:D

We are all adults here, and I think our perceptions come from the experiences we had as kids decades ago. I think things have changed a lot due almost entirely to Columbine. Schools take this shit very seriously now. At my kids elementary school they have a "peacemaker" program. They spend several hours each month going over core values and practicing conflict resolution. There is also a peer mediation program so kids can take conflicts to trained peers if they are afraid to take it to a teacher. Most importantly, the teachers take it seriously. They don't want bullying going on, so they work it out between students if they hear there is a problem.

It's still kids on a playground, but it isn't Lord of the Flies, like when I was a kid.

I saw a lot of bullying and did nothing about it because I didn't want the bullies to turn on me. That's probably the thing that bothers me most.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you... then you win."

Didn't we learn from the Breakfast Club that the bullies are just as damaged as those they bully? Isn't there a similarity to abusive relationships?

Yes they are. But we have a choice. I was bullied and beaten up often. But I never did it to anyone else.

No. We did not learn. As somebody said, if history teaches us anything, it's that we don't learn from history.

Unless they asked for it in juuust the right way?;)

No. It didn't make it ok. What I should have done was advise my friend to talk to her teacher, or indeed quietly talk to one of the teachers myself. What I did instead was serve up a very adolescent form of rough justice. I fed her the meal she'd been feeding my friend. It was the wrong thing to do. But, I, like her, was very young.

But that's my point Classic. People aren't setting up websites and engaging in a national debate in order to combat teasing, which I believe is what you thought was being referred to. They're trying to tackle a very real and destructive problem. It's something that affects a lot of people, and can have profound implications for their future happiness. Unfortunately there is a tendency within our culture(s) to look at bullying (of the kind I am talking about) and characterise it as teasing gone too far. It's not teasing gone too far it's a different animal altogether.

This subject winds me up a little. Not because I'm angry at stuff that happened to me as a kid. I'm not. BUt that kid and her family put their pain out there in order to try and empower youngsters coping with a very destructive force and I think they deserved a little more benefit of the doubt. I think that's what pissed me off. Our readiness to dismiss them. To mock them, even, as an instinctive response. With a lack of evidence (the ignorance you posit) our initial and instinctive assumptions are unkind and unsympathetic.

Umm...the message I took from that at the time was that being a Basket Case had mileage. It confirmed my own suspicions that the way to stave off bullying was to become a mental. Which I duly did.

huh....and to think....i went around taping all the nerds' butt cheeks together that year

lol jim

So you changed your behavior or self in some way, and the bullying stopped?

The bullying stopped when I kicked the shit out of Queen Hockey Bitch in the middle of an art class. But I'd already figured out people are less likely to want to fight you if they think you are dangerously unpredictable and suicidally reckless.

It doesn't say it is related to bullying but you have to wonder. Is this what we are coming to?

http://wcbstv.com/local/school.bans.hugs.2.969949.html

Thats where I was coming from.