's just a compromise between people with differing goals - some entirely uninterested in the hierarchy, some obsessed with climbing the social ladder.
I'm also glad I had people around me who pushed me to overcome the bullying rather than telling me I was a victim of it. In my experience people who are taught they are a victim of bullying who most struggle with it. These people believe bullying t be abnormal and expect the world to fix it. But unfortunately bullying is normal and unless you learn to overcome it you'll always be at risk of being a victim of it
To physically bully you before with a compromising (but fake) photo, the bully would need to physically distribute said images to the presence of your friends and family, which requires time, knowledge of their location, etc. Not so now; if you used a social network and they could see connections to other users (such as family members) then they can just follow those connections by messaging those people directly.
That difference in scale and ease for the bully is real vis-a-vis physically vs social media.
Avoid all mistakes. (Even if it mean not trying)
The principal is in a position of power which cannot be held accountable within the confines of the system. Such positions are ripe for abuse and in fact attract people who want to abuse power.
As a society, we should design rule systems in such a way that each position can be held accountable.
Bullying is always wrong according to everyone, but that person being bullied is always the exception. “If they could just act in another way we wouldn’t be “forced” to do this to him/her.”
The key rule about fighting back that is never taught is: don’t get caught.
In adult years I came across him on Facebook and he was wearing biker gang clothing/insignia. Of course the persistently exiled/bullied kid turns to organized crime later in life - the perfect system to exploit his endlessly-neglected need for inclusion and protection.
Now I'm extra curious about some of the other people who actively harmed others. Not going to waste my time thinking more than this momentary passing thought about them, though :P
Also from there: "What does the research show? The most highly revered and intensive anti-bullying programs rarely produce more than a minor reduction in bullying and often lead to an increase. A large-scale study conducted by the University of Texas at Arlington found that kids who attend schools with anti-bullying programs are more likely to be bullied than kids who attend schools without such programs. Why? And how can schools determine what is more likely to be effective? ..."
And: "Bullies to Buddies teaches how to understand the Golden Rule as a scientific, psychological formula and how to apply it in real life. It provides materials and training to students, school staff, mental health professionals, and parents. Because the lessons are simple yet counterintuitive and taught largely via entertaining role-plays, they enable people to quickly understand their mistakes and how to rectify them. Rather than teaching students that they need to rely on others to protect them from each other, Bullies to Buddies teaches them how to solve their social problems on their own.
What students learn:
* The “optical illusion” that causes bullying
* How to use the Golden Rule to stop being bullied without anyone’s help, including dealing with:
* Verbal attacks
* Rumors
* Physical aggression and threats
* Social exclusion
* Cyberbullying
As a result, kids grow in happiness, resilience, independence, and emotional maturity. These techniques will unleash their sense of humor and make them more popular with their peers. And they will get along better with their parents, teachers, and siblings."
To be clear, Izzy Kalman also outlines situations where the approach works (e.g. teasing, name calling, rumors, shoving) and where it doesn't (e.g. serious physical violence). And he also points out that while the approach may greatly reduce issues it may not resolve all issues. There is a certain low-level of social negativity people have to learn to live with (as contrasted with "zero tolerance" policies where people can learn to game the system to use it to bully others).
There is a videos section on the site with a a couple dozen of videos. Example showing in general the distinction between most programs (modify the entire social environment) and what Izzy Kalman suggests (train the person suffering in skills of resilience and social interaction): "The Golden Rule System - Simple Solution to Bullying" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVVAx_kGM7w
Example showing to learn to deal with (mild) physical aggression: "Magic Response for Physical Aggression" - Bullying Prevention for Educators" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRPusaSSqqE
Example of Izzy Kalman applying ideas to recent violent events: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/resilience-to-bull...
The number of survivors that ended up in gangs is significant. It’s an utterly shameful part of New Zealand history.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/07/25/state-care-has-key-role-i...
https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/about-us/news/gangs-first-eve...
Same with recording silly videos or taking photos of themselves to share with friends. When the relationship turns sour, that is raw material to humiliate the other.
