Were you the subject of bullying in school? do you think kids are more or less vicious now then they were decades ago?

I was bullied because I moved around so much and had the “wrong“accent. But in the end I learned how to stick up for myself. Schools should be made more aware of it yes. But life is full of bullies better to start young, by learning karate.

I was only ‘bullied’ verbally, kids were too afraid to try to beat up one of the few black kids in school. In my opinion, bullies should be beat up by someone bigger to get the experience of what they are doing to others, and I’m totally serious. I wish I could be employed to beat up teens…...

I think kids are probably as vicious as they always were; no more no less. However, with the advent of the internet and social networking sites. it seems the bullying can get global very easily. I do think schools are now more aware of the issues and are trying to address them. When I was younger, the attitude seemed to be basically one of “suck it up.”

I was bullied pretty much continuously from about 4th grade through senior year. There were varying degrees of bullying, but for the most part the mental stuff was worse than the physical. It happened most during P.E. classes, which along with sadistic coaches, pretty much turned me off on P.E. and exercise in general for a very long time. I’m certain teachers knew about it, some of it must have been seen, I turned in short story writing assignments about kids taking revenge on bullies that would have had me in psychiatric counseling to prevent another Columbine if they were turned in today. I expect that there were horrible cases of bullying then too, but that they get more media attention now. Some of what I’ve heard about is far worse than anything I experienced, but I don’t know how widespread it is or was or even how much of my current impression of bullying is more from Law and Order SVU and how much is from reality. But overall I would say that there is a trend toward a much more vicious kind of bullying today.

I think if you know your kid is being bullied and it is relentless, and nothing is helping you should let them switch schools if it is possible. Once a kid is labeled it can be difficult sometimes to change it. I was not bullied and did not bully anyone. I went along with teasing a girl in my neighborhood once when I was very little, maybe 6 years old, and my mom told me how horrible it was, and I never did anything like that again.

I was always a bit chubby as a kid so the temptation for people to bully must have been huge, excuse the pun. Luckily, until highschool I had my brothers reputation to protect me. However once in high school a kid did try to bully me…. so i picked him off the floor by his neck & slammed him into a wall. No-one ever tried again.
I dont honestly think kids are worse now than they used to be….. I do think that thanks to modern technology there is more opportunity to bully. & this may well explain, to a degree, the increasing number of bully related suicides etc.
I think that if a school is aware they have a bullying problem & does nothing about it, & a child ends up dead, then they should be held responsible in the same way a company can be charged with corporate manslaughter.

I went to one of the largest high schools in the country and bullying seemed virtually non-existent. I was never victimized, never heard of anyone being victimized, and the size of the school tended to neutralize the “cliquiness” of high school. It was not the case that everyone knew everyone, far from it. There was 2,000 students in my graduating class.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, grew up in a town with less than a thousand people in it and went to a combined middle and high school, meaning everyone was with the same classmates for 7 years and everyone knew everyone. She said that bullying was a huge problem, and there were people who were seriously affected by it.

@timsnarpewen I’m sorry Snarp, I would have protected you :)

I was brutally bullied in middle school and the first part of highschool.

I got over it, moved on, and I’m very well adjusted mentally and socially.

Kids have always been assholes and will probably always be assholes. I remember my grandfather talking to me about how he knew some bullies in the 40’s who tied up some other kids and tried to “execute” them with bb guns before their dad showed up and whipped their asses. If I had to quantify it, I’d say that kids were probably slightly worse, in the past, but bullying was less common because of the prevalence of harsher discipline.

The difference is in the “old days” a kid could go home and escape the bullying for the weekend or at least overnight, and get relief in a safe home environment. Now technology allows the bullying to continue nonstop through texts, posting humiliating pics taken with camera phones on facebook, barraging a myspace page with insults. The kids can’t disconnect from it as easily as in the old days.

I’ve seen a lot of bullying. I’ve even seen teachers bully. Sometimes even adults tend to pick on people who are different, believe it or not.

The worst bullying I ever, ever witnessed was the treatment of gay male students in particular, especially in small conservative towns. In smallish towns the rumor mill also feeds the bullying. Vicious gossip often precedes a sort of group “shunning” of epic proportions.

