Did you know that "being nice" to the kids who are being bullied has been tried?

“Let’s try assigning Robinson to be nice to Cruz.”

“Does she have or get any training for that?”

“Have you seen our budget lately? No. [yuk yuk yuk]”

Right?

Yes, I read that article. Suggesting that is another example of blaming the victim as the author states.

Perhaps the program helped two people and there was one failure. It is still worth trying.

They don’t help anyone at all. It just makes the situation worse. Please re-read the details.

I copied this from a Wash Post article that I couldn’t read because it was trying to make me subscribe to it. You have just a few seconds before the banner pops up, and in those few seconds I managed to copy and paste the text:

Op-Ed Contributor
I Tried to Befriend Nikolas Cruz. He Still Killed My Friends.
By Isabelle Robinson
March 27, 2018

PARKLAND, Fla. — My first interaction with Nikolas Cruz happened when I was in seventh grade. I was eating lunch with my friends, most likely discussing One Direction or Ed Sheeran, when I felt a sudden pain in my lower back. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of my 90-pound body; tears stung my eyes. I turned around and saw him, smirking. I had never seen this boy before, but I would never forget his face. His eyes were lit up with a sick, twisted joy as he watched me cry.
The apple that he had thrown at my back rolled slowly along the tiled floor. A cafeteria aide rushed over to ask me if I was O.K. I don’t remember if Mr. Cruz was confronted over his actions, but in my 12-year-old naïveté, I trusted that the adults around me would take care of the situation.
Five years later, hiding in a dark closet inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I would discover just how wrong I was.
I am not writing this piece to malign Nikolas Cruz any more than he already has been. I have faith that history will condemn him for his crimes. I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Douglas would never have occurred.

This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
A year after I was assaulted by Mr. Cruz, I was assigned to tutor him through my school’s peer counseling program. Being a peer counselor was the first real responsibility I had ever had, my first glimpse of adulthood, and I took it very seriously.
Despite my discomfort, I sat down with him, alone. I was forced to endure his cursing me out and ogling my chest until the hourlong session ended. When I was done, I felt a surge of pride for having organized his binder and helped him with his homework.
Looking back, I am horrified. I now understand that I was left, unassisted, with a student who had a known history of rage and brutality.
Like many pre-teenage and teenage girls, I possessed — and still, to an extent, possess — a strong desire to please. I strive to win the praise of the adults in my life and long to be seen as mature beyond my years. I would have done almost anything to win the approval of my teachers.
This is not to say that children should reject their more socially awkward or isolated peers — not at all. As a former peer counselor and current teacher’s assistant, I strongly believe in and have seen the benefits of reaching out to those who need kindness most.
But students should not be expected to cure the ills of our genuinely troubled classmates, or even our friends, because we first and foremost go to school to learn. The implication that Mr. Cruz’s mental health problems could have been solved if only he had been loved more by his fellow students is both a gross misunderstanding of how these diseases work and a dangerous suggestion that puts children on the front line.
It is not the obligation of children to befriend classmates who have demonstrated aggressive, unpredictable or violent tendencies. It is the responsibility of the school administration and guidance department to seek out those students and get them the help that they need, even if it is extremely specialized attention that cannot be provided at the same institution.
No amount of kindness or compassion alone would have changed the person that Nikolas Cruz is and was, or the horrendous actions he perpetrated. That is a weak excuse for the failures of our school system, our government and our gun laws.
My little sister is now the age that I was when I was left alone with Mr. Cruz, anxious and defenseless. The thought of her being put in the same situation that I was fills me with rage. I hope that she will never know the fear that I have become so accustomed to in the past month: The slightest unexpected sound makes my throat constrict and my neck hairs curl. I beg her to trust her gut whenever she feels unsafe. And I demand that the adults in her life protect her.

Isabelle Robinson is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

**************************

Awesome writing skills. I blame the schools.

I mean you can’t fix psychopaths but you can stand up to bullies and prevent them from inflicting psychological damage on others. Some kids who are heavily bullied never fully recover from it and yes some may turn into monsters as a result.

Funny you asked this. I’m on my way to finish a long ass “documentary” about a fucked-up autistic man who literally went insane and trolls people on a daily basic. As a kid his parents refused to send him to a special need school even when they offered them to. So the school he studied in assigned some girls to be his friends. He suffered from a lot of bully and he genuinely appreciated their company. The thing is, the girls didn’t share the same sentiment. They knew very well they were just there to keep him happy and they had a life outside him, but of course they couldn’t tell him that. He the went on to express his love to some of them, which they turned down. This gave him a mentality that all pretty girls had boyfriends and later became one od the sources of him madness. And this was sometime in the 90s.

I think the way forward involves people with much better training than schools generally have any idea is possible, and a legal (and school authority) structure where those people are in a position to correctly detect, assess, and do something useful about problematic people.

I’ve met several people who I feel were qualified to correctly identify problematic children and/or adults, but our laws and social agreements give hardly anyone power to correct messed up situations and get perpetrators away from victims and into appropriate treatment. Of course, we also have more problematic people than we have capacity to deal them appropriately, by a long shot. (And of course, look at who’s at the top of our government… oops.)