Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools

I was also expelled for fighting back. This was how I learned that documentation is important in life.

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.

> 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.

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.

There's twice as much surface area. Bullies can now do their thing 24/7 from behind the screen _and_ still physically torment.

Again, whatever they can do from behind a screen now, they could also do in your absence before.

it sounds like you just don't know what it's like to be bullied. it's not just about the verbal knowledge that tomorrow at school you'll be hit. it's the visceral anxiety that tomorrow at school you will be hit. without social media, you can try to block it out of your mind and pretend it's not happening. with social media, I assume, you are constantly reminded of what's happening, because now the bully can reach out to you and directly remind 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.

No, they couldn’t.

Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your peers?

Even just as text, they can easily take your name and spread rumours speaking as if they were you.

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.

Printers.

If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create photoshopped images of you with?", why would you attribute that to social media?

Is it possible you are being thick here? Mentally rehearse the process of photoshopping your victims image and then printing it out and circulating it to everyone in the class before or at bedtime.

Being able to do awful things more easily and efficiently is a qualitative difference even if the things themselves aren't objectively worse.

While technically true in describing the possibility, there is a big difference in ease between printing a photo and sending a message to a user via a digital platform e.g. WhatsApp.

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.

No, they were printed out, hung up around school, posted into lockers…

Are you really trying to suggest that printing out 500-1000 copies of a photo and handing it out physically to all the kids in the school is the same as effortlessly spamming the same image out through online groups/chats? Come on, man.

Yeah, I got suspended once or twice for fighting back. Somehow it's my fault I can fight better than the trashbags that pushed me around. Eff around and find out, idiots. My school experience involved at least one experience of unwarranted punishment per year, almost like clockwork. By high school my resentment for the school system was just maximum-tier and my apathy was too. Failed 5/8 classes in grade 11.

This just isn’t correct.

Right now there is instant, 24 hour access between kids, tools for altering video and photos and an audience large as you can imagine.

I am very glad I grew up before social media.

I suppose it was all just as bad before printers too?

You just did a lot of oil paintings. And prior to that you did some cave drawings?

It really seems you have not seen the way kids bully each other these days. Example: two kids were friends a year ago shared a lot of personal thoughts with each other. Now guess what? That was all recorded, because it was all in chat. Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past?

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.

> Anything a bully can do to you over social media, they can also do to you without using the internet at all.

Instantly spread a rumour to dozens or hundreds of kids?

Taunting you even when you're at home?

etc etc

> Kids today have it so much worse with social media.

Why would you let your child use social media?

The first country to outlaw social media for everyone under 18 will own the future.

> Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past?

Simple; the one kid tells everyone what the other kid said.

Kids are smart and will find ways around your blocking attempts. Though I tend to agree, it's a scourge.

Y'all are literally bullying here.

The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn't just straight up mean.

I dont mean to be nasty, but what sort of turbo nerds are bullying you if they decide to Photoshop images. Back in my day, bullying was about repeatedly keeping people out of the ingroup until they internalized their otherness. It was opportunistic. We didn't plan elaborate scenarios, we called him gay when he spoke about something he cared about. That was enough.

If anything, social media would give that kid more opportunities to find a group that will accept them.

> Taunting you even when you're at home?

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.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your distinction between knowledge and anxiety, although I think you over specify it a littls when you say _verbal_ knowledge. The same exact thing is true for _textual_ threats.

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.

If it comes across that way apologies. I was honestly suspecting that the post I was replying to was being deliberately obtuse, but I guess it’s possible that this happened to them and it’s unduly salient as a consequence.

Human memory isn't photographic.

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.

When I was at school, printers were expensive and bad, cameras weren't digital and film was non-trivial price to buy and also to develop, and the one single scanner we had was one-bit black and white.

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.

Not the same at all. Yes, that is a form of bullying, but it’s not nearly the same as having their own words, shared in confidence, blasted out to their peer group.

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.

You do and they can get bullied because of it.

You don't and they can get bullied because of it and also become the weird kid that doesn't have social media.

Sometimes there isn't a good choice. :/

Now imagine you're calling that kid gay constantly and you can look at all the worst stuff whenever you feel like to go mock it extra as a bully. And they only have to know it's you if you feel like it. (Anxiety's a big thing to remember there too, anxiety and obsessions and any historical traumas)

It's not a world of difference, but it might explain why it's not as stark as you might expect at worst.

> _verbal_ knowledge. The same exact thing is true for _textual_ threats.

I meant it in the sense of "relating to or in the form of words", so we're in agreement!

Because that's how everything in their world is planned and organized? You're backed into a corner as a parent.

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.

See, I took a different path. While I wasn't a great student in high school, it was for different reasons (it rhymes with drugs and I'm not good at rhymes).

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

Y'all never stopped to consider their point.

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.