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The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

261–270 of 449 posts

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#261

I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this: > These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience; ... > These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age. Have we considered ways to make bullies n…

Absolutely people try to make bullies not want to bully, from psychological counseling to suspending them from school. It sort of works, but any success is limited. Also bullies can attack outside the school premises.

This is why helping other kids withstand bullying, defuse situations, and generally not feel helpless is still important. By the same token, however much you may discourage people from stealing, you should still lock the door.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Solve the problem yourself". Yeah, you've never had to deal with being chased by bullies and having the shit kicked out of you for no reason. Bullying is not a conflict between peers anymore than a woman getting raped is a conflict between peers. As an adult these problems are solved for you by either human resources, the police, or being able to avoid the situation. Maybe that's why you don't walk around the rough…

Well, bullying is many things, and I think the exact issue is that the conversation lacks nuance. As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not. If you are attacked by a group of people, or someone substantially larger than you, then intervention is warranted. Ideally this intervention is carried out by older peers. If you're being bulli…

> As I mentioned in my first post, conflict which is evenly matched should not be regarded the same way as conflict which is not.

This was covered by the paper. You are talking about Peer Victimization without bullying. Bullying is a form of peer victimization in which there is a power imbalance (size, numbers, status, etc).

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#263
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s important to take a more nuanced viewpoint rather than reducing such parents to “bad people”. I think it’s fair to criticize such people, or point out why it’s a problematic approach, but many parents are just trying to do what they believe is the right thing, misguided though it may be. Education and correcting misconceptions is important, and applying a binary mindset to…

Everyone is trying to do what they think is right — you can read the pro-social statements of many dictators. I think teaching your kids not to defend themselves is obviously bad parenting — and the people who do that, to the result of their own children getting hurt, are bad people.

Is there a scenario where you would be willing to interpret such a parent’s pacifism as naivety?

There are many extremely complex issues that do not have obviously right or wrong answers.

Being bad at something is not the same as being a bad person.

How would you describe the difference between a parent who actively abuses their kids and a parent who loves and provides for their kids, but fails in some area along the way?

You’ve gone right back to a binary stance here.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression. Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.

Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration. If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you. I recently wrote a le…

> The ringleader of this group

Group? What university was this? Who was the resident assistant? Was that particular incident with the rock written up somewhere?

What you've written here isn't run-of-the-mill college bullying anecdata-- it is the beginning of a serious piece of investigative journalism.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a term for this: Victim Blaming. It's one thing to not be so sensitive when it comes to jokes or teasing, but this requires a maturity that a child does not yet have. A feel as though a lot of people that say those things haven't been victims of bullying, or maybe, at least, not the a certain extent that others were (I know I'm treading very close to a No True Scotsman with that statement). I was bullied when…

If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it? If there are skills that could be taught to children to prevent their own bullying, would you deny them?

A lot of children discover how to deal with bullies effectively. This can be taught to them.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression. Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.

Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration. If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you. I recently wrote a le…

> It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.

And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#267

When I was coming up, especially in middle school, we were always told that you should just ignore bullies and they would go away. This, of course, never actually worked. And anyone who did fight back against their bullies were punished just as severely, if not moreso if they swung first, as the bully. This entire approach was complete BS and only served to enable bullies because they now know that their victims eith…

“To fight bullying, don’t be an easy target” doesn’t that shift the burden to the next weakest person?

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullying is the social destruction of self not because it is the act of one "crazy" person but because bullies have the support of the entire community including teachers, other students, and school administration. If it was just one violent person doing one thing it would be a minor act. It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you. I recently wrote a le…

> The ringleader of this group Group? What university was this? Who was the resident assistant? Was that particular incident with the rock written up somewhere? What you've written here isn't run-of-the-mill college bullying anecdata-- it is the beginning of a serious piece of investigative journalism.

The year was 1990. The school was the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The leader of the group was Chris Cater. The resident assistant who was battered was Steve Dyker and this happened in front of South Hall, the dorm I lived in, although I wasn't there when that incident happened.

When Chris did this in front of witnesses he was expelled immediately although I did see him come back to sell drugs on campus a year later.

Before that incident the dean of students, Frank Etscorn, told me that it was just "my word against his" and that he could not press charges.

Chris was criminally minded and he certainly inspired a group of students into more criminal behavior than they would have done on their own. I don't believe that New Mexico Tech was much worse than other schools at this time, in fact around this time there were high profile incidents involving bullying and suicides of gay students at other schools.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#269

I sometimes feel like I'm in some alternate universe when I read stuff like this: > These new findings indicate that interventions should also focus on supporting victims of bullying and helping them build resilience; ... > These studies suggest that public health interventions could aim at preventing children from becoming the target of bullying behaviours from an early age. Have we considered ways to make bullies n…

I teach people how to protect themselves from emotional attacks. What I've seen is that most of us who attack others often believe we were attacked first.

So I don't know if "bullies" necessarily think they've been bullied per say, however I feel quite confident they believe they feel attacked in some way (rejected, guilt tripped, ignored, blamed, etc).

So with this in mind, I try to teach anyone to learn how to respond better to these attacks because I think we counterattack more than we may realize.

Re: The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific consensus is that more commonly aggressive disorders that involve violating others’ rights like BPD and ASPD are less treatable than anxiety and depression. Stop trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics. You’re out of your wheelhouse.

I'm not sure how getting to the root of the problem instead of treating the symptoms is "trying to apply feels-right reasoning to complex medical topics." If the topics are more complex, let's address those complexities. I feel like when they say, "We should teach kids how to survive bullying better," they're the ones trying to apply feels-right reasoning to a complex situation. That's a short-term solution. If the r…

Bullying is enabled by a power imbalance. For those without the ability to rectify the power imbalance, teaching resilience both helps in the short-term and is a useful skill for the large fraction of the population who will one day end up in a job where there is a n abuse of a power imbalance, but they can't quit if they also want to eat.

As the parent of both a bully and a victim (two different kids), I can say that correcting the bullying behavior is not as easy as it might seem. Many (most?) bullies are charming and manipulative and most victims are not, so convincing those who have the ability to correct the power imbalance is quite challenging.

I could make a laundry list of examples just from my own direct experience, but I'll limit it to one:

(Pre COVID, as it does involve tech in the class room, which changed a lot in 2020).

We refused the school-issued Chromebook for my daughter and the administration agreed that she could do all of her work on paper. One of her teachers "didn't feel right singling her out" and "she is such a good kid" so without telling us gave our daughter the classroom Chromebook to do in-class assignments, which she used to cyber-bully a classmate to the point that the child left the school and the child's parents, who were previously friends with my wife, will no longer talk to us.

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