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

I always found it really frustrating that a "zero tolerance" policy to bullying seemed to disproportionately affect people who eventually fight back.

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.

That sucks, sorry that happened to you.

How did you stand your ground?

One of them ripped a necklace off of me, then spat on me.

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.

Got it, thanks for sharing.

Overly harsh consequences are only fair if detection of the responsible/initiating party is foolproof.

Ironically, overly harsh consequences are often imposed because detection is lacking. If you can't reliably detect infringing behaviour to impose a fair consequence, you have to ramp up the severity of the consequence imposed when you do detect an infringement in order to maintain deterrence.