Do you wait for a bully to physically attack a victim, or do you intervene at the verbally abusive phase?

Verbally adusive stage. Its a shame that we have bullies.

I honestly as a student would get a teacher involved to try to stop it early on.

In grade school? TATTLE. I’d get an adult ASAP.

@ willbrawn; I agree; and hope the teacher does “the right thing” (call the police). People need to learn that there are consequences to their actions regardless of their “circumstance”. Though education, and accountability ought to play major roles in rehab.

Run and find some place to hide. Maybe the toilet. To make sure no one else gets hurt.

I was very shy as a child and my school only had a couple of bullies. They were the 15 years old fourth graders.

As an adult, I intervene anytime I see one child bullying another—no hesitation. The last time it was high school boys bothering an 11 year old. I jumped in and looked UP at those boys and chastised them.

i broke up a few fights when I was in grade school and high school. I got hit a couple times, but mostly I was able to talk people down without having them lose face.

That’s the key thing about things like that—you have to be sensitive to ego. Being tall also helps.

15-year-old fourth-graders!? Wouldn’t you have had to repeat every single year of school to be a 15-year-old fourth-grader? Good Lord.

@MacBean . Yes. When I was in grade school, you went to the next grade only when you passed all of the subjects. There were people who were in the same grade for three years. Today they just push them on through the system until 12th grade, then they cannot pass the exit exam and quit. When I was growing up they quit school at 16 in the fifth or sixth grade. I don’t know which is better.

As a kid ,I would mind my own business, If a bully tried anything with me (and they always did, since I am autistic) it was a different story. I had been taught never to throw the first punch, so I would verbally bait him into swinging, (not a difficult thing to do when ones IQ is at least twice that of the bully’s). A block, a chop and no more bullying at that school. I was a Navy brat and went to so many schools that I had this down to a science. Of course this was in an era when boys were expected to settle such things for themselves.

@thriftymaid: We’re hijacking the thread here, but I have to ask, when (and where) was that? (That sounds disbelieving. It’s not meant to. I’m really just curious. I find this really interesting.)

When I was in elementary school, whether you passed or failed a grade was kind of subjective. The teacher would review the student’s grades over the course of the year and decide if they thought the student had progressed enough overall. Then they’d recommend “pass” or “fail” (or, on occasion, “skip” if the student was that much more advanced than their peers) and say which teacher they thought the student should have the next year. Parents were able to appeal if they strongly disagreed with a decision. (For example, one year my parents and my best friend’s parents appealed our teacher’s recommendation to put us in the same classroom the next year because we fought too much when we were together all day, so the principal gave us different teachers the next year.)

In middle and high school it became an objective thing because we had a different teacher for each subject instead of just one for all of them. You had to maintain an average of 65% through the whole year and also pass the final exam at the end of the year in order to pass the class as a whole. You could fail one subject and still move up to a homeroom for the next grade the following year, and only repeat the subject you failed. If you failed two subjects, you still moved forward in the classes that you did pass, but you were kept back in the ones you failed and also in homeroom, which meant you weren’t allowed to graduate with the class you’d started with. It got rather complicated; in my junior year I had at least one class in every grade level. (Mostly junior classes, senior French because I was in an accelerated program, sophomore math because I’d failed, and freshman science because I’d been skipped over it and chose to go back and take it anyway so I could get a science sequence for my diploma.)

Bullies tend to be “all show and NO GO”! The “law” would say you can report a “bully”, but you CAN’T attack them! The only time you can become “physical” with a bully is in self-defense! But bullies tend to be bullies because they have NO FAITH in themselves; so they’re “mouthy”! Generally. . . . .I’d just “blow them off”!

Physically striking someone is where the line stops. Everyone ‘verbally abuses’ someone, I’m sure we do it all the time without even realizing it.

@Blackberry

Just wanted to say “Hi”, Blackberry! Glad to see you made it to “Fluther”! Enjoy your day today!

I intervene at the verbal stage. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it makes it worse. I remember when I was in school I was a self appointed defender of the meek. Nine out of ten times the person I was defending hated me for it. Looking back I see why, it just revved the bullies up, they lay in wait for the victim and when they were caught alone they paid a higher price for my intervention. Teaching the victims of this world how not to be a victim is a more effective approach.

I am uncomfortable interceding with strangers, but when it seems appropriate, I do so at the verbal stage. Physical violence results in a call to the police ASAP.

As a student, I was always the victim. As an adult, I do not have the physical capabilities to intervene in anything physical but I would call the police if I witnessed a crime being committed.

NO!!! catch them early bcuz the first blow might not be with their hand….it could be the only blow to end someones life.