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The persistent and pervasive impact of bullying in childhood and adolescence

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

311–320 of 449 posts

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

#311

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?

Ideally the equilibrium would be that enough people in the group can't be bullied that it extinguishes the bullying behavior, or bullies get ganged up on.

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

#312
post #52

Heh, decent timing. My last CBT session ended with me realising one of my issues may be a lasting effect of bullying. Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol" Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything th…

Can you elaborate on how the deception part is related to the bullying? I don't see the connection

Hazarding a guess: A frequent theme in bullying (at least in my experience) is falsely building up an expectation of positive outcome, then pulling out the rug, while blaming the victim for having unrealistic expectations, usually with rhetoric that they are inherently unworthy of positive outcomes, so by deceiving themselves they have only revealed their compounded lack of worth.

Experience that enough and I would expect one could develop quite advanced heuristics to protect oneself from deception.

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

#313

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…

> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't. My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong. One of my fa…

Thankfully after graduation we get the ability to often walk away from them however. Unless they're a HOA president I suppose

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

#314

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…

> 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 say those things and my stepfather was abusive to the point of choking me unconcious and kicking me in the face with a steel-toed boot. Please, do tell about how I know nothing about dealing with abuse at the hands of others.

Just because you have your torments does not mean others do not have their own, in their own inner worlds. And trying to diminish theirs is a cruelty.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But what if bullying is just fun for some people? We have a word for those people: "sociopath"

Nah, that's too glib. The people at one extreme end of the spectrum might accurately be called sociopaths, but lots of more ordinary people fall to the right of center on the "enjoys bullying" bell curve.

Monsters aren't born, they are created.

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

#316

For the people who think bullying isn't a problem: Replace "bullying" with: Parental neglect/abuse, unfair rejection/blame, or being backstabbed in a situation that you can't really do anything about it/no one will believe you. It gets at what the end-feeling is like. Bullying in its raw form seems acutely more harmful than say, parental abuse, which only manifests as "bullying" years later, but it's the same overall…

> Any solution I've heard of ranges from dystopian to hellish.

This is the part that few people seem to want to acknowledge: top-down "solutions" to problems like this end up being worse than the problem they purport to "solve".

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If there was something that you could have done yourself to prevent or stop it, would you refuse to do it? I still don't know. "Do you go Ender's Game on the bully?" As an adult, I don't want to condone violence, but at some point, it seems like there must come a point where one must stand up & defend oneself. The problem is that you'll very likely get in trouble for it — self defense is not a defense in the eyes o…

> self defense is not a defense in the eyes of public school administrators

While this is true, it's also obviously wrong, and the fact that it's widespread in our society makes it even more wrong. Rather than try to expound that in more detail, I'll just reference a post by The Last Psychiatrist that does the job better than I could anyway:

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/one_way_our_schools_...

The TL/DR is at the end:

"[W]hat kind of school doesn't want a kid to stand up to a bully, especially when they're doing it to help someone else? What kind of crazy school wants you to back down-- and get someone else to protect you? What kind of school indoctrinates kids that power is only possessed by a) bad people; b) the state?

Oh. All of them."

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have we considered ways to make bullies not want to bully? That seems way more productive to me. At over 40 years of age I've had to deal with people attempting to bully me, most of them are completely shocked when they realize they can't. My point here is that if you think bullying is something that stops at graduation then sure, that sounds like a reasonable position, but the premise itself is wrong. One of my fa…

This is a good point. Policing bullying in school (when young) may work if one can catch it in the act but this bully behavior never stops in adulthood, it starts taking different forms. Being aware of bullies and not being affected by their actions helps but they will only find a different target.

I think the point the OP is trying to make isn't to police bullies, but to figure out the influences on the child to be a bully, and to correct for that, so that the kid doesn't bully in the first place.

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

#319
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering what you think bullying is, at the school level? Because at my level, it was physically violent - and I was not in a school where this was considered "a problem". Everyone knew who the bullies were, and there was a collective culture of silence because the school could not possibly enforce proper physical safety on the grounds or around it. You avoided them and stayed away from them, because they abs…

Teaching children to deal with physical bullying includes self defense lessons and also involves teaching them not to be passive if they witness physical bullying. Maybe the bully is the biggest kid in class but it won't matter if every kid knows how to defend themselves and also every kid will team up to pull them off of someone.

Yet some school cultures are entrenched, and extend from the broader community. If people are taught from everywhere else that bearing witness is dangerous then groups of bullies will have free reign. Changing that culture can be like pushing a rock up hill.

Solutions may have to be drastic, like electronic surveillance or sending troublemakers to different schools.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When the parent is externalizing the cost of their pacifism onto their child, they are engaging in moral failure.
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