This presupposes that the popular and not "off" kids aren't bullying each other. They are. It, too, can be really cruel.
This also does some heavy victim blaming about who's getting physical first, after you've insulted the target by calling them "off".
Obviously “normal” teasing or “lite” bullying aren’t the reason bullying can be so psychologically traumatic. But I feel any approach can’t be quite right if it fights bullying by dehumanizing bullies. Especially since “hurt people hurt people” and kids are kids.
Not that anyone needs to stand up for bullies, but you know, I’m curious if someone has an opinion about this.
Well, that's bullshit. Often the "traditional response" (at least in my day) was to blame the person being bullied, sometimes along with the bully as well.
I'd guess that the racial and economic demographics of the particular schools in question are much more relevant.
Because being either too tall or too short means a person should get fucked up every day, because they deserve clearly it. (/s)
Is that what you're saying?
Your concept of what a "good kid" is seems a bit off?
If they're being a bully, then aren't they by definition not real good, regardless of how they're pretending towards others?
> Thanks Fred, I owe you a beer next time we run into each other
Please don't encourage others to be bullies.
It's easy to imagine a school with cameras in every hall, and when it benefits those in power, the "tapes are pulled", but when it might help a pleb, it's too much of a hassle to pull the tapes.
No, it is done that way by purposeful intent, though you wouldn't recognize it as such without having studied and having a certain level of exposure to how torture works in reality (really dark stuff).
Bullying is a combination of physical and mental coercion. During Mao, the Chinese government discovered a number of ways to torture people to the point where they adopt false ideologies (effectively breaking them) for thought reform purposes.
These techniques are often embedded today in the structures used by teachers and they have predictable results. If the exposure is ongoing, people break, either through disassociation (helplessness/suicide), or psychosis seeking annihilation externally (albeit a semi-lucid psychosis capable of planning).
This is torture for thought reform, and Active shooters seem to fall into the latter bucket quite prominently. Unfortunately, Technology has made the ephemeral steps needed to do this (previously physically), possible (remotely).
Joost Meerloo, and Robert Lifton wrote about these structures and observations professionally covering the developments of the subject matter from WW2 through the Korean Conflict (1944-1960). They are well established experts.
Academia has a long problematic history of supporting things related to marxism. The most common telltale sign is that of circular structures (hegelian dialectic, or the abuse of the contrast principle). These are used to create convincing lies/deceits, critical theory (cultural-marxism/ i.e. the woke), originated from Marxists/Communists/Socialists (whose structure is almost objectively identical).
There are people in these systems who in action promote communism, while claiming otherwise. Whether they are lying, or are just delusional its hard to say but as I mentioned the telltale sign is circular structures. The first thing you need for rationalism is a common shared definition (what is called identity in philosophy). Then you can hold accountability following a system of logic. Without it, there is no accountability, and you can just as easily claim the exact opposite of the situation (Falsely), with no way to prove otherwise.
If you want an introduction to this not mired in a quagmire of deceit, I'd suggest Mises on Socialism (circa 1930s), it provides a rational introduction to the objective structure of such, without needing a lot of discernment to combat deceitful circular narratives inevitably found in other material.
Getting back to bullying, and torture, the gist is, all that is needed to coerce is components of isolation, lack of agency (on the part of the subject), and increasing cognitive dissonance. Its only then a matter of time and exposure, and certain structures allow meeting this criteria simultaneously for multiple different groups at once.
One such structure is called the hot potato, where a student is called out in front of class to answer a question. Usually fact questions are mixed in with thought reform opinions, and the student is not informed to mount a reliable defense. The subject when called is anxious or nervous, disapproval of their peers may result in bullying, lack of opportunity, or social stigma. This is determined and reflected by the approval or disapproval of the teacher in answering the question or correcting the question. Any disagreement is a reflection of disapproval. The more disagreement, the more disapproval.
There are always those seeking approval in the peer group, where disapproval results in those members bullying and harassment, or shunning, to seek approval, albeit arbitrarily with no explicit direction. This almost always happens outside class.
