Bully for OT!

[Tabouli]

Well well, good ol' OT has now raised bullying for my perusal!  Very thoughtful of you all.  Yes, well, I'm not short of first hand experience here either, sadly.

I might have well have tattooed "victim" across my forehead in primary school.  I was a terribly timid, desperate to please, self-conscious and uptight little kid, which was a bad start.  Worse, I did well at school, and a lower middle class Australian primary school in the 70s and early 80s at that.  Such things are not to be tolerated.  Worse still, I was useless at ball games (though not bad at athletics, and I now suspect my uselessness at ball games may have its origin in self-fulfilling prophecy: I was a goody-goody loser, and therefore by definition bad at sport).  Worst of all, and this was the clincher, I was, undeniably, Not Australian.  I don't mean in the eyes of the Australian government, oh no.  I was born and raised in Australia, both my parents were citizens at the time (my mother duel with Malaysia).  I mean in the eyes of my peers.  I did not look white and of British or at least Northern European stock and had an undeniably Chinese looking mother waiting at the gate when I started school.

Not a good recipe.  Especially when I was also one of the smallest, meekest children there.

What *can* be done about bullying?  The sort of advice I've heard myself and heard given to kids makes me cringe.  "Hit them back twice as hard so they don't dare bully you again" isn't really an option when they're twice your size and sometimes also number.  And hardly works for psychological bullying (few victimised children have the self-esteem left to stand up for themselves verbally), which can be devastating, and in some ways *more* damaging than physical bullying because people are apt to take physical bullying seriously, at least when visible damage has been done, whereas psychological bullying is easily dismissed as child's play or something the child is told to "just ignore" (yeah right).

"Stay away from them" places the blame squarely on the victim, and isn't a realistic option either... I mean, who are these people kidding?  Have they forgotten you are *locked up* in school all day with these people?  Outside class they are free to go where they like!  If they want to bully you, what's to stop them tracking you down?

Telling people in authority so the bullies can be punished or Spoken To might work on some occasions but can backfire disastrously.  Not only are you a pathetic creature who deserves to be bullied, you are a dobbing informer who got them punished!  Next time I catch you, I'll bash your head in for that.  Ahh, just what every kid needs to hear.

Trying to educate kids about the evils of bullying and what to do about it before it happens to pre-empt the problem.  Haven't read about whether this works or not.  Maybe.  Anyone know about this?

I escaped the worst of the bullying I experienced when I finally got out of that ghastly primary school and into a secondary school with a lot of Asian students and a very academic focus, but the bulliability is still there, I just hide it better.  Learned that if you adopt a confident, assertive, don't-mess-with-me persona, people usually don't try to bully you (and thereby discover you're really about as personally assertive as a marshmallow).  And, after a particularly nasty episode in my early twenties, took up karate.  Which really did help.

Sure, a lot of the "build your confidence" stuff is just martial arts promotional hype, but actually, it did.  After a couple of years of having large, strong men physically trying to kick and hit me in combat practice (and sometimes succeeding, ow) and managing to defend myself successfully most of the time, it took the edge off bullying a little.  Once I knew I had ways of dealing with bullying if it reached a physical level, it made bullying in general a bit less threatening somehow.  And standing up for myself a bit less scary.

I occasionally wonder if it would have helped if I'd done karate in primary school.  I think it would have depended on the bully.  The ones who were in it for the fun of distressing me would probably have given up, because it's not much fun pushing someone around if they aren't intimidated and are skilled at fighting back.  It might well have increased my social status a bit, being an interesting sport which would probably have been seen to increase the attractiveness of staying on my good side.  It's the ones with real malice I would worry about.  Who'd sneer and then gang up eight kids to beat me up and thereby prove karate didn't make me as tough as I thought I was.

Catlady:
> It is possible that what Ravenclaw Jenny's students usually go 
> through is not bullying (...) but rather the establishment of a 'pecking order'.

I'd say cultural and demographic factors have a lot to do with why and how people bully others.  If you live in an environment where you win respect by proving yourself in physically, like Jenny's students presumably, the best way to respond to bullying will differ considerably from those who live in an environment where you win respect through non-physical means, like in the corporate world.

Catlady (quoting sneering people in response to my Pirsigian musings):
> Why do you waste your time discussing Harry Potter on an e-mail-list when you could be writing 
a book or earning a graduate degree instead?<

Actually, I think this sort of thing is *exactly* what I was talking about.  It's social value (extrinsic motivations, wealth, status in society) versus intellectual value (intrinsic motivations).  But anyway.  (My home says hi back to the Catlady!)

Tabouli.

P.S. Many, many thanks to all the members who housed and entertained me so generously during my overseas trip!  I'm slowly getting around to writing my thanks to you individually, bear with me...


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]