Memoirs of a Bullied Kid

This comment will be controversial, especially for North Americans and Western Europeans. I ask you to read it and think about it a moment before reacting, and comment if you disagree. I believe what I'm about to say is true, and I'm not trying to get a rise out of people - I want to fix some problems with society.

I feel for the author. I also moved around a lot as a kid. No, wasn't a military family. Just coincidences, reorganizations at work a few times in a row, changing jobs, family circumstances. Sometimes things went great and I fell into a group of good kids right away, sometimes they weren't so good. It's normal that sometimes the new kid gets shit. I understand.

A little teasing is nasty, but kids can cross the line. Something like this:

> John and Mike never stopped. They never gave me a day off. And while their bullying hit maximum levels within a few days of school starting, the self loathing grew until I actually hated myself. ... they started in on new bullying tactics like sneaking up and cramming food from the floor into my mouth, knocking my lunch tray to the ground, throwing dangerous objects at me, tripping me, shoving me, and pushing me.

That's crossing the line. Those John and Mike kids are way past any acceptable teasing/jockeying line.

What's the author advise?

> And so, I will ask you now to not hate the bullies. Experience tells me that hating them, or being angry with them, will always make it worse. Instead, put your arm around them. Love them. Tell them that they are valuable. Tell them that you expect great things from them. They will stop the bullying.

No, they won't.

This is where I'll offend polite society. I'm not doing it to get a rise out of you. I'll tell you - this is the mainstream advice you hear growing up these days. "Love the bullies, talk it out, and they'll stop."

No, that's false. That's how we got into this mess in the first place.

I remember I changed schools mid-year in seventh grade when we moved. I was born in August which is the cut-off date, so I was effectively a year younger than everyone else. I was 11 years old. The middle school I transferred to was 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. Just how that district was laid out.

A ninth grader - 14 or 15 years old, much bigger than me - pushed me into the lockers the third day at school. Hard.

He then laughed with his friends and started to walk off.

I ran after him, tackled him, and started hitting him in the face.

We both got suspended. No one caused problems with me after that. I found a nice group of friends and was respected. The older kid didn't cause me any problems after that either. He didn't really acknowledge me one way or the other, we were just strangers after that, which suited me fine.

And that's how you've got to do. This love the bullies thing - it's wrong. It ignores our animal nature.

I've got some sets of names I'd name my sons as they're born. They're unconventional names - Cosimo Marshall or Aurelius Marshall if the boy's mother was Italian, Zhuge Marshall if he was Chinese. The boy will likely get teased.

That's fine, tease back.

But son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you, they've crossed a line. Fuck them up. It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand. They're wild animals. They make violence on you, you need to show them that you're the stronger, bigger animal. When someone attacks you maliciously for no reason, you need to impose your will on them.

Even if you lose, lose swinging. They respect it. Be a tough fight.

This "talk it out" shit doesn't work... it's been the dogma for the last 30-50 years, it assumes the nobility of human nature will win out. It doesn't. It's nonsense. It just simply doesn't work.

If you're not strong enough to impose your will on someone making violence on you, then train and get stronger. If you're intelligent, it doesn't matter if the other guy is bigger than you. Take up boxing or martial arts. Brain beats brawn. Fight dirty if you have to. They shove food down your pants or whatever? As soon as he turns around, hit him in the back of the head as hard as you can. If you're much smaller, pick up a hard object and do it.

My Mom is awesome. She picked up from school when I was suspended. We sat in the principal's office and she was very serious, saying yes, my son is serious about school, he never gets into problems, I don't know what happened with the fight. After we left, she took me out to lunch and said good job.

I wished I'd learned that lesson earlier. Some people are animals. The ones that want to hurt you for no reason. Show them that you'll go to self-destructive lengths to defend yourself and avenge yourself upon them, and they'll stop. Also, protect others. I got into a shouting match protecting some McDonald's employees from a mob boss in Hong Kong. A riot cop came to break it up, I was almost in a fight with three mafia guys.

