[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

100%, the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.

I once had a kid bullying me in middle school. I spoke with my mother about it, who recommended I say something to the teachers, which I did.

When that didn't work I knocked the shit out of him the next time he tried to bully me, to the point that he was running around the edges of the classroom trying to get away from me while I chased him down to beat on him some more.

He stopped fucking with me after that.

To your point, we both got suspended, but my mother made it clear I wasn't being punished and made sure I had fun during that suspension.

It's a lifelong skill that will be used as an adult too.

[sharadov]

100% agree, I was a skinny kid who taught himself to fight to ward off bullies.

I bought a punching bag and started training when I was 12 - in 6 months I got so strong that I was bare-hand punching into cement walls.

There was this bully who would constantly berate me - he probably had 4 inches over me and a good 15-20 pounds heavier.

This one time am walking down the street and he comes out of nowhere and throws a punch, luckily I saw it coming, ducked and it grazed my cheek.

I flew into a rage - all I remember is he was down on the ground in a couple mins and I had beaten his face to pulp - I stopped when a friend and bystanders pulled me off. So yes, learning to fight is a life skill - because there are times when there are no adults around and it's you or the bully.

[vintermann]

> the way to avoid being bullied is to not be an easy target.

That may work for the individual, but there's always going to be an easiest target. We have studies of bullying interventions, including teaching kids self respect by way of martial arts, and changing the victim doesn't work.

I suggest people should look into the actual science on this. A good start is "Bullying at school: what we know and what we can do" by Dan Olweus from 1991.

[spacephysics]

So this book that’s been around for over 30 years has the answers, yet apparently few schools have implemented it enough where bullying is still a problem?

[vintermann]

If that would surprise you, you don't know much about social science. Proving an intervention works is one thing, convincing the people who make the decisions to follow up on it is quite another.

Luckily Olweus was uncommonly good at that too. It has been implemented at thousands of schools all across the world, and kept being evaluated in differing cultural contexts, and in comparison to alternative interventions, in many systematic review studies.