Feeling Bullied?

To Be or Not To Be Bullied?
If we are ever bitten by a snake, you don't ask, "Dear snake, why do you bite me?"  You'll never get satisfying answers from the snake because the snake would rather lull you with its colors and it silky movements.   The snake will never give you insights into its character.  It can't.  But others talking about that snake can.  When we come upon a coral snake, it is be well-advised to learn the saying "Red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow."  This phrase helps us distinguish between poisonous coral snakes and their counterfeits.  Snakes bite.  That's what they do.  Asking "Why?" in a threatening context is no help.  Regrettably, we may face threats and potential harm from individuals or a group of individuals.  If we are attacked by someone, asking "Why?" afterwards helps to provide some insight on motive.  Understanding motive post-assault helps to understand what happened and helps to judge a perpetrator.  But during an imminent threat, you ask "What is it?" or "How do I remove myself from this threat?"  These are useful and actionable questions.  Bullying is a snake of many different stripes and colors.

To defend ourselves against bullying, we need to identify the threat, assess the risk for staying, and then act on that evaluation quickly.  If we hear a rattle walking on a trail in the desert or in the mountains, we stop and find another path.  With some poisonous snakes, we get a warning.  We can minimize the threat within minutes.  But with people, particularly those with whom we are forced to work, managing the threat involves more decisions outside of our own authority.

None of us need a definition of bullying.  That's for legal haggling.  We know when we are threatened and we know when we are loved.  An action, gesture, or word gives us all the information that we need.  If someone threatens violence against us in public, odds are that that threat was for show.  But since one can never completely tell, it is wise to let authorities who know threats and who deal with threats what happened.  If a threat goes under the radar, that can be more insidious and threatening because it is something that has to be endured.  Harder to prove because there are no witnesses except for yourself and your aggressor.      

Individuals bully.  Groups bully.  Do institutions bully?  Unfortunately, yes.  Teach your child not to be a victim.  But bullying  But don't we endure mild forms of bullying almost on a daily basis, when we're asked to go here and not here.  Told to do this and not that?  Instruction sometimes is colored by a kind of force that does not and should not reach the meanness of bullying.  Force is force is force.  The results of education and edification are joy and enlightenment.  We know that; we all know this.  But there is a difference to education, which we achieve almost anywhere and schooling, which the state seems to have a monopoly on.  Schooling is a form of education; it is perhaps that part of public education we prefer to do without.

so for those few cynics that believe that education is forced , a force that might be necessary for edification.  So what then is the difference between the compulsory nature of schooling and the malicious nature that we associate with bullying?  Intention is the criterium for most illegal or criminal acts.  So is it with bullying.  The intention to bully or harass has to proven in order to convict someone of that crime.  But bullying takes on many faces.  Sometimes teasing and light-hearted haThe answer is repetition and intention.  Dr. Valeri Besag's book Bullies and Victims in School is referenced at Wikipedia, where her definition of bullying is offered as "an act of repeated aggressive behavior in order to intentionally hurt another person, physically or mentally.  Bullying is characterized by an individual behaving in a certain way to gain power over another person."  Okay, the key words in that definition are "repeated aggressive behavior . . . to intentionally hurt another person."  According to Dr. Besag, for an action to be bullying it has to be repeated and aggressive and intentionally done to hurt another person.  A single incident of aggressive behavior might be the result of a bad day, where the aggressor feels in review contrite or embarrassed for acting in such a way and he or she pursues more respectful and dignified exchanges in the future.  We should allow Los Angeles Unified School District to weigh in on this subject, for it has its own definition of bullying.  Bulletin 5212.0 defines bullying as ". . . a comprehensive term that describes the deliberate antagonistic action or creation of a situation with the intent of inflicting emotional, physical, or psychological distress. The behavior may be a single or repeated act and may be electronic, indirect, non-verbal, psychological, sexual, social, physical, or verbal."  The difference so far between Dr. Besag and LAUSD is that for an action to be bullying, it does not have to be repeated.  It can be a single, isolated action.  That is a low-tolerance position.