This structure induces both subject and peer group to participate in the dynamics, and in truth both are victims, since the harassment/needs of the peer group require them to act in ways that are consistent with the teachers approval (consistency principle). It doesn't matter if the teacher condemns such behavior verbally.
The idea of a struggle session (Maoist), is that you make life intolerable arbitrarily until you meet some unstated arbitrary measure. The subject is gaslit to believe its their fault, if only you would confess or agree (which invokes consistency). Sometimes there is no measure and its unending.
The route of effect is the same way we develop our identity and culture through communication within a community. Reflected Appraisal. As you are isolated, those you see most you begin to trust, they inadvertently affect you more until full conformity and adoption.
You generally must be in a vulnerable state either naturally (developmentally), or induced (through torture), to adopt behaviors in this way. The latter is effectively involuntary hypnotic suggestion which is induced.
These structures distort reflected appraisal, and use other sophisticated psychological biases to indoctrinate for purpose (avoiding critical thought/perception).
Unless you know what to look for, you don't even notice it being used against you to manipulate you. It is not of the flesh but over flesh. The seen and unseen. Tolkien often took inspiration from the bible, and Amazon's Rings of power are masterfully done in the way it depicts this subject matter.
If you've ever seen the movie Focus, what is described with choosing the player and number for the gambling con is truthful, and you can do far more than just that narrow example. Much of the foundational subject matter for these things was originally taught in a classical education (pre-prussian model of education), under Rhetoric. Science has allowed us to further probe what was known back then, effectively breaking perception, which reminds me of the Tower of Babel story.
If you would like a crash course in the blind spots, Robert Cialdini wrote a book, though he refers to them as levers of influence, unfortunately he doesn't touch on reflected appraisal in depth. The book is called Influence. Its been recognized in the US by members of the state department.
Many of these structural elements have been repackaged so as to obscure the fact that these originated from torture.
The Octalysis framework for game development for example hits most of these indirectly (albeit perfectly), but this is not an isolated example. Variations of the same structures are everywhere from business process, to CSR doom loops, basically anywhere you want to impose cost to coerce people against a specific behavior; these are used.
These situations and outcomes are by design, they are subtle and malign evil people often pretend, or rather believe that they are good. Know an evil person by the willful blindness they show to the consequences of their action, know an evil act by the destructive outcome that follows.
Know sloth by its more modern name, complacency (also the banality of evil), which turns towards radical evil.
If you would understand how these things happen, a thorough study of corruption, systems (and failures of such), history, and ruin are needed. Few get this education with modern curricula. Classical Curricula follow the greeks, (Trivium/Quadrivium). The rise and fall of the Roman Republic to Imperial Rome is also quite illustrative, and Social Contract Theory is a must (to understand what changes have caused civilized society to fail). The latter include Locke, Kant, Rosseau, Thomas Paine, and a few others.
Sometimes, people are just predators, and when prey doesn't exist, they manufacture it.
I personally see my accomplishments as in spite of the bullying, not because of. And I'd wager this is a fair bit more common of a view.
My bullies were not "keeping me focused on computers" when they dragged me, kicking and screaming, into a stall in a restroom against my will, with the stated intent to further assault me further, including dunking my head & face into a shit-clogged toilet.
I could do without having lived through the verbal abuse, the physical assault, the panic attacks decades later, and the mental disorders that I now am trying to conquer through therapy.
If you have a reason why it's bad then just say the reason. Don't ask insinuative questions.
It's not merely
> You're now comparatively better because others are now worse.
You are really better in absolute terms at their expense.
These effects last decades!
Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying to you.
She then removed the problem parent from the school's roster the only way available.
In fifth grade, however, one teacher confronting the bullying did change the entire tenor of things for that year and the next (then I moved and graduated).
Which is to say, all the posters here hot to recommend fighting back as some kind of solution. Stop, just don't. Schools need systems for stopping bullying and those system are social changes. "What about the fight-backers" is someone's cowboy trip.