@blackberry – I did get some occasional protection in high school. I had a friend who was one of the biggest dudes in the school, a hard core death metal head, and also pretty much the king of all drag racing. Don’t think he was ever in a fight, people just thought he would kill them. I got into a car wreck with another kid from my school, completely his fault and he really caught hell from his dad. I started hearing that he was going around threatening to do serious bodily harm to me. Then one day my head banger friend just walked up to me and said: “Don’t worry about him.” I had never said a word about it, I guess he just heard the threats and responded. I never heard about it again.

I had a another friend who was seriously mentally ill. If he was off his medication he would go off on anyone at the drop of a hat, and he wouldn’t stop. I saw him take on five guys after one of them, much bigger than him, said something about his girlfriend. The other four were just trying to stop him from killing the first. It was all they could do to get him under control.

But still, some bullies don’t know who your friends are, and some will just do what they want when they’re not around. Plus I wasn’t the kind to go crying for help.

There’s a Roald Dahl story called The Swan. It’s the story of a kid who is brutally bullied. It’s fiction of course, but the notion of vicious bullying in it came from somewhere, and it was published in 1977. So that’s some evidence that it’s not an entirely new phenomenon.

Not to fear, the kind of person who becomes a bully is the same kind of person who will end up bagging your groceries.

@noyesa – That’s what I’ve always said. I’m pretty certain most of my former bullies are doing fairly poorly now. Oddly I’m Facebook friends with two of them, one is a dentist and the other is a lousy musician. I expect they’re the most successful of the lot. Actually, almost my entire high school class seems to now work for State Farm Insurance. Not sure what that says.

I was bullied all throughout school, I hated it. I was bullied because I was chubby, and my hair has my birthmark, and I developed faster than all the other girls in my class. I was teased, on girl tore my shirt, when I was in fourth grade, I got tied to the flag pole, and when I was in gym class, somebody broke in to my locker and stole my bra and hung it on the flag pole for everybody to see.
But I personally think the severity of bullying has increased.

were you bullied in school?
I was picked on a bit, but that always ended pretty quickly, and aside from a couple of incidents was never physical. I wasn’t a good target for bullying types so they pretty much avoided me.

or were you a bully?
Never, I actually stood up for people.

how responsible do you think the schools should be if they are made aware of the bullying but choose to ignore it
In my opinion it’s the schools responsibility to ensure a safe environment conducive to success and education. I can see how bullying can easily and predictably interfere with that so when the school is aware of an incident, I feel they should they should immediately intercede. Failure to do so, in my mind, is essentially shirking their responsibilities to provide a stable learning environment for all students.

As to more or less vicious, I don’t know about that, but I think it tends to go further than it used to. Both in bullying and responding to it, neither of which seem to be adequately addressed… and too many of the adults involved appear to prefer eschewing responsibility for the situations.

I was bullied in school. It was awful, and at one point I tried to bring one of my dad’s guns to school, to protect myself. Thank God my dad had a gun-locker I couldn’t get into.
I don’t think things are any different today. Kids are generally assholes, and need to be taught empathy and kindness.

@timfilmfannenew That is the difference I see today. The problem is being addressed more. I heard a piece on NPR the other day about an anti-bullying curriculum being taught in a junior high. And the other difference being what @timescapedone7enew expressed, the unrelentingness of the bullying with the internet so that there is no refuge.

When I came to America, I was bullied for being that immigrant kid with glasses and bad clothing – in 6th grade, things were so bad that I was being punched in the hallway – we had to switch schools. I was a bully as well, once, and I regret it to this very day.

I was never bullied. I never bullied anyone. None of my friends were bullies.
There were hostile bullies in jr high and high school. they were all boys and a few bully-girls.
the school did their best to discipline them, but it didn’t stop these thugs. some dropped out of high school, or ran away.
What I found out later on as I grew up, was that there was extreme family-at-home problems. Stories like an alchoholic father or step father who beat them, and some horrible abusive parents, always emotional, mostly physical abuse. Then when I knew the rest of the story, I understood the parasitic abuse cycle.

@noyesa – I don’t think that the size of your school had any impact directly on bullying. I went to a very large high school too, what a large school means is just that it’s easier for bullying to go unnoticed. More likely that either you just didn’t see the bullying, or there was something about the pool from which the students were pulled that reduced bullying.