Bullying is wrong.  Nobody approves of it.  We think, "Hey, I know bullying is wrong.  I certainly don't bully," which may be true.  But sometimes when we stop and think and realize that "Hey . . . you know . . . what I did back there was a bit cruel."  Opinions speak for themselves, and opinions of ourselves tend to speak well of us.  Contrary to popular belief, facts do not speak for themselves.  We do something offensive or untoward and it is like lightning when someone informs us, "Hey, what you did was wrong."  It's the realization of our deeds that must pierce the bubble in which we protect ourselves.  We need to stop and assess and realize that, hey, we're not so wonderful all the time, that we do make mistakes.  We are capable of hurting people.  "I hurt people!  Impossible!  I'm the nicest person in the world.  I never hurt anyone.  I mind my own business."  That's an important distinction: hurting people unintentionally is not bullying.  It is also the popular alibi used by bullies, "I didn't mean to . . . ."  Bullying is intentional.  A bully will use situations of powerlessness to hurt, to limit, or otherwise make someone feel bad about their situation.

Okay, so we know that bullying is intentional.  We know that we're capable of it, but how do we stop it?  Reporting a bullying incident is done after the fact.  Someone has already been hurt.  But maybe there is an underlying fact about schools themselves that makes bullying the norm rather than an aberration that rises and falls in frequency due to the absence of enforcing officers.  Some, like Roland Meighan, assert that schools are themselves a bullying institution.  He argues that "In a democracy, nobody is supposed to be detained against their will unless they have committed an offense.  So what is the offense that children have committed to justify detention?  It would appear to be that their "offense" is that they are young."  Here, Meighan elucidates that compulsory education is itself a bullying institution, and being such should not surprise anyone of the frequency and intensity of a passively-endured violent environment in which kids grow up in.  That is one heck of an indictment.  Meighan, you should know, is a proponent of home-schooling.


  
Taken seriously, it is the effects of bullying that are terrible.  People are made to feel so bad that they are liable to hurt themselves.  Individuals have to be strong but not all are.  Some young people are vulnerable; they feel bad often.  Bullying that degrades good and happy feelings can make a person hurt themselves.  Suicides, although rare, can result from a bullying incident.



What drives bullying is a desire to control the people in one's environment.  Controlling one's environment in school is a challenge.  For so much of a student's and an adult's environment is controlled by others, people we don't know or worse by people we don't like or worse yet people with contradictory interests.  Look at all of the things that are taken out of our control:  We are told WHEN to start school.  We are told WHEN we can have lunch.  We have to ASK FOR PERMISSION for the biological need to go to the bathroom.  We are told WHEN we can leave a classroom and WHEN we can leave the school.  We are told WHAT we are to study.  We are told WHAT constitutes academic success.  So much of our day is controlled by others or by an impersonal system for which no one wants to take credit or to hold to account, a system that benefits only those in power who are so removed from my life and what is important to me.  The only thing that we do have control over are our words, our actions, and our bodies.  And within this institution, we are told reminded how proud and what a privilege it is to attend such an institution.  Proud to be a slave?  Privileged to told what to do by someone else?  Why do people endure this?  Herd mentality, a case where everybody else is doing it?  Tradition, a case where everybody else, including my parents, has gone to high school?  Why is it that those who drop out and are independent are perceived as losers or failures?  Are we as a society that afraid of freedom that we have to stigmatize and demonize those who take their own path in life?  I thought that this country was built on independence?

In school, being with people perceived as fun, smart, and cool is what we all want.  We want exciting, beautiful, and smart people in our lives.  But people have preferences.  And once we have Bullying comes in many forms.  Physical and verbal abuse we are all aware of.  Coercion, too, we understand to be a form of bullying.  But there are subtler forms, like quietly excluding one person from a group.  Being excluded feels crummy, particularly when there is tacit agreement through silence from the rest of the group.  But by the same token, every individual has the right to associate with whom they prefer.  We don't have to like everybody, nor does everybody have to like us.  The heart knows what it wants, and if someone prefers someone else over us then so be it.  It doesn't feel good.  Again, it is the intention of being excluded.  If a group is intentionally excluding one person because they all do not like him or like her, then that is an act of bullying.  It is deliberate and willful exclusion to humiliate and embarrass.  And that is exactly how you can determine the intention: review the effect of someone else's actions on you.  But be careful.  Most people are not out to harm us.  They may not live up to the promises or expectations of being a friend.  Disappointment is a recurring part of life.  People and things which don't disappoint we are absolutely delighted by.


