| > Given the reports of bullying's adverse effects of a society's productivity, I'm almost wondering if we should apply legal penalties to bullies and mitigate such externalities. A beautiful idea which will not work, any more than resort to adult authority ever does in such cases. Three reasons: Shallowly, first, the authority is not absolute and cannot be. There will always be opportunities for a bully to bully; trying to forbid this only makes it more appealing. A sufficiently interested bully won't let themself be avoided, and they find the appearance of vulnerability interesting because they're out for a good time and not a fight. Shallowly and secondly, bullies rarely act like they do for the sake of pure sadism. There is usually some prior damage back of it. Heaping punishment on top thus tends to make them worse and not better, because they blame their own victims and treat them worse in consequence. Deeply, bullying leaves a longlasting mark on people who have been made to feel helpless. Resorting to someone else to protect you does not ameliorate this. Learning to defend yourself does, because in doing it you discover that you don't need to resort to outside authority. A bully puts you in fear. You learn you can take yourself out of it. It usually doesn't take long, and requires consistency much more than the ability to take a punch; once someone gets the idea you're guaranteed to give them a fight rather than the good time they want, they desist. Most childhood bullies can't fight for shit anyway, or at least most of mine couldn't. > I would love to avoid bullies for the rest of my life. What kind of workplaces are least likely to have them? Those where there's no access to money or power worth having. As far as I can tell, those are the primary incentives in adult life to which people respond with bullying behavior that has to be taken seriously. That said, it looks like the situation in South Korea may be far worse than what I've seen. If it's as apparently universally described, I'd tend to think of it as a cultural pathology. (That's not American condescension, I promise. If anything, given the state of America these days, it's half professional opinion and half commiseration...) |
As someone bullied in high school, I would counter this by saying "how about we start by punishing adults that openly participate in the bullying?". Surely that isn't so much to ask? Because this was a definite problem. Sudden unexplainable extremely pedantic test corrections, teachers shouting at you when you get bullied. Teachers treating the bullied kid as a problem instead of the bullying, and, although that was often so badly done it almost helped, teachers attempting to bully you directly.
I learned to do tests absolutely correctly, leave absolutely no opportunity for the teacher to deduct points. A SINGLE spelling error in a verb in a history test? -20%. Use of "advanced" mathematics in a physics exam? -50% (I used a derivative because of a book on physics I got from the library, and the physics teacher (of 10th grade, in US terms) did not understand derivatives, or what they have to do with physics. After all, due to state legislation, we have a physics teacher that had a "license" (master's degree) in history ... and a history teacher that had a license in physics. Technically they could switch, but their tenure would reset to zero if they did, with consequences for pay and apparently if the school had to shrink they'd get fired sooner. Both chose against doing this). Asking physics questions in history class definitely led to bullying.
But can we start by actually punishing abuse of adult authority for bullying, and give some opportunity for kids to prove such bullying.