I was conversely the bully and the bullied ( I also moved around a lot, often being in multiple schools in the same year). Kids may be slightly more vicious due to desensitization but it’s hard for them to be truly evil with responsible adults in charge.

I was not bullied (sure I was teased a couple times and there was this one guy in 4th grade who hated me, but a talking to his parents stopped that problem), but based on stories from my parents, it seems that bullying was tolerated a lot more in the olden days. For one thing, only physical bullying was really focused on. If someone was getting beaten up at school, then the person would get in trouble, clearly. But verbal bullying wasn’t focused on as much. “Boys will be boys” was a common excuse used back then. So while I’m not sure if there was more bullying back then, there certainly wasn’t the “zero tolerance” policy that we have for it now. Only difference is that now people are cyber-bullying, which is much easier to get away with.

I was bullied to the point I snapped, then I became the bully of the bullies! :-/
Every time they beat someone up I got them! The teachers never stepped in, it always kicked off in the play ground or sports field, I remember fighting three guys at once in the changing room after rugby practice because I scored the winning try & conversion ! :-/ they thought because I was the poor kid I had no right to talent, hell could fight then ….. It’s a lot worse these days I think with knives being used ever so , violence from school is killing a lot of kids through the gang culture & mix race culture, I think the authorities need to do their homework on how best to tackle it, it’s no good just leaving it to the teachers, if they step in too heavy handed they could well find themselves in court on an assault charge, that’s how dumb our laws are!
:-/

I was bullied (in the 1970s and early 80s) because I was too skinny, and noticeably disabled, and hopeless at sports. It was physical, sometimes, but I was never seriously hurt. I think it’s worse now than it was then.

Desensitization. Kids nowadays are nearly sociopathic.

Grade school was awful. We were poor and my dad was sick and my mom worked. I I was a little rag a muffin kid and was always sick. I remember when a girl pointed out in front of everyone that my socks didn’t match. (That was in the day that girls had to wear dresses to school.)
Some grades were better than others, but for the most part the bullies were not the bad kids, they were the teachers pets. They got good grades and were athletic. I doubt that they will ever see through the kiss ups and lay down the law with the bullies.

Other than the occasional teasing, my school years were pretty uneventful. My friends and I (the same friends through middle school and high school) mostly went unnoticed. We weren’t popular, but we weren’t picked on either. Looking back, I think it was ideal!

Like others have said, the technology available to kids today makes it easier for them to harass each other 24/7 and with a wider audience. Now, not only can one kid humiliate another in the school hallway, but that kid can post the action on youtube, link to it on facebook, tweet about it, and text it to everyone he or she knows. Instead of being humiliated in front of a few people, the kid has just been humiliated to the whole world.

I was bullied for two years in secondary school fucking bitches and that was only about 10 years ago so I can’t really talk about how it was for the generations before me but I would take a guess that it hasn’t got worse but our perception of it has changed. Gone are the days that my grandfather remembers where, if you were bullied, you stood up for yourself without getting teachers or parents involved. My grandfather said that school for him and his friends was a prime example of “survival of the fittest” and if you couldn’t learn to stick up for yourself then it was your own fault that you were bullied! Nowadays, like others have said, there are more extreme ways of bullying than just a scrap in the playground. We are also encouraged to talk about bullying more nowadays when, in my granfathers day or at least, at his school, the teachers mostly turned a blind eye to it, letting the kids fight it out amongst themselves. I am only going by what my Grandfather has told me about his childhood days, obviously not everyone of a certain generation will have the same experiences.

@an-Leanne1986-en

I did!! :-/
We used to sort it with our fists not knives!! ;-)

@ben-Leanne1986-drew As far as I know, schools now have policies in place to punish kids for fighting, regardless of who started the fight or whether or not one of the participants was acting in self-defense. I have a friend whose son was recently suspended from school because another kid grabbed him in a choke-hold. When the son defended himself by elbowing and hitting the kid who was choking him, he was disciplined just as harshly even though he stopped and backed off as soon as the other kid let go. Several witnesses confirmed that my friend’s son hadn’t done anything to provoke the fight and was only defending himself, but “school policy is school policy.” It’s nonsense. What was he supposed to do, stand there and let the other kid choke him?!