The Power of Bullying is all in its Effects

What is the effect of bullying?  Fear, helplessness, powerlessness.  
Bullying is when one person threatens another person whether within a group or around their peers.  Anyone can be a bully.  Bullying occurs at good schools as well as bad schools.  Bullying can be carried out in different ways.  Physical bulling might be in the form of pushing, hitting, or shoving someone.  A threat can be conveyed by words in the form of threats and rumor-mongering.  Giving someone a look or the evil eye is a form of non-verbal bullying.  When your friends are gossiping at lunch about at girl, or commenting on what you are wearing.combined with looks of disgust are all a form of bullying.  People usually bully someone because someone looks different or is different.  For some bullies, it is gratifying to target the weak or someone young and in a grade smaller than them.

A bully bullies because he can.  The humiliation of another enlarges the bully in his own mind (and there only). He picks his victims purely on the basis of risk. That is, the lower the risk to himself the easier the target.  Bullies are the proverbial chicken-hawk.  Though this may provoke some, the bully is essentially a coward. 


How Does One Answer The Bully?
The answer with childhood and school-yard bullying isn’t litigation or bureaucratic intervention.  No, it's plain old self-defense.  The easiest way to back down a bully is good right cross to the nose, and that’s exactly what I’d tell my own kid.  One shot and he won’t be bothered again. Very laissez-faire I think. Once a bully perceives a risk to his own life and property, i.e., his body, and well-being, he will change his ways.

What interests me most, however, is not the psychology of bullies–there are many reasons some people choose to be thugs, and as they are not excuses, they are not that interesting to me–nor techniques for self-defense, but why libertarians don’t see bullying as aggression. Surely, you wouldn’t say, to women, that “the answer” to rape is self-defense? Surely, they should defend htemselves if they have to, but far better to prevent it and if they do it, you arrest and hang ‘em. Why does a bully get away with it?
In my view, if a kid bullies, he ought to–quite literally–be arrested and imprisoned for a time, and punished with severe pain. And if he does it again, he should be imprisoned for a long time, if not ejected from society. I am quite serious. They are criminals, pure and simple. There is no excuse for it.
Bullying is a problem.  We're all aware of it, perhaps been a victim of it, and yet even done to someone less vulnerable than ourselves.  It one person taking advantage to intimidate, scare, and otherwise belittle another.  What is bullying exactly?  Bullying is not good-humored teasing or kidding another person.  Bullying involves a threat of physical harm, perceived or actual.  Bullies are created not born.  Situations create them.  The strong prey on the weak and vulnerable.  The weak know their role--endure the abuse. 

If It Is Prohibited, Why Does Bullying Persist?
That's a good question.  Lew Rockwell, of LRC.com and an advocate of home-schooling, claims that bullying is due to the creation of a "kid culture, [one that is] separate from parents and other family members, encourages this sort of evil."


To What Is Bullying Attributable?
Scores of theories for why kids bully have been expounded.  
The Educational Heretics Press out of Nottingham, England claims that schools in the United Kingdom have aggressive inspectorates, adults who discipline and bully students into compliance and conformity with school rules.  Students observe this and learn that one can get what they want if they bully.  Bullying by adults gets masked as discipline.  Some forms of bullying are legitimate, while others are forbidden.  The staff writer continues his damning indictment of bullying as persecution, "The unwritten, but powerful message of this package, is adults get their way by bullying.  There are at least three types of outcome to this model of schooling. The 'successful' pupils grow up to be officially sanctioned bullies in dominant authority positions as assertive politicians, doctors, teachers, civil servants, journalists and the like, and start their own career as persecutors."

So it appears that bullying has a context.  It does not occur in a vacuum.  Turns out that the compulsory nature of school contributes to the bullying mindset.  Nazis culled individuals who were raised in abusive environments, either at school or home.  It was easier for them to be desensitized to violence.  In fact, observing someone else's abuse and torture provided a level of entertainment and catharsis.  Horrible. 



What To Do If Someone Bullies You
If someone's aggressive behavior scares you, try not to show fear.  Seeing fear in a victim's eyes satisfies and activates an aggressor.  If an aggressor repeats a non-life threatening action with, tell an adult.  All action and each decision we make involves risk.  But each situation has different risks.  Sometimes the risk to self is high; other times it is low, where almost nothing will or could happen.  You've got to assess risk all the time.  When an aggressor attacks you to hurt you, you should already have gauged the risk of being hurt by that person as well gauged the risk of defending yourself.  If an aggressor hits you to injure you, you have the right to defend yourself on the spot.  Just assess the risk.  Bullies, too, gauge the risk.  They do not bully unless the risk of getting caught or the risk of harm is low.  Bullies, as has been noted, are not courageous individuals; they calculate risk.