All this talk about bullies Randy
When I was in Jr. High, this kid was giving me the blues. Dad went and talked to the school, but I was told not to fight. Finally, dad said, if you come home again and you didn't fight back, you're gonna fight me. Well, needless to say, I was more scared of my dad than this kid.
Sure enough, the next day the kid went off, and I beat him down, more scared of my dad. The principal pulled us in the office after the fight. Took me in, new the story, and beat his chair with his paddle and told me to find some tears and wait outside.
Then he pulled the other kid in and wore him out (the second time in 20 minutes).
From then on, I had confidence and I got in a LOT more fights, but most of the time I was in the right. Most of the time. 🙂
All this talk about bullies Randy
> From then on, I had confidence and I got in a LOT more fights, but most of the time I was in the right. Most of the time. 🙂
...and thus a bully was born.+o(
All this talk about bullies Randy
> > From then on, I had confidence and I got in a LOT more fights, but most of the time I was in the right. Most of the time. 🙂
>
> ...and thus a bully was born.+o(
Nah.
All this talk about bullies Randy
I thought the post was about bullying and not boys fighting. Boys fighting is a sort of a natural process and has nothing to do with kids being bullied but I guess posters here want to interject some type of anecdotal memory to justify how things should be or were or blah blah..
Like Larry P mentioned below, bullying can lead to tragic consequences. The age that Larry states is the prime age for suicide in these circumstances.
We are not talking about Opie like Kris Morgans of the world being bullied. It is kids that are gay or have some sort of physical presence or personality that attracts a bully or bullies. IT could be a group and/or peer bullying done to someone to make them more of a social outcast. It has many facets.
swmbo is a MHP counselor in a JR HS this year and has been a MHP in various schools for years. She sees the bullying and suicides.
I am into my 4th year of coaching at another JHS and I see the fights. I have also coached youth sports for 7 years now and I see the fights also. But both experiences have not produced bullying situations. There is another social dynamic going on.
> > It asks kids to stand up for others who are being bullied ..
> But not by physically confronting the bullies. Rather, by shunning the bully, by supporting the bullied, and reporting the bullying behaviour. Quite different.
Yes , that is true but it is effective and it is proactive for small kids.
If you want to start teaching elementary school kids to stand up with their fists in support of a bullied kid then you are going to have kids pounding on someone everyday of the week.
Let young kids ID the problem and give them the way to solve the trouble that occurs.
Like others have mentioned and it is true, bullies are created by some severely bad parenting methods or lack of parenting. They need help just as much as the kids that they bully. Having a beat down is not the solution.
All this talk about bullies Randy
I disagree on many levels. Bullies pick on those who they think they can push around. Typically, fights end it. That was mine and scores of others experiences. The best thing is when the administrators are clued in and can help to take action, but they can't be there 24/7. The other social dynamic is social media, which admittedly isn't something we had to deal with growing up.
I will stipulate that anyone who is different from the perceived norm will be bullied or picked on. Whether or not the kids help that individual stand up or not remains to be seen. There is safety in numbers.
My thoughts...
> There is another social dynamic going on.
I believe that's the key.
When I played football in HS there were actually no "stragglers". But it seemed as though every week someone was picked (by a collective "everyone") to get poked at. Rick Smith caught it because he was red-headed and freckled. Frank Dennis caught it because he was hairy as an ape. Skinny Darrel caught it because...well, he was Skinny Darrel.
Although possibly harsh by adult standards; the ribbing had a good-natured seed that seemed to draw us all together. We just occasionally pointed out things about each other that brought about a group acceptance of things we noticed, and possibly even felt self-conscious about ourselves.
The big difference was that any one of us (except the designated target) could diffuse the situation by verbalizing, "Hey man, that's enough." I'm sure some got their feelings hurt, but there was still the underlying "team" spirit. Even though my nickname was "medicine ball", I knew those guys were my pack.
The actual downright bullying that I have witnessed could be defined by seeing one individual bully that falsely expresses to the victim that they (the bully) represent the rest of the group, or everybody else, in their dislike of the victim; pushing their own agenda the whole way. This can be successful aggravated if bystanders, or accomplices, re-iterate to the victim that the bully is "correct" in his or her accusations. Sometimes the bystanders become accomplices out of fear of becoming a victim themselves. If we could only teach these young folks that no one single person represents a collective hatred or dislike.
It is the fear of that hatred and dislike that causes the anguish within the victim. And sadly that hatred and dislike is merely a Fata Morgana, peddled by a "bully" that is pushing their own selfish agenda.
This is what happens when the bullied kid has enough
That's really great. But the dynamic of a big kid being bullied by a smaller kid and finally dumping the little guy on his head is a lot different dynamic than some of the ones that go on. Of course all of these "stand up for yourself" and "fighting fair" are a lot simpler philosophies than addressing kiebold and harris getting so fed up that they commit mass murder on their school mates. Or kids being so hurt that they commit suicide. I am not sure everything is simple enough to be wrapped up in standing up to a bully.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with a regular guy standing up for himself and confronting the harassment immediately when appropriate, but I am afraid that is not the nature of most bullying. Some guys don't deserve to be harassed and picked on even if they aren't as tough as Kris M.
