[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.