Anecdotally, I popped my bully in the mouth and stopped getting harassed.
I'd probably correct this to be, "invented by slothfully complacent parents who raised evil people.
Seems more accurate and likely, and fits objective externally verifiable definitions of evil people (willfully blind to the consequences of their actions) at least in retrospect.
You can learn so much about lost knowledge from reading old books.
There’s obviously some other complexity but i think this sums up a lot of the most common reasons that almost every kids will give/receive at some point. Some kids are just pure evil and enjoy inflicting pain, that’s out there but less common.
This is an excuse. Not a reason.
Based only on people's status and the way they look, certain affordances are made.
The bullies are effectively permitted to bully.
The bullied prevented from fighting back.
The zero tolerance is the excuse (not reason) used to implement that.
This is trivially tested by reversing the roles.
If the bullied becomes the bully, the punishment is not reversed.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/education/recognising-switzerla...
100K children, up to the 1980s, but who knows what's happening nowadays.
Name and shame the principal and school. Nothing changes otherwise!
Call the local media, father & son duo to be arrested from sidewalk in front of school official's home for camping in protest of his son's expulsion after protesting a wrongful suspension. (Repeat for the bully's home, then back to the principal's, then run for the school board and when you win make that principal's life hell in that district. Bury a kilo of cocaine in her back yard and phone a tip in. Etc.)
School mismanagement of bullying (and of course first and foremost bad parenting) breeds narcissists and psychopaths. Who then work their way into positions of control and power to continue to implement the same literally insane principles of punishment and force them onto others to make others suffer the same hell they suffer, out of a deep seated and misdirected desire for revenge.
Restorative justice would be key to break this cycle, but of course narcissists know to prevent this from happening.
The problem in your formulation is that the bully gets to label what feels 'weird' to him. There is no universal definition of weird; it is entirely the bully's world. A victim can be shy. A victim can have an interest that the bully feels threatened by. A victim could simply not have enough friends yet (being new at school, for example), and the power imbalance is there for the taking.
After all of that, I contacted my friend who happened to be on the School Board. He got me in touch with the Deputy Superintendent, who got my son placed in another (excellent) in-district school, where he excelled.
Both of my parents were teachers, and I'm familiar with school politics and their fiefdoms. If I had not had the benefit of this knowledge, we probably would have switched to a private school.
Why would you let your child use social media?
Simple; the one kid tells everyone what the other kid said.
I told my daughter's teacher that we fully intend to support her if she needs to fight back physically and the teacher seemed really surprised (mind you, she's a star student and not someone they think of as "trouble"). Of course, if people hurt her, it means the school failed in the first place.
The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn't just straight up mean.
If anything, social media would give that kid more opportunities to find a group that will accept them.
This might be a European take, but we used to actually visit each other. When I was a kid, you'd only rarely hang out at home. You'd mostly be out with the other kids at a playground, someone's house, or downtown.
Keeping people out of those "shared but private" spaces was part of the bullying. In that sense, a shared Facebook groupchat isn't any different.
At least for me, the physical aspects of bullying never mattered much. As you say, you can simply punch back. What mattered to me was the excluding otherness I felt never getting to be part of the collective. I still struggle with that.
Ironically, social media sort of helped me there. Forums led me to people who would accept me. I played games with people, I could chat with them, they were willing to accept me.
I believe in the “talk shit, get hit” sentiment. It’s easy to spot people who have never been hit in their entire life.
Memories are biased such that we mostly don't remember the bad things our friends have said, we mainly remember the good. And the inverse for our enemies.
When you change from one to the other, what didn't pass into long term memory can't just come back.
And normal people on the internet was told to never ever reveal their name or address to others online for fear bad people would misuse that info.
The case studies written in Robert Lifton's book, "Thought Reform, and the Psychology of Totalism", have many details of the elements, taken from first-hand accounts (PoWs), back in the 50s. Many of these people never recovered.
Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind has an overview of the process, observations, and some early diagnostic criteria (Schizophrenia/delusion is often found as a characteristic in such early cases).