My thoughts too...then I am done
> > There is another social dynamic going on.
>
> I believe that's the key.
>
> When I played football in HS ..blah blah blah
Once again, this isn't the basis of bully prevention that is going on in schools.
The prevention program is aimed at kids from the 3-6 grades. (basically ages 7-11).
It is done to make kids aware of bullying situations against kids who are different.
Step up as an individual and/or collectively to help others. Learn it as a elementary school or middle school kid.
When kids reach JHS, there is a strong socialization process that kicks in subsequent to their body and personalities that are formed.
BY HS, these kids are hopefully young adults and they have learned the lessons of bullying and it's consequences.
Listen, I could offer anecdotes of HS fights and from my experience but that is not addressing what is happening today.
I will offer one....
We had a boy in HS who was one of the toughest kids in the class but he had a lot of problems. Probably was abused at home by a father who beat him and he might have had a problem with alcohol also. Big German kid and you did not want to mess with him. He was still liked by everyone and you could interact with him socially but it seemed that everyone was destined to be punched out by him sometime during your HS life. My time came during a locker room incident. I was getting tossed into the showers by a group and somebody behind me had grabbed my tee shirt and it started to rip. I reacted by throwing an elbow to the unknown person and caught him in the jaw. Oops..it was the big German kid. He planted a right cross on my jaw and I just stood there and took the punch and I did not go down, but it rang my bell pretty good. If it had hit me in the nose, mouth or temple, I would have been in the ER.
That was it. I knew that we were for a lack of a better term “buds” from that point on. Once when I as cold cocked from a kid and knocked out, he promised revenge for me. I told him to let it go.
Thus school was in an urban environment and there were fights all the time either in school, against other school kids, neighborhood kids or kids from other neighborhoods. It was a way of life..sort off.
The big German kid never picked on kids who were very weak or were not fighters. But one day in the locker room, he severely punched out a kid who was kind of a nerd, straight As and captain of the chess team etc.
A few people yelled for him to stop but most stood aside fin disbelief. Somebody must have got hold of the PE teacher because he came in to the locker and kicked the cr@p out of the German kid. I mean pummeled him.
He graduated and I heard that he married his HS girl friend and a few years later blew his head off with a pistol.
It is too bad that he could not have gotten help at a young age but things like that did not exist for boomer kids.
This is what happens when the bullied kid has enough
>
> Don't get me wrong, I agree with a regular guy standing up for himself and confronting the harassment immediately when appropriate, but I am afraid that is not the nature of most bullying. Some guys don't deserve to be harassed and picked on even if they aren't as tough as Kris M.
No one deserves to be harassed and picked on, regardless of how tough they are. FWIW, I was very meek, mild, ADHD, and didn't know how to put stuff together or read people. Couple that with socially awkward in a small town, and I was everyone's favorite guy to screw with or beat up on. I'm not a terribly big person at 6' tall and 195 pounds either, and I graduated at 17 instead of 18 and was shorter and smaller than everyone in my class being that I was a full year younger as well. I'm more that astutely aware of the issues of being bullied and by the time that I had the confidence and the skill set to handle being bullied, it didn't really matter. It's pretty damn sad when you fight back with one, and four more jump in.
I don't necessarily think I'm tough. I am, however, from being bullied, quite mean. It's not a great way to grow up and it's not anecdotal as Robert would have one believe either. I have great sympathy for those who are weaker and are picked on and bullied, be them children or adults.
In my professional career, I have taken at least 10 jobs that I can think of, off the top of my head, at cost or under my cost, just because the client was being bullied and I knew the adjoiner would not bully me. The one that really stands out was a guy who was trying to steal and extort his next door neighbor over 8 feet of land that he felt he could take. My client did not speak much English (he was Vietnamese) and didn't know what to do. I had previously provided a quote to the ahole adjoiner to survey his land. When we showed up to begin work, he and bullied my client into telling him how much I was going to charge him (it was a pittance) and he came to take issue with me about why I quoted different prices. My dad loves to tell this story because he was keeping the notes and heard me slam my hat down on the ground and saw me start after the guy and he hid behind his wife. Well everyone saw he was a P U 55 Yankee and no one in the neighborhood had an issue with him again.
My client had a doughnut shop and he gave us free doughnuts that day for what we did. Bullying is not relegated to just children. We just feel it differently when it's our kids.
There is a story, maybe it's an urban legend, about the town bully who picked on everyone, especially when he got drunk.
One day while harassing and picking on a younger, smaller person a crowd gathered around. A shot rang out. The bully fell dead to the ground.
There were no witnesses.
Well, not so much of an urban legend around here. Many years ago, we were doing a survey on a very rough side of town and didn't get finished in that day. The next morning we went back to finish and there was police tape all around the area. Seems like the old tush hog bully that had beat up everyone in the neighborhood got just a little too drunk that night and several of his former victims got him down and smashed his skull with a sledge hammer. There were no witnesses and the police never did figure out who did it. So there, there's my blah, blah, blah contribution to today's bully thread...
