[cannaceo]

"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 part of town alone at night. As a kid you have no control over your environment.

[MrJohz]

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I was bullied as a child, and honestly, the problem is hard to deal with. I was not good at socialising, I found it difficult to read social cues, and I was kind of irritating a lot of the time. None of that excuses bullying, of course, but ultimately a large part of what caused that bullying was my own behaviour. If I'd have been more socially adept, if I'd realised that the social group I'd found wasn't supporting me and if I'd put more effort into making worthwhile friends, I wouldn't have been in that situation.

In the end, I needed to change for the issue to be resolved - which I did, and, along with moving to a new environment which helped reset a lot of my social interactions, that helped a lot. Obviously that's not some instant magic wand solution - I went through five long years of this experience, with various teachers and other adults trying to help me before things started clicking and I started being able to move on - but in my experience there aren't really many better solutions.

So, while I can't reiterate enough how unacceptable bullying is, and what a negative impact it had on those years of my life, I do agree with the previous poster: the ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of victim (n.b. not literally: I never found violence helped me), and trying to resolve the situation via visible external intervention may well have little impact. For me at least, a better social education would have made me much more prepared to deal with the issues that I faced.

[thewebcount]

But isn't one really useful way to learn by having people older and wiser than you step in and explain the situation to everyone involved? You don't just throw a bunch of math symbols at a child and say, "learn how to do arithmetic." You teach them what numbers and numerals are and how to manipulate them. You teach them easier concepts first, and then build on them. That needs to be done for both bullies and their victims, too. Most people will not "just figure it out." That's abusive in itself.

[MrJohz]

That's definitely true, but I think you've got to know what you're teaching. You can't just teach that bullying is bad, because - while it definitely is - that's not solving the underlying problem. Instead, I think you've got to take an active role in teaching healthy social interactions, especially to those kids who are struggling to figure things out. We need to embrace emotional intelligence as a taught intelligence, where I think all too often we just ignore it with excuses like "that's just who they are".

And that's not going to work for everyone, so obviously there still needs to be repercussions for people who do bully others, and we should make it clear that bullying is never acceptable, but I think we need to concentrate more on helping the people being bullied to grow, rather than stopping the bullies themselves. To come back to your maths analogy, if someone's struggling with arithmetic, you can't just make the subject easier and tell them they don't need to worry about it, they still need to actually learn the subject, even if it's hard for them.

[cannaceo]

"The ultimate solution to being bullied often lies in the hands of the victim" is the reality that people who are pushing for anti-bullying measures are trying to change.

[thegrimmest]

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 bullied by one of your peers, you need to learn the skills to resolve that conflict. Sometimes escalation is the best tool, sometimes avoidance is. There's no panacea, but it's something we all need to learn.

[cannaceo]

Can you give an example of what being bullied by a peer would look like and what skills would be required to resolve that conflict?

[thegrimmest]

If one of your classmates takes to pushing you around, taking your stuff, embarrassing you, calling you names, etc. This is normal behaviour in apes who are trying to establish a dominance hierarchy. The bully likely sees you as a soft target who is easy to dominate. The best course is to correct that assumption - escalate conflict - fight back, fight dirty. It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. The best way to avoid that is to make friends and be more trouble than you are worth.

[bentley]

In adulthood I’ve never had to resolve a problematic interaction through physical violence, and I hope to never have to. The methods I have used—distancing myself from the bully, reporting to management/HR/oversight agencies—are quite like the methods I used to avoid bullying in childhood. I never used violence back then either.

The only meaningful difference between now and then is that in adulthood I have more such avenues and they are much more effective. The fact that they were less effective in childhood is an indictment of the administrative and social structure we have constructed schools to have, not of nonviolent methods themselves. I reject your assertion that it’s helpful for a bullied child to model behavior on chimpanzees in the jungle or criminals in prison. Becoming violent in childhood would have had negative long‐term effects on me, and I’m glad nobody back then gave me the “advice” you’re sharing now.

[Biologist123]

Good response. Toxic organisations (at whatever scale) fail to maintain an atmosphere where bullying is rejected and people are helped to be their best. Children should be taught to recognise toxic organisations and be given courage to exit them. And internalize that you do this as an adult too. There are situations where assault or battery could arise, and it is good to have some training in how to deal with those situations. Bullying, assault, battery are all abusive: it’s just bullying is legal and the others are not.

[thegrimmest]

Or perhaps the conclusion here is that administrative intervention is not effective on children the same way as it is on adults.

[bentley]

Given that my interactions with adults outside of school (and later, when I was pulled out of public school to be homeschooled) were almost always positive, I’m willing to specifically blame school administration and/or their techniques.

[leto_ii]

> It's the same rationale as in prison - you don't want to end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy.

The simple fact that you think it's not a problem to somewhat approvingly compare schools to prisons is already a bad sign. Schools shouldn't be like prisons. Prisons shouldn't be like prisons either, but that's another story...

[thegrimmest]

Approval has nothing to do with it - we are apes living in dominance hierarchies, children even more so.

[leto_ii]

That's just not true. There are many kinds of social relations, dominance being just one particularity nasty one. Other apes also exhibit a whole range of social relations. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog world out there, and most of the time it actually isn't.

[darkarmani]

> 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).