Since we are in the Rants & Raves section, here is my rant on bullying. My view is largely influenced by my own experience and
this really, really good article that I think I posted a long time ago in a different thread. I'll give you the Cliff Notes version.
Bullying can only happen in places where kids/people are held captive, and when the bully has an "audience". This is why it only happens in places like school, prisons and less often, workplaces. If people are free to walk away, that's what they will do almost every time someone tries to bully them.
The goal of the bully is to get a reaction from the victim in front of the audience. If the victim reacts, then the bully holds that up as proof that the victim was whiny and deserved to be bullied. The only options for the victim are:
1) Leave the situation entirely (as I said above, almost always not an option)
2) Don't react at all and let the bully continue to torture you. Good luck.
3) Fight back with even greater force to get the bully to back off. This will likely result in both the bully and the victim getting punished. And the bullying may resume after a while.
4) Complain to the parents, teacher or whoever has higher authority. The authority may view the victim as the problem, since they are the one complaining. If they are taken seriously, it may give the victim a temporary break. After a time, the bullying will likely resume, though, and may be even more intense.
That's it. Those are the only choices the victim has. None of the choices are very good. The absolute best outcome is if the "audience" witnessing the bullying (the other students in this case) were to tell the bully to stop. Once the bully sees that what they are doing is not gaining them any status, they will almost always stop (unless they are truly a sadistic sociopath). Sadly, the victim has no control over whether their fellow students will stand up for them like that. This is why bullying says way more about the other students witnessing the bullying than it does about the victim. Teach your kids to take a stand if they see someone getting bullied. Most of the time, the bully will not turn someone who speaks up into a victim, but it is a risk. It takes courage.
Bullying happens less often in bigger schools where there are multiple "cliques". If you can find a decent size clique where you fit in, then your friends will likely stand up for you and you will be safe. This is what I experienced in high school. Bullying did happen in high school, but it happened FAR more often in my small private grade school. At the small grade school there were only 2 cliques - the cool kids bullied the nerds. So you had better hope you were accepted into the cool kids group. I was initially in the cool kids group. Then I saw them bully people and I told them to stop. Since it was just me saying that, they didn't stop. If more people than me had spoken up, I think they would have stopped. So after that I was basically a loner - there were like 3 of us that didn't fit into either group. The kids in my grade largely left me alone, but my clique of 3 was not enough to stop bullying from kids in higher grades.
I used to blame these traumatic experiences from my childhood for shaping me into the sensitive, introverted, loner person that I am. I am 100% sure those incidents did not help me at all. I was in my 30s before I started to grasp that I would probably be the same person, for the most part, had I not been bullied. My anger, rage and shame over those incidents was totally justified, though. What happened was BS. I did not learn a single life lesson from being bullied. All it did was cause deep emotional scars that took years to heal. That's it. There is no upside.