I don’t think kids should be allowed to fight at school, but there should be common sense mixed in with the rules. The “zero tolerance” policy is often taken too far.

How is bullying ever going to change? It’s definitely possible to create a school culture where it’s much milder or nearly extinct (I know this, because I was lucky to be in such environments) but I think it’s something that’s just a part of human nature—picking on others. The school district I attend is fantastic about constantly pushing no-social-cruelty, no-discrimination, no-bigotism, et cetera, et cetera. The administrators and teachers take it seriously. So do the students, because of that. If a school makes it a priority to raise awareness among students—not just for one week, but throughout the year—then there are rarely incidents where teachers or administrators have to step in between a bully and a victim.

I think the great thing is that it’s getting attention these days. No one is supposed to just suck it up and tough it out. It’s seen as a problem and the victim isn’t told he or she is being too sensitive. Of course, there’s the internet…unlike talking behind people’s backs in real life, if you do it online—and there are records of it—how is it ever going to get scrubbed off of the internet? Imagine a case of middle-school libel following your name around your whole life, every time someone Googles (since it’s April Fool’s, I suppose I should say Topekas) you. Maybe this is just me being paranoid?

I was bullied at both my high schools. One was a guy on the varsity football team, and the other was a girl who was dating one of the big gang leader kids at the school. Her reason was she “just didn’t like my face”. Seriously. That was it. Why the varsity football player shoved me in lockers, against walls, and hit my head at water fountains, I have no idea. He was a foot taller than me and outweighed me by at least 100 lbs.

During my sophomore year, this jerk hit me really hard as he passed me in the hallway, and I fell down. Went up to him and hit him back, but I got caught and was in trouble. Why? He was on the winning varsity football team and our school claimed to have a no-tolerance rule for fisticuffs on the part of athletes. No one wanted to have him sit out any games. I had to sit out a soccer match, despite my coach telling the assistant principal that this wasn’t right. That still upsets me a bit. What was I supposed to do, let him hurt me while not one other kid stood up for me? Fuck that noise.

There were two white guys at my second high school who would whisper “n*&%$r” in my ear during English class, block the doors when I tried to use them, that kind of crap. And our English teacher was a straight-up racist. When I answered one of her Shakespeare questions (she had to pick me, no one else had raised their hands), she had the gall to look exasperated and asked me how on Earth, given my background (!!!!!) would I know such things. Bitch. My name is from a play of the man’s. She knew what those boys were doing. I sat in the front row. She gave her tacit consent for these dudes to pick on me, and the only reason I didn’t fight back was because I was the only dirt poor kid at school and I didn’t want to make things bad for the other black kids going there, though I really shouldn’t have worried about them.

But that was the mid 80s. No one cared about bullying so much then. It’s only been in the last 6 or 7 years anyone’s cared that this goes on among young people. To tell the truth, it was worse at church with the pastor’s kids. There were 6 of them, and all asswipes.

I was doomed from the start. First, I lived in a trailer park on the low income side of town and was going to school in a “magnet” program that drew kids mostly from the rich neighborhoods. Second, the poor kids in my neighborhood weren’t magnet kids, so I was teased for being smart. The kiss of death was my lesbian mom – no one could deal with that. So it was like hanging a bully target on my back. It was pretty intense. They’d wait outside the school grounds to beat me up on the way home, they’d steal my shoes as I changed into my boots and throw them in the toilet, I had to stand up on the school bus, I was spit on, kicked, and of course no one wanted to have me on their team or at their lunch table. It sounds petty when you’re all grown up, but that’s total ostracism as a middle schooler. This was 70s-80s. When my mom would go talk to the school, they were less than zero help – “Laureth is bullied because she draws it to herself. She needs a father figure. Kids will be kids, and those other kids don’t know any better.”

In fact, it made me pretty much hate people in general.

It’s true, kids are animals. They’re not going to police themselves, so adults in authority (who totally know better) ought to step up to the plate. It can’t be in ways that will get the victim more abuse (“you snitched!”), but if they have programs that nip it in the bud, it can help. This stuff is a good start. If kids can be conditioned to see the bullies as the ones who are out of line, a lot of it will wither before it starts.

