CyberBully

[DanaC]

So...this life altering aberration you described was something you felt compelled to inflict upon another human? Oh... YOU had reason. So that made it ok, i guess.

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.

Personally what you all are talking about is way past bullying - its harassment. My definition of bullying would be more akin to what (no name) has been done here to certain posters...relatively harmless poking or mocking. I believe I even mentioned this in my 2nd post.

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.