More recently, Social Engineering in the context of movie character design touches on another aspect where distorted reflected appraisal is used to often impart gender or cultural maladaptive behaviors, or destructively interfere in belief systems, such as religion, or groups (the nuclear family), under a guise of inclusion.
Pixar and Disney are two companies which often touch on this subject matter, Apple too, and there have been whistleblowers from the first, who have come out and talked about what happens behind close doors.
Some examples, association of the handsome man always being the evil villain (targeting teen women), the religious or trusted community figure or leader acting and looking crazy and goofy with no one paying attention, the hero being so weak they need to be defended by their romantic interests (targeting teen men), or their romantic interests emasculating them in the guise of defending them (targeting women), normalizing maladaptive behavior that only causes friction between genders, and other cohorts. Similar targeting for the nuclear family, where mimicking behavior (something kids naturally do) becomes malign.
I remember reading some studies where language processing was examined. I can't quite remember where it was from now but basically Children read differently from adults, where descriptive language is modified indirectly. Children take the literal (first simple meaning and stick to it), whereas adults get the correct context after gymnastics.
Basically, with enough natural/destructive friction, people isolate themselves to limit exposure which makes the messaging all the more effective for the majority of the population, as long as you hit those three things I previously mentioned.
As torture is an involuntarily induced hypnotic state, you can find a good deal of more modern material under hypnotism (bypassing the critical factor/attention, and hypnotic reversals which cause irrational emotional response against something when they believe they notice the manipulation.
The TV Show Hannibal, used similar means to induce and associate delight in the audience with the colorfully posed victims, of the serial killer, which was sickening on so many levels.
Igor Ledochowski has several programs, Mindbending Language, and Conversational Hypnosis which take this to SOTA back in 2000.
NLP and Cult deprogramming has been an active area of research.
There are many areas where these things intersect, some relying on distorting communication as that is usually the simplest way to distort reflected appraisal, others to shape sentiment.
Karma bots on social media as an example of the latter (where karma dictates whether you are squelched or not by the majority).
The large tech companies basically used their government funding and constructed echo chambers for all of us individually. Inconsistency in reflected appraisal tends to drive us crazy (as humans), but also leaves us in a state where we are easily manipulated (Joost Meerloo touches on this robotization that inevitably is inflicted on the individual within totalitarian societies).
Google had a leak of their selfish ledger awhile back for a concrete example of the sophistication of the propaganda. While, horrifically flawed, its still convincing if you didn't know better (which is a result of inoculation).
Quite a lot of this research originated in Russia/China, but has continued globally under Irregular Warfare/Political Warfare subject matter. If you have a high discernment, going to the source material and understanding what is meant can provide useful insights, as well as the history of the Jesuits (which Marx/Engels seemed to have stolen somewhat heavily from).
Psycho-politick was interesting as well, albeit older. There is a ebook available from USMC Press on Political Warfare (published 2020), albeit doesn't touch as much as I'd like on the nuts and bolts.
Most of this has until just recently, been understood by those in the know, but publicly discounted/nullified. The history is quite interesting on its own, albeit hard to piece together given the clandestine nature of it all. A lot of this falls under regime-change strategy, and military doctrine of divide and conquer.
If you can segment people into roughly three groups, one unresponsive, one psychotic, and one rational. The rational cohort is too busy offsetting the fires created by the psychotic, and only a small group is needed (in theory) following a four stage process. Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Re-normalization, based in psychology.
Hopefully that provides some useful springboards for your research. Knowing how it happens, can provide some useful defensive measures, albeit one must be careful about anchoring on stimuli, since people who use some of the more sophisticated aspects often will notice the lack of effect, and adjust and will often try to invert, or induce an irrational reaction, which can bypass simple measures, and you can't remain hyper-vigilant all the time without detrimental effects (jumping as shadows). They'll paint you as a crazy person after goading you to destroy your social credibility.
But honestly, I can see you are fully committed to the premise that “things are exactly the same now as before” and so this discussion is pointless.
It's not a world of difference, but it might explain why it's not as stark as you might expect at worst.
