[copperx]

Before bullying was eliminated from schools, bullying was pervasive, and I know several friends who were bullied throughout their schooling. The emotional scars and struggles with self-esteem they faced lasted long after the bullying itself stopped.

[LeoPanthera]

> Before bullying was eliminated from schools

I have bad news.

[boringuser2]

You can't force a social group to be accepting of people.

'Bullied' or not, these people will be scarred by being rejected from the social group in any context that they have interactions with their peers. There will always be people who are rejected by their social group for various reasons.

It's extremely jarring because in ancient times it generally foretold literal death. I remember it feeling like that sometimes.

[em-bee]

You can't force a social group to be accepting of people

i disagree with that. you can teach people to be accepting of others. doing just that in my opinion is exactly one of the jobs of school.

[copperx]

You definitely cannot teach people to be accepting of others. However, a school should force them to be civil and even pleasant toward all people during school hours.

[em-bee]

really? on what basis do you make that claim? being accepting of others is the basis of our society. (we can't have a society if we don't learn how to accept others in that society)

claiming that this can't be learned is defeatist, and decidedly not helpful.

on the other hand, i don't believe you can force behavior on people against their will. they need to learn the behavior so that they actually want to behave like that.

[MaxfordAndSons]

> bullying was eliminated from schools

It was? Not that I've been in primary school in a few decades, but I find this claim exceedingly hard to believe.

[trealira]

Maybe they just have kids who go to a nicer school than they did. I think this may have happened with me and my mother.

She went to high school in a poor area of the US south during the 1970s, so her school probably wasn't good. She's told me stories of how she was bullied physically (mainly by boys, but girls bullied her physically too), and how she's glad it's not like that "nowadays"/"anymore." Even kids who weren't bullied still got into fistfights. It probably didn't help that corporal punishment was routine at her school.

I went to a magnet high school in a high income county in the US. I graduated in 2021, and I personally didn't see or experience any bullying. Students were generally pretty nice and left you alone if they didn't like you.

From reading this thread, I realize the difference probably comes more from the areas we grew up in, but I had attributed it to bullying being mostly eliminated without thinking much about it.

Many have given anecdotes, but we need statistics in order to get an accurate view of the whole country. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 22% of US students ages 12-18 reported being bullied, while 5% reported specifically being pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=719

[ViktorRay]

Maybe the bullying was happening at your school and you were just lucky not to see it.

I went to an excellent high school and it was filled with many friendly intelligent hard working people. I was still bullied. I’m sure many of the other friendly nice kids in my grade probably assumed no bullying was going on because they personally didn’t see it but I can assure you that even in the best schools it can and does happen.

I was in high school 15 years ago.

[trealira]

Yes, it's highly possible that it happened and I just didn't witness it. Though I had a couple friends, I wasn't very sociable, and mostly kept to myself when I wasn't eating with my friends. I was on the track team, but had no friends there either.

Some students spoke English as a second language and had trouble with it. I know because I was friends with someone like this for a short while. They could have been easy targets for bullies.

Some students were openly transgender. Maybe some people talked bad about them behind their backs and/or disbelieved them, or harassed them without me seeing it. I couldn't know without having asked them about it. I know that at least one other student knew a transgender student from middle school and wouldn't stop calling them by their old name and pronouns.

I was also one of the few who didn't use social media, besides Reddit; maybe there was cyberbullying that I missed. I feel like I'm out of touch with most people my age because of this.

[MaxfordAndSons]

Yea I recognize it's probably been greatly reduced generation over generation, it was already being addressed systematically when I was a kid ~20 years ago... but saying "eliminated" seems like it must be an exaggeration. Though ironically, the bullying that does occur probably has been largely relocated from the physical realm to the digital, so in that sense it may have been all but eliminated.