Bullying Support Group
Bullying is the act of intentionally causing harm to others, through verbal harassment, physical assault, or other more subtle methods of coercion such as manipulation. Bullying can be defined in many different ways, but one thing is clear: no one deserves to be bullied. If you or someone you know is coping with bullying, this is the place to share your feelings and get...
Hey, my name is JP i'm new to this site today so hello to all!
Bullying is a really terrible thing, even worse than most people realise, in my opinion! I was bullied all throughout school since i was 6 till i left high school at 18 and i can remember most of it in vivid detail. It has undoubtedly left me with some serious mental scars and still causes me social anxiety problems even though i am no longer bullied. I am lucky enough to be a strong enough person to cope however, but i thought i would mention my past experiences to give me some validity in my opinions for the discussion i am about to start.
I think the school system has got bullying wrong! Not just a bit wrong but completely wrong! There is no REAL support for victims of bullying. Schools have counselors and 'buddy programs' which are supposed to help and most schools these days have 'zero tolerance' bullying policies. They simply don't work!!!
As a bully victim myself it is easy for me to understand why. Bullying crushes your self-image and your confidence into pieces and grinds it up and burns it. It also makes you scared because you don't want it to happen again. But surely with all these fancy systems in schools to stop bullying and fighting you shouldn't feel helpless? Well my schools had some of the strictest anti-bullying policies and I still felt more helpless in school than at any other time or place in my life.
The main advice for victims of bullying is to "tell a teacher or a parent". Well, from my experience this is pretty pointless and only intensify the bullying in the long term. Teachers can't really do anything to help you if they dont see you being bullied, and most bully's aren't stupid, they will do it to you when you are alone, they are even low enough to come into the medical room to bully you when you are sick and extra vulnerable. So telling teachers helps for a maximum of a week, before the school run out of options and have to continue as normal. Telling your parents is similar because nothing can be done with the school, they would have to transfer you to a new school, nobody being bullied ever wants to risk losing the few friends they have and changing their whole lifestyle. It is the same result no matter what happens, unless someone can witness and prove the bullying, nothing is done to fix the problem.
So what is my point? That something needs to change for the sake of the generations of children who undoubtedly have to suffer this abuse. But how can we improve this?
Schools need to stop telling children to tell a teacher and start looking for the problems themselves! If you have no self-confidence you aren't going to be able to prove that you are being bullied and even if you do, there is no evidence of it happening.
Harsher punishments need to happen as a result. Suspension and even expulsion is rare for bullies even when they are caught and even this is not enough. Bullies should be made to take compulsory counseling to fix their problems so they no longer have to force them on innocent peers. They should also be better educated on some of the extreme reactions that bullying causes: social anxiety, depression, suicide.
Victims need to be given more power to defend themselves. If you are bullied in school you can do nothing to help yourself, you cant fight back against them or you get accused of bullying yourself! Quite often it is the bully victims that get into more trouble at school when they haven't done anything except defend themselves out of desperation. If a bully victim fights back against the bully's they shouldn't be punished, they should be congratulated!
Finally all children need to be given more opportunity's to talk to a role model within school. Parents can be a great help and support, but unless your parent is the head of the school there's not much they can do help. Also, I know i was afraid of telling my parents for reasons i cant explain and to this day they dont know everything that I went through. Schools should be introducing children to counselors, not waiting for the children to come to them! If i had simply been sat in a room with a counselor that i could have talked to, i would have had the chance i needed to express my feelings of hurt, rather than bottling them up and leading to further troubles.
So, please speak up! What else can be done about bullying and how should we, the public, be doing more to actually fix the ROOT CAUSE of the problem. Bullying charities obviously do a great job at promoting bullying awareness and helping the victims of bullying but until the schools themselves change their policies the problem is never going to improve!
Bullying is a really terrible thing, even worse than most people realise, in my opinion! I was bullied all throughout school since i was 6 till i left high school at 18 and i can remember most of it in vivid detail. It has undoubtedly left me with some serious mental scars and still causes me social anxiety problems even though i am no longer bullied. I am lucky enough to be a strong enough person to cope however, but i thought i would mention my past experiences to give me some validity in my opinions for the discussion i am about to start.
I think the school system has got bullying wrong! Not just a bit wrong but completely wrong! There is no REAL support for victims of bullying. Schools have counselors and 'buddy programs' which are supposed to help and most schools these days have 'zero tolerance' bullying policies. They simply don't work!!!
As a bully victim myself it is easy for me to understand why. Bullying crushes your self-image and your confidence into pieces and grinds it up and burns it. It also makes you scared because you don't want it to happen again. But surely with all these fancy systems in schools to stop bullying and fighting you shouldn't feel helpless? Well my schools had some of the strictest anti-bullying policies and I still felt more helpless in school than at any other time or place in my life.
