I've experienced a bit of bullying (not cyber) and it really affects you a lot.
I was bullied for 2-3 years and it fundamentally changed me. Before that, I was a friendly, trusting person who wasn't afraid to lead. Now, I'm more on reserved and untrusting side.
I also found my sanctuary on the internet and it helped me recover a lot.
Anna, you're brave and strong. Had I been subjected to this level of bullying, I'd have broken down completely.
Unfortunately it's very human. It's common human behavior, and common behavior among other social mammals as well.
Nature deals you and everyone else a more or less random hand of genes. Then, when you reach puberty, you duke it out to establish a pecking order based on relative fitness indicators. These determine who gets to mate with who, and who will be closest to the alpha males who will lead the tribe.
This is one reason that despite its trendiness I have never been able to accept the argument from nature. Nature sucks. Fuck nature. My hope is that we can start re-engineering this stuff as soon as we are able.
The argument from nature is completely ghastly from a moral perspective. I have never seen a solid argument that uses it. It's usually the domain of pseudo-intellectuals who are grasping at Internet points instead of actually thinking through the implications of what they're saying. It implicitly condones a huge swath of anti-social behavior in the pursuit of the all-important fitness. It inspires no hope, and it demands that you take an extremely unhealthy interest in your own self.
"The argument from nature is completely ghastly from a moral perspective. I have never seen a solid argument that uses it. It's usually the domain of pseudo-intellectuals who are grasping at Internet points instead of actually thinking through the implications of what they're saying. It implicitly condones a huge swath of anti-social behavior in the pursuit of the all-important fitness. It inspires no hope, and it demands that you take an extremely unhealthy interest in your own self."
That is very well put, and the last point is really an eyebrow-raiser. I've never seen it before, but now I cannot un-see. If you look deeply into the natural everything movement that's so popular right now you'll see an odd kind of cleanliness and purity obsessed narcissism.
One day, pal. I believe it will become possibile too. There are various upsides and downsides to humans achieving self engineering, I realised a terrible one recently - people would truly have nothing that belongs to themselves.
I have been told by my parents that I was a friendly, outgoing child going in to kindergarten.
I sure as fuck wasn't on the way out. (I was already a nerd.)
I've long since dealt with it. I don't even twinge saying that. But I am pretty firmly of the opinion that the school system tends to greatly underestimate the impact of bullying, conclude based on their actions that they are far more interested in not seeing it than in making it go away, and this has probably contributed to my current deep, deep skepticism about the schooling system as it stands today.
Seconded in full, save that I suspect in a lot of cases it's not just "interested in not seeing it" but rather silently cheering bullies on, on the same general theory as someone might, while finding the specific methods distasteful, approve in general of the idea of cross-gender rape as a corrective for homosexuality. (If that seems like an overly strong statement to you, consider that both "corrective rape" and bullying revolve around the use of violence to enforce a social norm. Granted, the former is much worse than the latter generally manages, but I'm increasingly convinced that the difference is more of degree than of kind.)
It's for reasons like this that, while pragmatically convinced it'll never actually happen, I am strongly in favor of the law treating adults who passively or actively enable bullying as it does anyone else who abets or conspires to a crime. Seeing the erstwhile principal of a school dragged off in irons, to be arraigned on suspicion of having been an accessory before and after the fact to assault and battery, seems to me just the thing to give every other responsible party, in every other school sharing the jurisdiction, powerfully to think. No, it'll never happen, but the once-bullied kid in me surely wishes it would.
If it's norm enforcement, then it reveals the disgusting inner nature of a lot of people: "these people are weak, so they should be harassed."
Can you sue a school/teachers for negligence here? Oftentimes demanding people to lawyer up seems to correct behavior remarkably quickly. Similarly, the threat of suing parents would probably also cause something to happen.
Well, as I understand it, you can sue over any tort if you feel so justified, and the rest is up to a judge. I'm not a lawyer, though, so I'm not even sure about that much, to say nothing of being able to predict the likely outcome of such a case in a given jurisdiction.
I've lost the link, but something like that actually did happen in the US recently. It surely helped that it was so flagrant and that there was video evidence, but a teacher was arrested for encouraging a bunch of kids to beat up another kid in the halls.
I'm not sure whom you imagine to constitute "they", but I've found from my own experience that assigning the responsibility for a problem, to some nebulous "they", tends to result in considerable underappreciation of the complexities involved.
>>>> But I am pretty firmly of the opinion that the school system tends to greatly underestimate the impact of bullying, conclude based on their actions that they are far more interested in not seeing it than in making it go away
Fully agree with this. I remember telling a teacher about bullying near the end of school and he talked to those 4 bullies.
Talking in this case was basically taking them out of the class (while smiling) and then talking to them for 2-3 minutes. When they came back, they were walking proudly and clearly pointing at me. A few weeks later, it started all over again. And the optimist in me died a small death.
I just finished reading Paul Graham's essay on why nerds are not popular and it kind of resonates. It is not about bullying but talks about schools in a completely different light.
Thanks for mentioning that essay. I just finished reading, and it made a lot of sense. Being popular in school is like a job. Most nerds I know (myself included) simply didn't care to put in the time or effort for the grooming, fashion, and surface-level socialization necessary.
Oh wow, I am so sorry. I don't really want to imagine what would have happened if I had been bullied for that long..
Indeed, I was made fun of for maybe 10 minutes; and it completely changed me. Back in 2005, last day of school (8th grade), many of us had gathered in a park in order to hang out and just spend time together before the start of the summer holidays. And then, the girl I had a crush on for the past two years, approached me with 3-4 other friends of her. She told me that she really liked me. It felt so thrilling and exciting and I was so happy and I told her that I liked her as well...
And then they left, and met up with a group of another ~30 people or so, maybe a 100 meters away. They all started laughing.. I felt so empty, I wanted to disappear, when one of them came to tell me "Oh by the way it was a joke that she likes you".
That summer I started playing MMORPGs, did not go to the beach once, just stayed home. Indeed, I spent the rest of high school pretty much isolated (although luckily eventually I replaced MMORPGs with actually studying). Whenever a girl showed interest in me, I immediately avoided her as much as possible, since I thought she just wanted to make fun of me. And it took 8 years, maybe a bit longer, until I started trusting people again.
So, why did I write all of this? Partially, because it came into memory after reading this thread. But more importantly, I am really scared by the fact, that the bullying I experienced was so so minor compared to the other stories here; yet it affected me so fundamentally.
I've experienced a bit of bullying (not cyber) and it really affects you a lot.
I was bullied for 2-3 years and it fundamentally changed me. Before that, I was a friendly, trusting person who wasn't afraid to lead. Now, I'm more on reserved and untrusting side.
I also found my sanctuary on the internet and it helped me recover a lot.
Anna, you're brave and strong. Had I been subjected to this level of bullying, I'd have broken down completely.