How to Deal with Bullies

[robinturner]

Following a long chain of links from the Yahoo Stoic Forum (which sounds like an oxymoron), I came across the the official British government guide to dealing with bullies. No, this is not advice to Gordon Brown one how to stand up to George Bush, it's advice for children about ordinary playground bullies. And yes, they are still repeating the old lie: "although it's tempting to hit back, it's a bad idea as you may get yourself into trouble if you're provoked into a fight." I mean come on, do you really expect any child to believe this crap? Kids have an intuitive understanding of game theory, and are familiar with the idea of worst-possible-case scenarios, so let's do an outcome analysis.

Situation: You are lying on your back with a bully sitting on you pounding his fists into your face.
Strategy 1: You refuse to be provoked into a fight, but follow the government guidelines and report the incident.
Best possible outcome: After a few painful blows, the bully gets bored and leaves. The school ignores your complaint, so the bully never hears about it.
Worst possible outcome: The bully doesn't have ADD and pounds your face into a bloody pulp, causing permanent disfigurement. The school takes action and he gets an ASBO. He then decides that a snitch doesn't deserve to live.
Strategy 2: You bring your knee up into his balls.
Best possible outcome: He rolls over in agony. You then give him a few good kicks and walk away with your head held high. Nobody ever bullies you again.
Worst possible outcome: It doesn't produce the desired effect, and he still smashes your face into a bloody pulp, but you have earned the respect of your peers.

No choice, really. When I was in primary school, I had a problem with a bully, and followed the government-approved advice and talked to someone about it. Fortunately, the person I talked to was maggie_lucy, my mother and constant source of wisdom. Her advice was: "Hit them on the nose - that really hurts." Of course, as with scripture, you need to take a broad interpretation of such pronouncements, so I also included kicks to the shin and so forth. I had no serious problems with bullies after that.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Ouch. :-/ I was constantly bullied at school, and the reason for this was that I knew very well that I would have got into trouble for any attempt to fight back. When I asked, plaintively but with ironclad logic, why the bullies therefore didn't get into trouble for their behaviour in the first place, I was always met with evasive answers. I therefore concluded at an early age that it was wrong for me to use violence, but perfectly all right for other children, since the adults around me behaved as though this were the case.

It was also perfectly all right for other children to have things that they wanted, whereas I wasn't allowed to have them in case I should become spoilt. I'm amazed I turned out so well-adjusted in the end, frankly.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Did you by any chance get that "You mustn't sink to their level" speech? Even six-year-olds aren't usually fooled by that one: sinking to their level would mean beating people up to take their lunch money, not merely sinking below the level of the Christian martyrs.

[dualistic.livejournal.com]

I wanted to hit back. I wanted to hit back so much, but people like me weren't allowed to, whereas others can do anything they like with impunity

I still don' t know how to deal with anger, because of these useless lies.

[solri.livejournal.com]

On a scale of reactions, I'd say feeling anger and not hitting back was the worst and hitting back without feeling anger was the best, with the other possible combinations coming somewhere in the middle. The message we often got from adults was that the best is to neither hit back nor feel anger, which is perhaps fine if you've got twenty years of meditation under your belt but not something you can expect of a six-year-old.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Not generally. I usually got "You should ignore it." When I asked for advice as to how one should go about doing this, I was told not to be silly, as though it were obvious.

I did occasionally try pointing out what was obvious to me, namely that adults didn't get bullied as a rule, and if they did they could seek legal redress. This didn't get me anywhere.

Being bullied did two main things to me. One was to make me realise that adults, in general, were insincere and not to be relied upon, even if they had basically good intentions. The other thing was to make me extremely resistant to any kind of social pressure. I understood instinctively from the beginning that if I gave in to what the bullies wanted, it wouldn't make them stop bullying me; all that would happen would be that I would not be quite as much myself as I previously was. When you've refused to change in the face of several years of bullying in different forms, then for one thing the bullies eventually realise they're wasting their time and learn to respect you (with me it suddenly happened when I was about 14 or 15 - some of the worst bullies turned almost overnight into good friends), and for another thing you're not going to change just because some newspaper is shoving the latest silly trend in your face.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

The only time I ever tried to hit back, I was laughed at because I was such a weakling.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I was a weakling too. I just fought more dirtily and viciously than my peers.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of something maggie_lucy told me about WWII. When men were drafted, the various branches of the armed forces had short-lists of professions that they wanted to recruit: the catering corps wanted cooks, the Royal Engineers wanted people who'd worked in construction, and so forth. Top on the list for the commandos were ballet dancers, because they were in peak physical condition, immune to pain and totally ruthless.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

In hindsight, I should have just gone for the balls, but it just didn't occur to me.

[dtlw.livejournal.com]

When my son was being bullied i just found out the name of the bully.... found him on his own one evening........and then kicked the crap out of him.

Funny thing was, he never bullied my son again and neither did his mates. I empowered him with the full care of my sons interests and made it quite clear that he would be held culpable no matter who bullied my son.

I wouldn't suggest this as a normal course of action, but then again, i have never been considered normal.

[kristian.livejournal.com]

I'm eternally grateful to my father and brother who gave me boxing/fighting/brawling lessons as I was growing up (not in the form of abuse, but lessons of worth!) which let me have the confidence to put any potential bully in his place during school.

The government line is of course thwarted by the "common knowledge" that being bullied is character building. And to be honest, I'm not sure whether I think it isn't so.