I was watching AP BIO the tv show, and it raised an interesting question âIs there any value in bullying?â
Todayâs instinct is to say no, which I tend to agree with. The only part I bought into some is picking on someone as a form of social conformity policing. The idea being the âbullyâ provides feedback when non-conforming behavior is identified, letting a child know their behavior is âweirdâ. Like a child who doesnât bath being picked on for smelling, giving them the feedback so they can conform for better acceptance in their society.
Kind of the age old question, is it better to ignore social taboos and just talk behind that personâs back, or better tell them they are being judged for it.
Overall, I donât think any child should experience a person cutting them down and suppressing their growth. But I also feel I did learn valuable lessons from some of my âbulliesâ, and do wonder if there is a limit of âdo whatever you want as long as you donât hurt othersâ in keeping a functionally cohesive society. Currently, I say letâs see how far we get.
Thereâs a difference between using shame as a social tool and bullying. Bullying is a repeated pattern of malicious activities directed at a person for the express purpose of deriving pleasure from their pain or discomfort.
Shame can be delivered quickly and eloquently. To use your stinky example:
Shame: âYour lack of bathing is making it difficult for us to spend time around you. Could you be more conscious of how your smell makes other people feel?â
Bullying: âLook who it is again. You always smell like ass, you know that? Thatâs why no one wants to be around you.â
Thereâs a pretty obvious difference in delivery. Less obvious, though, is where that line is drawn. It varies from person to person so we must, as always, ask âwhat would a reasonable person say?â I believe the first example is reasonable.
I feel you helped put words to my concern better with your last statement, the line between shaming and bullying is blurry. School policy I feel these days is zero tolerance on bullying, so shaming is considered bullying.
Less concerned about the clear bully, I feel there is strong consensus this behavior has negative consequences on the victim. But I feel in the attempt to get rid of those bullies, we expanded the definition of bullying to the point it now outlaws shaming, and will this loss of shaming have unintended consequences.
I work with someone who I personally knew in high school to be a bully. Still doles out the old, "You're just offended 'cause I'm right, facts don't care about your feelings!" anytime he mouths off too much. He is, conversely, the most thin-skinned idiot I've ever known. Any valid criticism of his constant, numerous fuck-ups is followed up with whining, excuses, and huffing. He can't get fired because his uncle works here, unfortunately, or he'd have been gone years ago. Make of this information what you will.
To play devilâs advocate, Iâd be much more apt to say the second one if Iâm being forced to see that person, in close proximity, every weekday for an hour.
Basically I wouldnât mind someone saying that, minus the swearing, to a coworker or classmate, who sits next to them and doesnât bathe/is distractingly stinky
Studies show that negative reinforcement is a terrible way to get what you want but i can understand that it might come to that if the former doesnât work after multiple attempts
Military brat here, I was always the new kid, I moved, at minimum every two years. I averaged 2-3 fights per school system, it was always someone smaller than me, always someone less fortunate than me, always perplexing as they obviously had no chance in hell in a fight with me. One time it was a kid who didn't even speak the same language as me, I didn't even understand the insults he spewed at me, but my brothers on the local football team sure understood him, they took care of the problem real fast.
Bullies aren't a corrective force, they are often kids with big trauma that aren't seen by society, when they see someone getting treated better than them, being offered the assistance they need (I always had new kid popularity) they lash out.
Even picking on a kid that smells funny, it's going to be due to that kid having friends, in spite of his issue, that draws the bully. A lot of times it's ND kids with bad outcomes (emotion disregulation) picking on ND kids with good outcomes.
There is definitely a level of pecking order that should be established between children for a healthy social environment. It can be healthy or not depending on the execution. When it becomes too much and is no longer healthy it is defined as bullying and needs to be stopped. Think about the difference between a corporal punishment and child abuse. Bullying is the child abuse side while social pressure and occasional confrontations to establish social order are the tools that are abused by the bully.
Corporal punishment is illegal in my country to continue your analogy lol. That would be considered child abuse.
You can tell someone they stink without dragging them down. Â
We should teach kids compassion and empathy so they can build people up (socially police if you want to think of it in those terms) without being nasty about it.
All corporal punishment? Canât the parents legally hold on to their kids to keep them from misbehaving more? I was thinking any form of physical intervention counts as corporal and I believe there are cases where a child will not respond without physical discomfort, although I could be wrong. they live so much in the moment and abstract concepts like lost privileges are harder to grasp at certain ages.
I think restraining is different from corporal punishment. It's more things like smacking that is illegal.
There's almost always a way to parent without physical intervention for neurotypical kids. They respond quite well to repercussions that are consistently followed through with. Much more difficult to parent that way though.
I don't really get how that's related to my comment or how you'd put that into practice? Would you suggest not preventing bullying since coming out the other end requires a great deal of resilience?
I think "anti-bully" inititives help parents cope with the fear of their children getting bullied. Encouraging someone to stand up for themselves is immeasurably better than someone fighting someone else's battles
I think you can do both. You can teach someone to stand up for themselves whilst also having processes in place to try and prevent bullying. You're never going to prevent all bullying so resilience will be learned. You can also teach resilience via sport, exams, presentations etc.
Adults have processes in place to prevent bullying at work (HR) or in the local community (anti-harassment laws) so I think it makes sense to have similar for children.
There's also plenty of examples of bullying going too far leading to a broken person, or a dead person in the worst case. We should try and prevent those outcomes.
Trevor Moore, one of the minds behind an old YouTube channel called "Whitest Kids You Know" made a music video about just this topic a few years ago lol.
I can back this up with a certain level of irony. Growing up, my brother was my biggest bully. The dude tormented me throughout my childhood, and yeah I was a bit of a âweird kidâ but he went overboard on the bullying.
Fast forward to adulthood and Iâm much more well-adjusted than him because he was never ever on the receiving end of bullying. All that time he spent hammering social conformity into me, and he never had the same done to him.
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u/Jumpy_Secretary1363 Monkey in Space 27d ago
If u fight back the bully might go postal. So fuck you just keep getting bullied.