I had two guys try to mug me the other day in a dangerous area. Bad mistake, doubled one of them over with a kick the stomach and shouted at the other one, "YOU WANT TO DIE? BACK DOWN, STAY BACK." He did, he let me walk away while his criminal buddy was doubled over.

Should I have "talked" with them, "loved" them, these vicious criminals? No, they're animals. They don't understand.

Teach your kid to fight back and fight smart. Protect the weak. Be hell and misery to bad people. Pacifism only works if there's someone else that's strong around to keep things together - someone who'll stick up for you. If everyone goes pacifist except the bad people, eventually one bad person with no conscience winds up ruling.

No. It doesn't work. Teach your kids to fight back, fight smart, defend and assert themselves, and protect others in trouble. There's legitimately bad people in the world, barely above animals, and strength is the only thing they respect. Assert yourself.

Here in the UK, many schools have a zero tolerance policy to bullying, but this is nothing more than an empty gesture. As soon as a kid tells a teacher about their bullying problems, the bullying will most certainly not stop as the school as no power over what goes on beyond the school gates.

Bullies are never punished for their actions, which is why this problem always perpetuates.

There's a lot of good information on this site:

http://www.bullyonline.org/

It's poorly-organized, but it's worth digging around.

I gave a printout of the profile of a workplace bully (http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm) to a woman I work with who was facing severe bullying from her boss, and she said she got so engrossed in it that she missed her stop on the train. I knew the bully as well and it was uncanny how well the description matched him. It was like he had a well-known disease and we were reading a textbook description of its symptoms.

That was workplace bullying, but the site also has information on bullying in schools.

Both your post and the original overgeneralize, treating bullies as a monolithic entity with a single motivation and a single response.

Bullies are not "wild animals" bullying for "no reason", they're people with unique intellects and desires and motivations that you, or they, may not understand. They may want others to see them as tough, or to feel powerful or in control, or for laughs, or because they have something to gain, or because everyone else does it and they think it's normal.

Effective responses have to be targeted based on the motivation. I'm not saying you need to send bullies to the psychiatrist and "talk it out" to understand their motivations, mind you, just that you can't expect the right response to bully A to be the right response to bully B.

Sometimes the right response to a bully is to be a credible physical threat to him. Other times it may be to get to know him and make him feel respected, improving his self esteem, or to involve adults who will hand down more severe punishment, or to laugh it off, or to make fun of him, or for someone else to tell him "that's not cool". The right response might even be multi-tiered, trying to change his underlying motivations, increasing the cost of bullying, and decreasing the perceived benefits all at the same time.

Don't leave tools out of your arsenal by mistakenly thinking you should only "love on them" or only "fuck them up".

If I ever have kids, they get martial arts training. From someone who emphasizes self-awareness and a productive discipline, but who does not skimp on the full range of effective techniques and the physical training to achieve them.

They may like it more or less. Regardless, it will be a part of their schooling.

Bullying ends when you end it. There may be more than one way to accomplish this, but when you're outnumbered and out of reach of any help, you need to be able to manage the physical situation. (This does not necessarily mean the ability to defeat an arbitrary number of opponents; it also means being able to reason ways to extricate oneself, etc.)

And, sooner or later, you'll be there. This is true throughout society and throughout its various situations; cooperation is limited, and you're going to end up facing difficult situations on your own. "Civility" is a luxury that is not always available.

Being persistently without control can become a self-fulfilling situation. Those neural pathways get burned in -- just as they do with everything else we learn particularly through repeated experience.

I don't want my kids to be placed psychologically in that corner. I also don't want them to place other in that corner, which is why the physical aspects are not sufficient.

P.S. I've also learned that some physical injuries can be irreversible. It doesn't do you much good to know that a bully will eventually "go away" or "one day learn", if in the meantime you have permanent scars and worse to deal with.