The main advice for victims of bullying is to "tell a teacher or a parent". Well, from my experience this is pretty pointless and only intensify the bullying in the long term. Teachers can't really do anything to help you if they dont see you being bullied, and most bully's aren't stupid, they will do it to you when you are alone, they are even low enough to come into the medical room to bully you when you are sick and extra vulnerable. So telling teachers helps for a maximum of a week, before the school run out of options and have to continue as normal. Telling your parents is similar because nothing can be done with the school, they would have to transfer you to a new school, nobody being bullied ever wants to risk losing the few friends they have and changing their whole lifestyle. It is the same result no matter what happens, unless someone can witness and prove the bullying, nothing is done to fix the problem.
So what is my point? That something needs to change for the sake of the generations of children who undoubtedly have to suffer this abuse. But how can we improve this?
Schools need to stop telling children to tell a teacher and start looking for the problems themselves! If you have no self-confidence you aren't going to be able to prove that you are being bullied and even if you do, there is no evidence of it happening.
Harsher punishments need to happen as a result. Suspension and even expulsion is rare for bullies even when they are caught and even this is not enough. Bullies should be made to take compulsory counseling to fix their problems so they no longer have to force them on innocent peers. They should also be better educated on some of the extreme reactions that bullying causes: social anxiety, depression, suicide.
Victims need to be given more power to defend themselves. If you are bullied in school you can do nothing to help yourself, you cant fight back against them or you get accused of bullying yourself! Quite often it is the bully victims that get into more trouble at school when they haven't done anything except defend themselves out of desperation. If a bully victim fights back against the bully's they shouldn't be punished, they should be congratulated!
Finally all children need to be given more opportunity's to talk to a role model within school. Parents can be a great help and support, but unless your parent is the head of the school there's not much they can do help. Also, I know i was afraid of telling my parents for reasons i cant explain and to this day they dont know everything that I went through. Schools should be introducing children to counselors, not waiting for the children to come to them! If i had simply been sat in a room with a counselor that i could have talked to, i would have had the chance i needed to express my feelings of hurt, rather than bottling them up and leading to further troubles.
So, please speak up! What else can be done about bullying and how should we, the public, be doing more to actually fix the ROOT CAUSE of the problem. Bullying charities obviously do a great job at promoting bullying awareness and helping the victims of bullying but until the schools themselves change their policies the problem is never going to improve!
One big point made in the article which i think is generally not understood: "If we expect children to be resilient, they will not be so as adults. As adults, they will be malleable, always susceptible to aggressors."
People, in general seem to have an idea that bully victims that make it through school without any psychical harm are not only free to continue life normally, but should be more resilient in the future. This is just not the way that the brain works, the damage has already been done and in order to take any 'benefit' of resilience off of being bullied, one must first deal with the false beliefs and guilt that has been planted in their minds throughout their development.
Society in general is set up in a way that supports the bullies, even if it pretends to support the victims and this is damaging society as a whole as well as the lives of many individuals. Why has it not been changed? Because the ones who wish to indulge in bullying behavior are being supported and therefore they have more influence to tell their side of the story (where they can lie if they wish) than the victims ever get close to.
In order to make a difference, the members of society who don't necessarily support bullying, but allow it to happen, are going to have to speak up against it and change the way society is built, so that the bullies no longer have the upper hand. In the last 100 years society has made some great changes for the better to help tackle racism, sexism and child abuse by reorganizing society to give the minorities a greater chance to speak and making it socially unacceptable to engage in hurtful acts. The same needs to happen with bullying and it disgusts me that many people still see bullying as a part of society. There are little laws that protect victims from it, but it has been shown to have deeply damaging psychological effects.
So i urge you, if you ever hear about acts of bullying, react to them in the same way that you would react to somebody discriminating against someone for the colour of their skin because no matter who the victim is, they will be damaged the same way.
Jay, the last sentence in your post is what hits the nail on the head. We can have bullying awareness and education programs till the cows come home but until the schools make a dedicated effort to rid themselves of bullies and actually provide a safe place for kids to attend school, nothing else really matters.
Google "Minding the workplace" article is "Legal and policy challenges facing public school teachers: A brief report from Memphis". You will find they bully each other and people who interfere. The school system it's self has to be taught it's wrong to bully ! You will find many more articles that will back this up. Health care is number one in bullying... Schools including Superintendents, Principals, Teachers (bullying) are number two, so why would they see students bullying even to this level a problem. It's the norm for many of them ! Sadly, you will also see it isn't only students who have committed suicide because they were bullied ! I'm just sayn....
One solution is to improve your interpersonal skills and appearance. Obviously schools have a problem these times determining things. Almost every parent called to school is now smart enough to say that her child was the victim and the other kid the bully.
Bullies never give up. That's what makes them bullies. If you fight back, they will get friends and come back even harder. It's a losing proposition.
Remember Wargames? "THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY".
The first thing to do is report that someone is being bullied. That is the first step to getting someone involved. Schools have to begin taking action towards peopl ewho are being bullied. In the state of Georgia there has been a law passed to help stop bulling in the schools.