I was teased and bullied throughout my entire 1 – 12 school days. One time it was so bad, a boy threw a ball at me so hard during a dodge ball ‘game’ that my appendix ruptured and I nearly died. Yes, I apparently already appendicitis, and was sick, which is why he picked on me. It’s an animal pecking order, and the weak might as well have targets on their back. The teacher’s and school administrators call it socializing.

I’m really sad to hear about the stuff that went on for a lot of you. I was class of 2007 at a high school that was very mild and I can’t even imagine anything like this.

I came here from Europe in kindergarten. For a while, I was picked on by kids, while I learned the language and customs. A couple of them pushed me around. I fought back and it stopped. Everything was OK after that. I raised a couple of kids and I do not think kids are any different. The parents are definitely different however. They do not think it is acceptable for kids to stand up for themselves. They seem to believe that it is better to let the grownups get involved or for the kids to shrink from confrontation or both. To bad for the kids. Often enough, bullying occurs when people allow themselves to be victims (This principle is true in international politics as well). It is in the nature of the creature that is man. You have to recognize it, and be prepared to deal with it or you are not in touch with reality.

@josie I think it is acceptable for my kids to stand up for themselves but I believe they can rise above being physical with another child but I’m more of a brains>muscles kind of person.

@MissAusten, stories like that just make me furious. My son was the victim of one of those incidents in about sixth grade. He was waiting in a line and some kids ahead of him got to pushing and shoving. There was a kind of domino effect that toppled several kids, including him. He was facing away from the scuffle. He fell toward the girl standing behind him and reflexively put out his hands to break his fall. In so doing he ended up pushing her in the chest. The VP busted him for sexual assault and suspended him. There is absolutely no sense to this kind of thing. It taught my young son that there is no hope of justice in the system and that behaving right, minding your own business, and telling the truth don’t do you a whit of good.

One day a boy my age and his brother decided to push me around after school. I was the younger brother of a gang leader at the time. I calmly stood up and dusted myself off. I said to them very coyly, I suggest you enlist help. The next day I approached some associates of my brother’s sort who attended the school and explained what had happened to me the day before. Six hours later I was called to the principals office. The young man sat trembling in the chair next to me, while I was excoriated for possibly exciting a race war. The principal asked if I would accept his apology and call off any retribution, and I did. Noone ever ever really even crossed my path to much thereafter, right up through senior year.

It’s easy to say that the kid should stand up for himself and blame the victim, but small, weak kids outside the social groups “ask” for bullying much like any woman going outside the house not dressed in a burka is asking to be raped. It’s also easier to defend yourself if you’re athletic, strong, maybe play varsity football, and have a bunch of people on your side, but as we have seen, those are not the folks generally getting bullied. The victims are often so very alone.

Yes, it would be wonderful if they have the chutzpah and resources to stand up to the world of bullies, but how often does that happen? When your shoes are soggy wet with toilet water and they’re meeting you five or six to one, it’s not going to happen. “Oh look! Baby thinks she can fight! Come here baby, lezzie girl, try to hit me! Isn’t that funny, she thinks she can hit! She’s getting mad! Lezzie girl is getting mad, oh look at her, isn’t that funny?”

@laureth You’re right, kids target kids that can’t fight back. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be bullying.

I remember hearing an interview with a child psychologist on TV after some school shooting a few years ago. He was talking about why some kids are so affected by bullying, while others manage to get through it. He compared a child’s (or teen’s) emotional health to a tower of blocks. The more stress a child has, the more blocks are added to the tower. If the child doesn’t have any support system to turn to, like family or role models, there’s no base to keep those blocks of stress steady and they are more likely to come crashing down.

I always think of that analogy in terms of my own kids. My daughter is in middle school now, and it scares the hell out of me. I know she is teased at school and sometimes targeted by other girls. We talk often about what kind of behavior crosses the line from teasing to bullying, what she can be expected to handle on her own, and how best to approach teachers at school if she’s having a problem. This kind of behavior started in second grade. There have been two or three times when I’ve called a teacher (once a Girl Scout Troop leader) to address a problem and every time it was handled very well. Thinking of kids trying to get through that without any kind of support or role model, without someone to back them up when they need it or help them work out how to respond to such behavior makes it easy to see how some kids snap.

I found the book “Queen Bees and Wannabees” a great resource, and would encourage anyone with a daughter (or even a son) to read it.