20y ago I did a high school semester in the UK (Worthing) and it was a very good environment with no bullying whatsoever. 3 factors contributed to this:
1) low stress environment as a whole (beautiful campus, calm teachers and staff, etc)
2) the students had a high degree of liberty in choosing what classes they would attend, so they were presumably interested and not rebellious
3) the student divided themselves into strict groups, and these groups barely interacted with each other.. so after class the 'goths' would hang with the goths, the 'sports-people' with the sports-people, etc. I didn't quite like this at the time because I'm very sociable so it struck me as weird. However, it did work in the sense that there were hardly any social problems among the students.
I don't have any social media and I think (while the concept of social media is awesome) it's going to genuinely be the fuel on a very violent fire at some point.
But if your kid doesn't have some kind of social media at a certain point, their social life is non-existent. I don't like the rules, but I don't make the rules.
Also, do you not remember being a kid and finding technology work arounds? I remember feeling like an absolutely l337 hacker when I found a way around the parental locks on our family pc as a kid. I'm not stupid enough to think they won't do the same.
In college I decided to fix what I could. I went into higher education administration and consulting to specifically fix the policies in primary and secondary education and administration training programs. I work to stop this bullshit by making sure teachers and admin have the skills and knowledge they need to actually stop it. I can't impact a huge area, but the schools I work with are models for their response to student needs, mental health resources, and bullying prevention. Therefore, the k-12 schools around me, where the colleges and universities I work with place their teachers and admin are exemplary.
I'm not a believer that serious adversity breeds excellence, but sometimes bad experiences can be used for good
Now, I’m a dad of a 6 year old son. We’ve been telling him his whole life to be respectful and keep his hands to himself. He has and is truly baffled by kids with aggressive attitudes. He’s been around it occasionally his whole life, having to play nice or talk it out with another kid but while he’s still pretty chill and peaceful it’s now obvious he’s essentially bully bate. He’s too kind and tolerant of other kids being jerks. This past few months we made the switch to telling him that defending himself is OK. It felt weird, like we did everything right but now have to backtrack because of the failure of other parents. Or, and maybe more likely, it’s the case that some kids are just more innately better/worse behaved and we just haven’t properly prepared our kid to deal with it. Idk but I’m totally willing to deal with the fallout of him getting in trouble defending himself versus the fallout of him not defending himself and being a victim with lasting damage to his self confidence/mental health.
Sounds like your experience is different to mine, as I'm not aware of that being the case.
The other student can't be within 500ft of your child, but they have to be at school, how would that work?
Let me give you an analogy:
An apple takes 1 year to fall from a tree.
An apple takes 1 seconds to fall from a tree.
An apple falls from a tree.
No difference.
However, every group/organization is just a collection of its members who each have different incentives. For some of those, it's gaining status/power. Status/power is mostly a zero-sum game, therefore gaining it requires attacking others (causing conflict). But causing visible conflict is damaging to the group so other members are likely to punish such behavior. As a result, the optimal strategy is to cause conduct conflict invisibly.
Bullying is nothing more than such a parasitic individual trying to achieve status/power or in some cases simply satisfaction.
> Here, we show that victims suffer from greater increases in low-grade systemic inflammation from childhood to young adulthood than are seen in others. In contrast, bullies showed lower increases in inflammation into adulthood compared with those uninvolved in bullying
> Conclusion
>Being bullied is known to have adverse effects on psychological and social development, but it is increasingly being recast as similar to family maltreatment in its potential to disrupt both mental and physical functioning across the lifespan (1, 2). In contrast, bullies experience few downsides and reap biological advantages of increased social status. Social status and disruptions to one’s status may play a central role in physical health functioning through effects on chronic low-grade inflammation, and these effects may persist for decades. Our findings suggest that this mechanism may be a key target for efforts to reduce risk for a bevy of age-related diseases and to promote optimal psychological and physical health functioning.
The literature about this is immense. There are even a couple of studies with monozygotic twins which are notoriously difficult to do.